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AI could help human scientists pick promising research topics

https://physicsworld.com/a/ai-could-help-human-scientists-pick-promising-research-topics/
1•zeristor•31s ago•0 comments

How A.I. Killed Student Writing (and Revived It)

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/us/ai-students-cheating-homework-classrooms.html
1•apparent•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Trip – a complete transformer engine in C built from scratch just by me

https://github.com/carlovalenti/TRiP
1•carlovalenti•2m ago•0 comments

Judge Orders Matt Mullenweg to Explain Missing Messages in WP Engine Dispute

https://www.therepository.email/federal-judge-orders-matt-mullenweg-to-explain-missing-messages-i...
1•docdeek•2m ago•0 comments

The Bloomberg Terminal Is Getting an AI Makeover, Like It or Not

https://www.wired.com/story/the-bloomberg-terminal-is-getting-an-ai-makeover-like-it-or-not/
1•01-_-•3m ago•0 comments

Non-Programmer Code Sharing

1•CombatHacker•3m ago•0 comments

Revealing NVIDIA Driver Command Streams for CPU-GPU Runtime Behavior Insight

https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.26889
1•matt_d•3m ago•0 comments

AI optimism is waning

https://bayeslord.substack.com/p/ai-optimism-is-waning
2•swah•5m ago•0 comments

Guardians: Static verification for AI agent workflows

https://github.com/metareflection/guardians
1•matt_d•5m ago•0 comments

CopyFail Was Not Disclosed to Distros

https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/04/30/10
3•ori_b•6m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built a private GitHub in 650 lines of PostgreSQL

https://github.com/calebwin/gitgres
1•calebhwin•8m ago•0 comments

AI Investment Boosted Economic Growth, While Consumers Tapped the Brakes

https://www.wsj.com/economy/central-banking/u-s-economy-grew-at-2-rate-in-first-quarter-6e0c18cc
1•JumpCrisscross•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Larkin – Authorization middleware for x402 agent payments

https://larkin.sh
1•mikebom•8m ago•0 comments

Vision agents vs. structured APIs on the same internal tool task

2•FirestarAlpha•9m ago•0 comments

The Whistleblower Who Uncovered the NSA's 'Big Brother Machine'

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-whistleblower-who-uncovered-the-nsas-big-brother-machine/
4•the-mitr•9m ago•0 comments

Xatastor: ZFS and NVMe-Of for Postgres Databases

https://xata.io/blog/xatastor-zfs-nvme-of-for-millions-of-postgres-databases
2•tee-es-gee•10m ago•0 comments

Fast GPU Linear Algebra via Compile Time Expression Fusion

https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22242
1•matt_d•12m ago•0 comments

American Dads Became the Parents Their Fathers Never Were

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-do-richer-dads-spend-more-time
1•ozozozd•12m ago•0 comments

Command Decision System for organizational risk (not average-based)

https://github.com/knuppjason-source/Human-Factors-App
1•Knuppjason•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Phase Router – capacity-aware routing for MoE

https://github.com/TSltd/phase_router_rs
1•TSltd•12m ago•0 comments

Largest Digital Human Rights Conference Suddenly Canceled

https://www.404media.co/rightscon-human-rights-conference-suddenly-postponed/
6•Brajeshwar•14m ago•0 comments

Long-Running Agents

https://addyo.substack.com/p/long-running-agents
3•swolpers•16m ago•1 comments

Maximilian Schwarzmüller – GitHub is facing problems [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pekbl3Yz02g
1•mindcrime•16m ago•0 comments

Constraints That Compute: A Unified Framework for Efficient Intelligence

https://zenodo.org/records/19895574
1•massimiliano_c•16m ago•0 comments

Dotcl: Common Lisp Implementation on .NET

https://github.com/dotcl/dotcl
7•reikonomusha•17m ago•0 comments

Illegal vs. Unwanted States

https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/illegal-vs-unwanted-states/
2•azhenley•18m ago•0 comments

SatoshiGuesser – Roll for Bitcoin

https://github.com/Pathos0925/SatoshiGuesser
11•ilarum•20m ago•3 comments

China pushes EU capitals to scrap 'Made in Europe' law or face retaliation

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/04/29/china-pushes-eu-capitals-to-scrap-made-in-europe-la...
4•Teever•24m ago•1 comments

A text editor as a user interface

https://ratfactor.com/cards/text-editor-as-ui
1•ibobev•25m ago•0 comments

Nvidia Nemotron 3 Nano Omni

https://huggingface.co/blog/nvidia/nemotron-3-nano-omni-multimodal-intelligence
1•ibobev•25m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•12mo ago

Comments

thechao•12mo 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•12mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•12mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•12mo 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•12mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•12mo 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•12mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•12mo 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_•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo 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/