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Money to Wealth – 100% offline net worth and budget tracker (Android)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tausif.moneytowealth&hl=en_US
1•Design_life•1m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Is a vibrating dildo Turing complete?

1•TuringHimself•1m ago•0 comments

Defending Against AI Agents with Social Engineering

https://blog.thinkst.com/2026/09/getting-agents-to-tell-on-themselves.html
1•strangelooop•1m ago•0 comments

Qwen Drive 1.0: A Vision-Language Foundation Model for Autonomous Driving

https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen-Drive-1.0
1•LorenDB•2m ago•0 comments

HF hack alignment: make agents more selfish

https://nonlineartransform.substack.com/p/the-collective
1•program_whiz•2m ago•0 comments

AI creators race to understand their creations

https://www.axios.com/2026/09/04/ai-dangers-risks-superintelligence
1•psychanarch•4m ago•0 comments

A field guide to sandboxes for AI

https://www.luiscardoso.dev/blog/sandboxes-for-ai
1•abdelhousni•6m ago•0 comments

Show HN: textlog – The quieter social microblogging platform. HTML-only, no JS.

https://textlog.cc/about?hn
1•stagas•6m ago•0 comments

OpenAI GPT-6 Astra is AGI? [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuFYLqe3-xc
1•harshalone•8m ago•0 comments

Ancient Coins Reveal a Wealth of Information About the Roman Republic

https://nautil.us/ancient-coins-reveal-a-wealth-of-information-about-the-roman-republic-1284847
1•Brajeshwar•10m ago•0 comments

AI Philosophy Competition

https://www.zacharygoodsell.com/ai-philosophy-competition
1•m-hodges•10m ago•0 comments

Two Nations, an Accident, and the Urgent Need to Understand the Laws of Space

https://www.wired.com/story/two-nations-horrible-accident-urgent-need-laws-of-space-lachs-moot/
1•voxleone•11m ago•0 comments

How the Planet-Altering Disaster of "Forever Chemicals" Was Kept Secret

https://www.propublica.org/podcast/forever-chemicals-pfas-pfos-3m-secret-kris-hansen
2•stevenwoo•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Show HN Hall of Fame

https://artifactbin.dev/@vivek/6bXsx3-vol-2-show-hn-hall-of-fame
2•nuwandavek•15m ago•0 comments

Donut Labs Solid State Battery Looks Like It May Be Real After All

https://cleantechnica.com/2026/09/04/donut-lab-reveals-amazing-performance-tests/
2•gumby•15m ago•0 comments

Doomscrolling Ourselves to Death

https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/doomscrolling-ourselves-to-death
1•jger15•16m ago•0 comments

A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind [pdf]

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/A_Wandering_Mind_Is_an_Unhappy_Mind.pdf
1•aray07•19m ago•0 comments

Discovery of a new IRC bot message board (2018)

https://drewdevault.com/blog/How-to-write-an-IRC-bot/
1•Zsfe510asG•19m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Functional options design pattern and implementation in Go

https://archetechmes.vercel.app/blog/functional-options-go
1•rzwsan•19m ago•1 comments

Sears is alive and well in Mexico

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/09/05/sears-isnt-dead-its-alive-well-mexico/
1•bookofjoe•19m ago•1 comments

GPT 6 Astra for Developers [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xp1XWmJ_Wo
1•s3p•20m ago•1 comments

Cash in on the AI Boom by Renting Out Your Spare Compute

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-inference-distributed-computing
2•pseudolus•22m ago•0 comments

Org chart is your cycle time

https://keithbrown.com/org-cycle-time/
2•optimizethis•24m ago•1 comments

SpaceX is building its own gas turbine blade factory to power AI faster

https://qz.com/spacex-turbine-blade-foundry-ai-data-centers-090226
1•JumpCrisscross•25m ago•2 comments

"Kill All Humans"

https://bsky.app/profile/ruggsea.eurosky.social/post/3murj32dbvs26
2•Bluestein•25m ago•0 comments

Processing power for folding@home has dropped significantly

https://stats.foldingathome.org/os
1•alightsoul•25m ago•1 comments

Almost Anyone Can Make Money Selling Electricity with AI and Batteries

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-09-03/consumers-profit-off-solar-batteries-selling-e...
2•JumpCrisscross•26m ago•1 comments

New urinal designs prevent messy splashes onto legs and the floor (2022)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/urinal-designs-no-splash-backs-university-water...
1•fidotron•29m ago•0 comments

NYC law could force Uber and Lyft to keep dangerous drivers on the road

https://reason.com/2026/09/05/nyc-law-could-force-uber-and-lyft-to-keep-dangerous-drivers-on-the-...
2•leephillips•30m ago•1 comments

Separating Parsing Expression Grammars Using Cell-Probe Lower Bounds

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29592
1•pcfwik•30m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•1y ago

Comments

thechao•1y 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•1y ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•1y ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•1y 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•1y 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•1y ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•1y 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•1y 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.
byronknoll•1y 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•1y ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•1y 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•1y ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•1y 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_•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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/

jcgrillo•1y ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem