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Show HN: Rubber Duck

https://rubberduck.greg.technology/
1•gregsadetsky•51s ago•0 comments

Writing a bindless GPU abstraction layer

https://www.kevin-gibson.com/blog/writing-a-bindless-gpu-abstraction-layer/
2•surprisetalk•1m ago•0 comments

NASA SpaceWASM – A flight-compliant WebAssembly interpreter

https://github.com/nasa/spacewasm
2•eqrion•1m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: I am not able to find a job. Should I switch stacks?

2•need_a_work23•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Web Components, `literal`, 0% vDOM, custom < void/> tags in production

https://github.com/crisdosaygo/good.html
1•keepamovin•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A zero-dependency auditor for decision records in AI-touched systems

https://github.com/forgedculture/legibility-field-kit
1•forgesignals•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Personalized, narrated bedtime stories for kids

https://www.hushwillow.com/
1•adsigel•3m ago•0 comments

Vulnify: Giving Your Agents a CVE Brain

https://trustedsec.com/blog/vulnify-giving-your-agents-a-cve-brain
1•ilreb•3m ago•0 comments

My Favorite Product Discovery Tool: Assumption Mapping

https://pawelbrodzinski.substack.com/p/my-favorite-product-discovery-tool
1•flail•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Geojam – a daily music and geography game

https://geojam.world/
1•mackmcconnell•6m ago•0 comments

Thoughts on Interactive real hologram (no supports)

https://www.blaisephotonics.com
1•buletaire•7m ago•1 comments

Tencent/Hy3: 295B MoE model rivals trillion scale SOTA

https://huggingface.co/tencent/Hy3
1•nateb2022•10m ago•0 comments

Pedantle – Uncover the Wikipedia Page

https://pedantle.certitudes.org/
1•hamburgererror•10m ago•0 comments

Autodata: An agentic data scientist to create high quality synthetic data

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25996
1•gmays•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Present and Build Whiteboards, Flowcharts and Diagrams on iPhone

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/canvasprism-whiteboard/id6785350171
1•LifeUtilityApps•12m ago•0 comments

Engineering Sacrifice: How Open Source Survives the Age of Free Code

https://lumramabaja.com/posts/engineering-sacrifice-how-open-source-survives-the-age-of-free-code/
1•irwt•12m ago•0 comments

China's AI boom is creating a different kind of entrepreneur

https://restofworld.org/2026/china-ai-worker-innovation/
2•ThinkingGuy•13m ago•0 comments

Automatia Update: A New Start

https://libriscv.no/blog/a-new-start/
1•fwsgonzo•13m ago•0 comments

Percent of U.S. adults have CKM syndrome – but most have never heard of it

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2026/07/09/90-percent-us-adults-have-this-syndrome-most-h...
1•mikhael•14m ago•0 comments

Lab: The Full-Stack Platform for Training Your Own Models

https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/lab
1•nateb2022•14m ago•0 comments

Experimental demonstration that qubits can be cloned at will

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10695
1•kaivi•14m ago•0 comments

Brief Lang

https://github.com/Randozart/brief-lang
1•usmanmehmood55•15m ago•1 comments

How to get the smell of cigarette smoke out of your hair

https://bookofjoe2.blogspot.com/2026/05/helpful-hints-from-joe-eeze-how-to-get.html
1•surprisetalk•16m ago•0 comments

Interview: Drew DeVault on an AI-free version of Vim

https://jasonpolak.substack.com/p/interview-drew-devault-on-an-ai-free
4•birdculture•18m ago•0 comments

My debut novel was a flop

https://haroldrogers.substack.com/p/my-debut-novel-was-a-flop
1•greenie_beans•19m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Any good replacements for "Refined Hacker News?"

1•gwbas1c•21m ago•0 comments

Wealthy AI workers send San Francisco house prices soaring

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9q29j47v9ro
1•onemoresoop•24m ago•0 comments

Dashlane Loses List of Subprocessors

https://www.dashlane.com/privacy/subprocessors
2•janandonly•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Magpie-search, Federated, local-first search for an AI

https://github.com/xfloukiex-lab/magpie-search
1•VektorGeist•25m ago•0 comments

Turks All the Way Down

https://josef.cn/blog/turks-all-the-way-down
1•josefchen•27m 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