frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Trump Family's $6.8B Fortune Is Increasingly Tied to Crypto

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-20/donald-trump-family-net-worth-increasingly-com...
1•zerosizedweasle•28s ago•0 comments

Stable-DiffCoder: Pushing the Frontier of Code Diffusion Large Language Models

https://bytedance-seed.github.io/Stable-DiffCoder/
1•akshayt•5m ago•0 comments

TikTok is officially US-owned for American users, here's what's changing

https://9to5mac.com/2026/01/23/tiktok-is-officially-us-owned-for-american-users-heres-whats-chang...
2•WaitWaitWha•5m ago•0 comments

Training Medical AI to Think Like a Doctor [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaxGcb9qvTw
1•ssunboyy•8m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: A good Model to choose in Ollama to run on Claude Code

1•sujayk_33•8m ago•0 comments

Ercot Dashboard

https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards
1•RyanShook•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Snowfall Progress

https://www.kmjn.org/snow/
3•mjn•14m ago•0 comments

Patterns, Predictions, and Actions – A story about machine learning [pdf]

https://mlstory.org/pdf/patterns.pdf
1•vinhnx•15m ago•0 comments

The Possessed Machines

https://possessedmachines.com/
1•laurex•16m ago•0 comments

Elixir: Gradual Set-Theoretic Types

https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/main/gradual-set-theoretic-types.html
1•sergiotapia•30m ago•0 comments

Show HN: EchoFluid – a video transcription without uploading full videos

https://www.echofluid.com
1•samwulol•34m ago•0 comments

ICE Launches "Operation Catch-of-the-Day" Across Maine

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2026/01/21/ice-launches-operation-catch-day-targeting-worst-worst-crimin...
9•SanjayMehta•34m ago•2 comments

Show HN: AsyncReview – An OSS DevinReview Using RLMs

https://github.com/AsyncFuncAI/AsyncReview
1•sashimikun•39m ago•0 comments

Why is it legal and ok when big corp. straight tries to scam a user?

39•kingleopold•42m ago•10 comments

Read Bondi's Letter to Minnesota's Governor

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/01/24/us/pam-bondi-walz-doc.html
7•duxup•45m ago•0 comments

Skijoring is taking travellers off Colorado's ski-resort circuit

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20260121-skijoring-colorados-wildest-winter-sport
1•1659447091•46m ago•0 comments

ICE Is Not Like the Brownshirts, the Brownshirts Identified Themselves

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ice-is-nothing-like-the-brownshirts-because-the-brownshirts-a...
15•bjourne•54m ago•1 comments

The Responsibility of Intellectuals

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1967/02/23/a-special-supplement-the-responsibility-of-intelle/
17•andsoitis•59m ago•5 comments

US SEC: India refused to serve summons to Adani Group under Hague Convention

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/company/corporate-trends/us-regulator-seeks-to-bypass-i...
2•alok-g•59m ago•1 comments

Alex Honnold completes Taipei 101 skyscraper climb without ropes or safety net

https://www.cnn.com/sport/live-news/taiwan-alex-honnold-climb-taipei-101-01-25-26-intl-hnk
46•keepamovin•1h ago•25 comments

The Bay Area Has Lost Its Soul. No Wonder Everyone's Leaving [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_bsaF5TTEE
1•keepamovin•1h ago•1 comments

Prototyping NixOS with FDE, tang and Podman using Claude.AI

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/e7cdb55a-3960-4dc9-bd1a-3c73a3145fb9
2•cptnslow•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: VM-curator – a TUI alternative to libvirt and virt-manager

https://github.com/mroboff/vm-curator
6•theYipster•1h ago•2 comments

nvidia-smi hangs indefinitely after ~66 days

https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/971
59•tosh•1h ago•3 comments

Kb_text_shape: Harfbuzz like single file C/C++ text shaping library

https://github.com/JimmyLefevre/kb
2•inxode•1h ago•0 comments

ADSL Works over Wet String

https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works-over-wet-string.html
3•Tiberium•1h ago•1 comments

AI Adoption Rates by Country

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ai-adoption-rates-by-country/
2•divbzero•1h ago•1 comments

Managing High Performers

https://twitter.com/staysaasy/status/2015026826217742509
1•thisismytest•1h ago•1 comments

The case against ultrasonic humidifiers

https://dynomight.net/humidifiers/
6•arbuge•1h ago•2 comments

Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Near Nuclear Facilities – Enigma Labs

https://enigmalabs.io/collection/a7111520-9526-4939-9a66-d225db45ba80
1•lukeplato•1h ago•0 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/