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Can AI Pass Freshman CS? [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56HJQm5nb0U
1•thethirdone•35s ago•0 comments

Explore medieval life and death with these 5 fun interactive maps

https://weirdmedievalguys.substack.com/p/explore-medieval-life-and-death-with
1•crescit_eundo•45s ago•0 comments

Migrating 13,000 Comments from Drupal to Hugo

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/migrating-13000-comments-from-drupal-to-hugo/
1•zdw•1m ago•0 comments

An 800 year old prayer book that's decorated with puns

https://weirdmedievalguys.substack.com/p/an-800-year-prayer-book-thats-decorated
1•crescit_eundo•3m ago•0 comments

Air Force One Returns to Joint Base Andrews After 'Minor Electrical Issue'

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/greenland-trump-tariffs-trade-eu/card/air-force-one-returns-to-j...
1•thm•3m ago•0 comments

How Birds Got Human Names

https://weirdmedievalguys.substack.com/p/how-birds-got-human-names
1•crescit_eundo•5m ago•0 comments

Why Not Tail Recursion?

https://futhark-lang.org/blog/2026-01-20-why-not-tail-recursion.html
1•todsacerdoti•9m ago•0 comments

Incremental AI Adoption for E-Commerce – Arcturus Labs

http://arcturus-labs.com/blog/2026/01/18/incremental-ai-adoption-for-e-commerce/
1•JnBrymn•16m ago•0 comments

Everything Moe

https://ianbarber.blog/2026/01/20/everything-moe/
1•phpencil•16m ago•0 comments

Shingles vaccine may help keep older people biologically younger

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/shingles-vaccine-news-bz55zstn5
5•ValentineC•16m ago•0 comments

Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)

https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/index-old.shtml
5•AlphaWeaver•17m ago•0 comments

Create video resumes without any recording - perfectclips.netlify.app

1•perfectclips•18m ago•0 comments

DOGE employees may have improperly accessed social security data, DOJ says

https://www.axios.com/2026/01/20/doge-employees-social-security-information-court-filing
3•handfuloflight•20m ago•2 comments

ChatGPT recommended a scam and I spent $300

https://old.reddit.com/r/soylent/comments/1qii7d5/soylent_aus_is_this_a_scam_i_just_spent_so_much/
2•aendruk•20m ago•0 comments

CT Scans of 18650 Lithium-Ion Batteries [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y23nfAOiXQ
3•notthetup•29m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Ballparkguess.com

https://ballparkguess.com/
1•bkls•30m ago•0 comments

Instagram Solved Its Justin Bieber Problem (2015)

https://www.wired.com/2015/11/how-instagram-solved-its-justin-bieber-problem/
2•teleforce•31m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A Simple MCP Server That Lets Agents Talk to Users

https://github.com/fellowgeek/mcp-speak/
1•pcbmaker20•33m ago•0 comments

Elon Musk floats idea of buying Ryanair after calling CEO 'an idiot'

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/20/elon-musk-buying-ryanair-ceo-tesla-michael-ole...
3•cycomanic•37m ago•2 comments

I rejected "Scalability" to build a logistics nightmare (works)

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-i-rejected-scalability-to-build-a-logistics-nightmare-that-...
1•rosiehong•39m ago•0 comments

I Burned $160k Trying to Solve "Online Tailoring"

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-burned-160-000-trying-to-solve-online-tailoring-the-engin...
4•rosiehong•40m ago•0 comments

Scientists in Dreamland

https://theamericanscholar.org/scientists-in-dreamland/
2•Hooke•46m ago•0 comments

Show HN: X Post Analyzer – Score posts using X's open-source algorithm

https://x.kano.codes
1•tonkotsuboy_com•46m ago•0 comments

App Store and Apple TV Experiencing Outage

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/20/app-store-apple-tv-down/
4•hughmandeville•48m ago•0 comments

Is PSA airlines network down anywhere besides DCA?

1•DubDouble•49m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How are you sandboxing your coding agents?

2•kwar13•55m ago•5 comments

Are there laws of history? (2020)

https://aeon.co/essays/if-history-was-more-like-science-would-it-predict-the-future
2•Ariarule•57m ago•0 comments

Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

https://github.com/anthropics/original_performance_takehome
4•myahio•1h ago•1 comments

Mike Rowe 464: Palmer Luckey–The Department of War Has a Mullet

https://music.youtube.com/podcast/csmQqaSHJrw
2•nradov•1h ago•0 comments

Vitruvius Basilica found after 500 years

https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/italy-uncovers-basilica-designed-by-vitruvius-the-father-of...
2•adeltoso•1h ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•8mo ago

Comments

thechao•8mo 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•8mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•8mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•8mo 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•8mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•8mo 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•8mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•8mo 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_•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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/