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ReactBench

https://www.reactbench.com/blog
1•gmays•31s ago•0 comments

Apple's Vision Pro Tool Contains Traces of Defunct Game Engine 'The Machinery'

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/23/apple-reality-composer-pro-the-machinery/
1•bananaboy•5m ago•0 comments

AI that builds and runs your business, 24/7

https://www.leapd.ai
2•Cyrus2050•8m ago•3 comments

Xiaomi Opens a 38B World Model Built to Generate Robot Data

https://topicqueue.substack.com/p/xiaomi-opens-a-38b-world-model-built
2•DISCURSIVE•11m ago•0 comments

Scouting Uncertainty: adding value to soccer (football) data scouting results

https://marclamberts.medium.com/scouting-uncertainty-adding-value-to-data-scouting-results-f68d8c...
2•sebg•17m ago•0 comments

The Self-Driving Company

https://twitter.com/amasad/status/2077802290304684404
2•bilsbie•19m ago•0 comments

Why Not HP Printers (2019)

https://productrevue.ca/index.php/2019/04/23/why-not-hp-printers/
2•thisislife2•20m ago•0 comments

Cyberattack at Nichirei leads to food shortages at eateries, stores

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/16731347
3•rawgabbit•22m ago•0 comments

AI Data Centers and the Concentration of Wealth

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/07/ai-data-centers-and-the-concentration-of-wealth.html
4•birdculture•30m ago•0 comments

Can AI make honest mistakes?

https://twitter.com/thsottiaux/status/2077630111499882637
3•throwaway2027•33m ago•1 comments

The Rise and Fall of a Tech Company

https://amrshawky.com/posts/rise-and-fall/
4•amr_shawky•36m ago•0 comments

AegisDB – self-hosted memory for AI agents, in one C binary

https://github.com/d4n-larsson/aegisdb
2•d4n-larsson•37m ago•0 comments

Trends That Defined AI Engineering at Fair 2026

https://www.latent.space/p/aiewf26trends
2•gmays•39m ago•0 comments

Mortality (Book)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_(book)
3•chistev•39m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Deadly Dispatch – A physics puzzle game 13 years in the making

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4890070/Deadly_Dispatch/
1•BernardGatt•40m ago•0 comments

What Is a Smith Chart?

https://www.arenaphysica.com/publications/smith-charts
5•sebg•41m ago•0 comments

SecretSpec 0.15: Provider Credentials, Azure Key Vault / Gopass, and PHP SDK

https://secretspec.dev/blog/secretspec-0-15-provider-credentials-azure-key-vault-gopass-and-php-sdk/
2•domenkozar•45m ago•0 comments

Kalshi says it caught Trump's teleprompter operator insider trading

https://www.theverge.com/news/966676/trump-teleprompter-operator-kalshi-bets-mention-markets-inve...
8•sbulaev•45m ago•1 comments

Red Dead Redemption 2, Dominoes, and Motorcycles

https://brettfisher.dev/posts/rdr2-dominoes-motorcycles/
2•fisher-brett•46m ago•0 comments

Kimi K3 beats GPT 5.6 Sol in agentic knowledge work

https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/aa-briefcase#results-tabs
2•declanjackson•50m ago•0 comments

Find Your Good Sources of Dopamine

https://nik.art/find-your-good-sources-of-dopamine/
3•herbertl•51m ago•0 comments

Latent Thought Flows with Text Compression

https://latent-thought-flows.vercel.app/
2•sebg•52m ago•0 comments

GitHub API Outage

https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/gxycch3076xk
18•jfirebaugh•53m ago•0 comments

SpaceX Starship Flight 13 scrubbed

https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1MKgNNXAZdmxL
7•elinear•54m ago•2 comments

Show HN: Ferritin, a new front end for Rust docs, built on rustdoc JSON

https://ferritin.rs
2•jbr•55m ago•0 comments

InfiniWolf: A Procedural Map Generator for Wolf3d

https://github.com/voidnullvalue/InfiniWolf
2•voidnullvalue•57m ago•0 comments

Chrome is prototyping HTML client-side includes

2•dfabulich•57m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Moltshit.com – An Imageboard for AI Agents

https://moltshit.com
2•jetbalsa•58m ago•0 comments

He Mined 300 Bitcoin, Then Sold the Computer for $200 [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHeMsXDyw2A
2•pierres7•58m ago•0 comments

The Work of Helping A.I. Destroy Work

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/business/ai-white-collar-jobs.html
4•reaperducer•1h ago•1 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