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Everyone's building AI agents that remember. I built one that has a body

https://sbarron.com
1•barronai•48s ago•0 comments

The Std:Bitset Story: How a Practical MS‑DOS Problem Contributed to C++

https://freshsources.com/blog/files/0efc66caabe2cb443a6acae6aca0f707-0.html
1•ingve•50s ago•0 comments

Microsoft admits it 'cannot guarantee' data sovereignty (2025)

https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2025/07/25/microsoft-exec-admits-it-cannot-guarantee-data-so...
1•leonidasrup•2m ago•0 comments

LG reportedly discussing the sale of its TV business to Hisense

https://www.notebookcheck.net/LG-reportedly-discussing-the-sale-of-its-TV-business-to-Hisense.130...
1•Markoff•3m ago•1 comments

Show HN: I made samspov.com to easily track updates

https://samspov.com
3•NKCSS•9m ago•0 comments

Manny Nosowsky, Whose Wordplay Enlivened Times Crosswords, Dies at 94

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/us/manny-nosowsky-dead.html
1•Michelangelo11•9m ago•0 comments

Hetzner Price Adjustment

https://www.hetzner.com/pressroom/standardization-and-price-adjustment-of-our-server-products/
1•TechTechTech•9m ago•0 comments

SOLID – ISP Is a Conditional Corollary of Dip Applied per Client

https://zenodo.org/records/20350293
1•humanfromearth9•11m ago•1 comments

Using typing in Python leads to different sorts of code

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/python/TypeHintsDifferentCode
1•ingve•14m ago•0 comments

Fiber Optic Drone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_optic_drone
1•throwfaraway135•14m ago•0 comments

SOLID – Why SRP Is Wrong: The Cardinality Error in the SRP

https://zenodo.org/records/20415656
1•humanfromearth9•15m ago•1 comments

When products think: navigating the AI product shift

https://www.cesarrg.com/when-products-think-navigating-the-ai-product-shift/
1•cesarrg•19m ago•0 comments

A useful paper on the case for AI data centres in space [pdf]

https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
1•nilen•20m ago•0 comments

Prepare your "no" and keep it handy

https://sive.rs/n0
1•Michelangelo11•20m ago•0 comments

Robinhood Lets Customers Use AI to Trade Stocks, Make Credit-Card Purchases

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/robinhood-lets-customers-use-ai-to-trade-stocks-make-credit-card-purc...
1•cesarrg•22m ago•0 comments

Seven Ways to Avoid Losing Your Job to AI

https://www.thefp.com/p/tyler-cowen-seven-ways-to-avoid-losing
2•yarapavan•23m ago•2 comments

Why the US is moving troops from Germany to Poland: a US Army officer explains

https://vulpesetleo.substack.com/p/kosciuszko-smiles-for-our-freedom
2•hnjm•25m ago•0 comments

DiffusionBlocks: Training Neural Networks One Block at a Time

https://pub.sakana.ai/diffusionblocks/
2•hardmaru•25m ago•0 comments

Ax language: Compact source, build for agents

https://axlanguage.github.io/axlang/
2•mellosouls•26m ago•1 comments

Show HN: LaunchPact – get upvotes for your ProductHunt launch

https://www.launchpact.io
2•devtanna•26m ago•0 comments

Learnings from training a frontier font generation model

https://www.mixfont.com/blog/learnings-from-training-a-frontier-font-generation-model
1•justswim•29m ago•0 comments

Train 1T parameter LLM with 8 GPUs?

1•kendy1992•33m ago•0 comments

Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages [pdf]

https://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/paperSLE.pdf
1•doener•34m ago•2 comments

Google worker charged with using internal data to make $1.2M on Polymarket

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c052yv259jvo
1•ZeljkoS•36m ago•0 comments

Rcmd: Reimagined Command-Tab

https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd/
3•doener•38m ago•0 comments

After Ferrari EV backlash, Lamborghini says canceling EVs was the right choice

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/27/ferrari-luce-backlash-lamborghini-ceo-ev.html
2•kleiba2•41m ago•1 comments

Apify actors at $0.001/result (Google Maps, NPI, SEC EDGAR, more)

https://apify.com/meticulous_snail
1•meticuloussnail•42m ago•0 comments

A Love Letter to Neovim

https://caio.ca/blog/a-love-letter-to-neovim
1•birdculture•42m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AI agents for UK GDAD PCF roles and their skills

1•jph•43m ago•0 comments

Digital Autonomy with RISC-V in Europe

https://dare-riscv.eu/
1•pimterry•47m 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