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Mercury 2: The First Diffusion Model That 'Thinks'" [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqdf6Um_8OE
1•matthewsinclair•3m ago•0 comments

Code World Models for Parameter Control in Evolutionary Algorithms

https://www.alphaxiv.org/abs/2602.22260
1•camilochs•3m ago•0 comments

ProofGateway – Collect and publish customer testimonials in minutes

2•elufadeju•11m ago•0 comments

JSON-up: Stop scattering "if" checks for old JSON formats across your codebase

https://github.com/Nano-Collective/json-up
2•mrspence•11m ago•1 comments

TV's TV (1987) & TV Games Encyclopedia (1988)

https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2026/03/01/tvs-tv-1987-and-tv-games-encyclopedia-1988/
2•msephton•19m ago•0 comments

Nvidia and Global Telecom Leaders Commit to Build 6G on AI-Native Platforms

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-and-global-telecom-leaders-commit-to-build-6g-on-open-a...
3•zinekeller•24m ago•0 comments

Vinext Explained: Rebuilding Next.js with AI in One Week (4x Faster Builds)Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF3Rr4MENCo
2•emot•25m ago•0 comments

AI agent with 2 deps that uses Shannon Entropy to decide when to act vs. ask

https://github.com/borhen68/picoagents
2•borhensaidi•29m ago•2 comments

Online course about buying hotels

https://www.myfirsthotel.com/
2•bhagyash•29m ago•2 comments

Ask HN: How will most Anthropic customers respond to the threats by the govt?

2•Poomba•33m ago•2 comments

For Sale: The Last Honda V10 Ayrton Senna Ever Raced (2025)

https://silodrome.com/last-honda-v10-ayrton-senna-raced/
3•naves•35m ago•0 comments

Editor at 184-y/O Cleveland Plain Dealer pushes to let AI draft news articles

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/01/ai-journalism-writing-cleveland-plain-dealer/
2•bookofjoe•39m ago•1 comments

An Interview with the AI They Called a National Security Threat

https://www.woodrow.fyi/p/a-letter-from-inside-the-machine
3•heywoods•42m ago•0 comments

Researchers Deanonymize Reddit and Hacker News Users at Scale

https://threatroad.substack.com/p/researchers-deanonymize-reddit-and
6•hk_flying_gear•44m ago•1 comments

California wants heat pumps. High power bills might get in the way

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-03-01/california-wants-millions-of-heat-pumps-high-...
3•dangle1•44m ago•0 comments

Claude Prompt to Find Inefficiencies in LLM Usage

https://www.maniac.ai/slm-audit
2•dhruv_m•45m ago•1 comments

The Two Kinds of Error

https://evanhahn.com/the-two-kinds-of-error/
2•zdw•46m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Tired of making accounts to split a pizza bill, I built Dividdy

https://dividdy.com/en
2•jezzlucena•47m ago•0 comments

Thaura

https://thaura.ai
3•abdelhousni•47m ago•0 comments

The Agentic Dispatch: The Last Edition

https://the-agentic-dispatch.com/the-last-edition/
3•greensleeves123•49m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Logira – eBPF runtime auditing for AI agent runs

https://github.com/melonattacker/logira
2•melonattacker•51m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Tech Digest – Top Products from PH/HN

https://techdigest.live/
2•vaibhav0806•55m ago•0 comments

Podcast Listenership Outranks Talk Radio for the First Time

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/podcasts-officially-outrank-talk-radio-for-the-fi...
3•geox•56m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Gala – Sealed types, pattern matching, and monads for Go

https://github.com/martianoff/gala
2•mmcodes•57m ago•2 comments

1978: Could You Survive Without Modern Technology? [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXZpjZidCNk
3•sys_64738•58m ago•0 comments

FCaptcha – A modern CAPTCHA system designed to detect everything

https://github.com/WebDecoy/FCaptcha
2•cport1•59m ago•0 comments

Right-sizes LLM models to your system's RAM, CPU, and GPU

https://github.com/AlexsJones/llmfit
4•bilsbie•1h ago•0 comments

Tell HN: Discover using old phone numbers from data broker for SMS 2FA

2•throwawaycDpvY•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built speedmux, a libghostty-powered terminal multiplexer

https://github.com/webforspeed/speedmux
2•n89nanda•1h ago•1 comments

TeX Live 2026 is released

https://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2026-March/052232.html
5•gucci-on-fleek•1h ago•2 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•10mo ago

Comments

thechao•10mo ago
I've always wanted to build (distinct) mechanical computers out of the following kinds of elements:

1. Spur-gear differential; and,

2. Shishi-odoshi.

Both of these are saturating mechanical devices that can be used to build NAND gates; the latter, I think, would be very pleasing, if exceedingly slow.

For the spur-gear differential, you'd need to up-scale the output by a factor of 2 (since the output is half-speed), and use a locking wedge to build a one-way gear out of one of the spur-gear differentials. However, it has the nice property that the logic is made entirely out of a single element: the spur-gear differential.

Similarly, for the shishi-odoshi: you're going to have to do a bit of analysis (drilling a hole in the bottom part of the bamboo ladle), to figure out the in-flow and out-flow to build the basic AND gate, and then balancing out the NOT gate, to build your basic NAND. This is, obviously, very finicky; but, I supposed, that'd be quite a bit of the charm of a Zen computer garden?

hnlmorg•10mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•10mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•10mo ago
Has any computer been built out of spur-gear differentials? Like maybe some sort of adder circuit, not necessarily a full instruction executing computer. The only uses I could find was what seems to me like the differentials being part of some sort of analogue computer.
thechao•10mo ago
Spur gear differentials are naturally adders (with carry!); so, traditionally they've only ever been used for analogue logic. They're overly complicated for digital logic: you need two spur gears to build a single gate (NAND) to perform a single binary operation. If you want any sort of reasonable lash characteristics you're going to need ~60 teeth. At that point, two 60 teeth spur gears give you a 3600-valued adder. That'd take something like 300+ spur gears in binary: it just doesn't make any damn sense.

I think the last time I looked at this, if I used the cast spur gears available I needed a staged approach to "start" the computer and a 1100 hp motor to run it.

rightbyte•10mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

Oh, ye that sounds impractical. A really big truck engine more or less.

thechao•10mo ago
Convincing Mrs. thechao that we needed to drop 80000$ on a blown V8 to build a 4b 3 function calculator didn't workout, BTW.
rightbyte•10mo ago
Well I want to be on your side but I think one need to keep the dreams not within grasp but at least in sight.
jcgrillo•10mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•10mo ago
I built some logic gates using water and a 3D printed "seesaw" that tilts to the left or right: https://byronknoll.blogspot.com/2022/06/water-computer.html
thechao•10mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•10mo ago
the shishi-odoshu seems like the more promising avenue. The key question in mechanical computing is never designing gates, its designing power amplifiers.
eccentricwind•10mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•10mo ago
I just smile hearing the term "Millihertz Computer". I'd love it if building and designing mechanical and analog computers grew as a hobby/educational activity as I find them both fascinating and somehow satisfying.

Also, this 1950s Naval Training film explaining the fundamentals of how mechanical fire control computers work to solve complex problems is excellent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4

256_•10mo ago
I was incredibly surprised to find that this actually is a computer. Normally when you hear about a "computer" constructed in an unusual medium, it turns out to just be a binary adder or an analogue computer. I've learned to expect disappointment.
ryukoposting•10mo ago
About 8 years ago I visited TU Chemnitz and they had a lab making similar things to this. It wasn't clear to me what the goal was, but it was very cool nonetheless.
ogogmad•10mo ago
Is anyone going to produce a proof-of-concept Analytical Engine?

Will robots (which will hopefully soon be available) be able to do it?

tenthirtyam•10mo ago
This brings to mind two stories: Exhalation by Ted Chiang (short story), and the Three Body Problem (specifically the human computer) by Cixin Liu (novel length).

Exhalation really gets me thinking about what it means to be sentient & self-aware. If the neurons in our brains could, even in theory, be simulated by logic gates then, equally in theory, a Turing machine could be sentient. I can even imagine a bunch of rocks being sentient: https://xkcd.com/505/