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SEC dismisses case against SolarWinds, top security officer

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-sec-dismisses-case-against-solarwinds-top-security-of...
1•pcaharrier•35s ago•0 comments

UK to Create New Fast-Track Residency Path for High-Earners

https://parliamentnews.co.uk/uk-to-create-new-fast-track-residency-path-for-high-earners
2•Doches•2m ago•0 comments

The Most Joyless Tech Revolution Ever: AI Is Making Us Rich and Unhappy

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-most-joyless-tech-revolution-ever-ai-is-making-us-rich-and-unhapp...
2•bookofjoe•2m ago•1 comments

Don't waste your time creating project structure

https://github.com/deyaa1251/Yaqeen/blob/main/README.md
1•oss-terminator•3m ago•0 comments

'Robotaxi has reached a tipping point': Baidu, Nvidia leaders see momentum

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/20/global-robotaxi-race-heats-up-between-us-and-chinese-rivals.html
1•thinkcontext•3m ago•1 comments

Exploring LLMs with MLX and the Neural Accelerators in the M5 GPU

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/exploring-llms-mlx-m5
1•ksec•4m ago•0 comments

One Uncaught Rust Exception Took Out Cloudflare

https://hackaday.com/2025/11/20/how-one-uncaught-rust-exception-took-out-cloudflare/
2•fcpguru•4m ago•0 comments

Trump Calling Reporter 'Piggy' Was 'Frankness,' White House Says

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/20/business/media/trump-leavitt-reporter-piggy.html
1•duxup•5m ago•1 comments

Solving H_n = 100

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/11/20/solving-h_n-100/
1•ibobev•6m ago•0 comments

Don't waste your time creating your project structure

1•oss-terminator•6m ago•0 comments

Weddle Integration Rule

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/11/20/weddle-integration-rule/
1•ibobev•6m ago•0 comments

AI data centers are straining power grids, environmental resources and markets

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-11-21/how-the-data-center-boom-tests-grids-water-res...
1•zerosizedweasle•7m ago•0 comments

Pinning is a kind of static borrow

https://nadrieril.github.io/blog/2025/11/12/pinning-is-a-kind-of-static-borrow.html
1•emschwartz•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: StandbyBro – friends for rent (platonic companionship)

https://standbybro.com/
1•binsquare•10m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Codesprint – A LeetCode Typing Trainer

https://github.com/cwklurks/codesprint
2•cwkcwk•10m ago•0 comments

Beats me. AI decided to do so and I didn't question it

https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369
1•sensanaty•12m ago•0 comments

LimiX: Generalist Intelligence for Structured Data Modeling

https://www.limix.ai/
1•salkahfi•12m ago•0 comments

iHeartRadio web has exposed all its source code

https://github.com/Gh0styTongue/iHeart-Frontend-Source-Code
1•GhostyTongue•14m ago•0 comments

Bring TeXmacs to Your Students and Colleagues

http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/bring-texmacs-to-your-students-and-colleagues/2102
2•amichail•17m ago•0 comments

How LLMs generate judgments

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-025-00925-3
1•Anon84•17m ago•0 comments

Dos and Don't for Any Place

https://www.dos-and-donts.com/
1•srini_reddy•20m ago•0 comments

RISC OS and NetBSD running on the same SoC

http://www.update.uu.se/~micken/ronetbsd.html
2•fanf2•22m ago•1 comments

iOS Clone SwiftUI

https://github.com/PallavAg/iOS-Clone-SwiftUI
2•mohi-kalantari•22m ago•0 comments

'Living off the land' allowed Russia-linked group to breach Ukrainian entities

https://therecord.media/russia-linked-breaches-ukraine-living-off-the-land
2•PaulHoule•23m ago•0 comments

Reinforcement Learning Control of Quantum Error Correction

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08493
2•SweetSoftPillow•26m ago•0 comments

Trump admin attempts to open pristine Alaska wildlife refuge to gas/oil drilling

https://www.npr.org/2025/10/24/nx-s1-5584883/trump-alaska-wildlife-refuge-oil-gas-drilling
1•stopbulying•27m ago•0 comments

Show HN: RAG-chunk – A tool to choose optimal chunk sizes for RAG

https://medium.com/@skanders/stop-guessing-the-scientific-way-to-choose-your-rag-chunk-size-b0c18...
1•messkan•29m ago•0 comments

Trump administration eliminates protections for endangered species

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-administration-endangered-species-act-rollback/
13•stopbulying•32m ago•1 comments

A new bill could sink India's drones from the sky

https://thedailybrief.zerodha.com/p/a-new-bill-could-sink-indias-drones
1•bulla•32m ago•0 comments

Show HN: GuardiAgent – Sandboxing / permission model for MCP servers

https://www.guardiagent.com/developers
4•phear_•34m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•6mo ago

Comments

thechao•6mo 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•6mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•6mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•6mo 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•6mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•6mo 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•6mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•6mo 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_•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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/