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Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb's New Universe

https://www.quantamagazine.org/astrophysicists-puzzle-over-webbs-new-universe-20260702/
1•jnord•2m ago•0 comments

Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

https://danluu.com/diseconomies-scale/
2•Liriel•3m ago•0 comments

ProofToken16: My Proposal for Private Decentralised Age Verification

https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/private-decentralised-age-verification.html
1•jstanley•6m ago•0 comments

Horsewood Reality Check 2026 – The Truth Behind the Claims

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/healthcare/articles/horsewood-urgent-report-2026-horse-19110038...
2•rafisalp•7m ago•0 comments

From flocks to pyramids: Balancing self-organization and architecture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0WiSoW-wL8
1•RebootStr•7m ago•0 comments

AB 1856: CA Exempts Open Source, Still Expands Age-Gating

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/05/one-step-forward-two-steps-back-cas-ab-1856-exempts-open-so...
2•mashally•10m ago•0 comments

Read Please

https://github.com/studioetc/read-please-app
1•incogvito•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Forge – A JavaScript runtime built on Mozilla SpiderMonkey

https://github.com/varadTheDeveloper/forge-runtime
3•opentestudox•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: WhosBuilt terminal lookup for who built a website

https://whosbuilt.com/lookup/example.com.markdown
2•hboon•20m ago•1 comments

But Nothing Has Changed on Our Side

https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/but-nothing-has-changed-on-our-side/
1•adunk•21m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built LibreYOLO, an MIT-licensed YOLO library

https://github.com/LibreYOLO/libreyolo
1•Xuban•29m ago•0 comments

Squeezes – A private, local-first bulk image compressor running in-browser

https://squeezes.vercel.app
1•marpe•32m ago•0 comments

Remote work didn't kill collaboration. Invisible teammates did

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/remote-work-didnt-kill-collaboration-invisible-teammates-did-JU...
3•ironsteel•40m ago•0 comments

DeepSeek drops another breakthrough [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0D7qV3nl7w
3•mgh2•49m ago•0 comments

Cvcheck.app scores your CV and tells you what's wrong

https://cvcheck.app
1•stefandulgh•50m ago•0 comments

A Last Gasp of 2D: The Cave CV1000 (2022)

https://nicole.express/2022/games-made-in-a-cave.html
2•tropicalfruit•50m ago•0 comments

Incompetent Content Moderation and Sexy Stuff

https://medium.com/luminasticity/incompetent-content-moderation-and-sexy-stuff-29e7e4d5caf7
1•bryanrasmussen•55m ago•1 comments

Suffix BWT vs. cyclic shift BWT, and fast computation

https://purplesyringa.moe/blog/suffix-bwt-vs-cyclic-shift-bwt-and-fast-computation/
1•g0xA52A2A•56m ago•0 comments

Before YouTube, Teenagers Were Coding Mind-Blowing Digital Art in Assembly

https://comuniq.xyz/post?t=1356
1•01-_-•57m ago•0 comments

Snake Venom Peptide Serum, Benefits, and Real Skin Insights

https://gamma.app/embed/Synevra-UltraLift-Review-2026-Snake-Venom-Peptide-Truth-Inside-jcmns0kstf...
1•prepostseo•59m ago•0 comments

Private space pilots are flying orbital missions for the US Space Force

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/02/private-space-pilots-are-flying-orbital-missions-for-the-us-spa...
2•01-_-•1h ago•0 comments

LiteOne V3 – A 12KB Zero-Build framework aiming for strict CSP security

https://github.com/reflexmanofficial/LiteOne-v3
1•RelfexMan•1h ago•0 comments

Do teams proactively validate Kubernetes resilience against SLOs?

https://www.resilopshq.com/
1•swaroopbhatk•1h ago•1 comments

Building is free now. Being wanted isn't

https://starts.live
2•sgraphics8•1h ago•0 comments

Egypt Won

https://xcancel.com/waterloo_intern/status/2073171123542573231
3•razodactyl•1h ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Which AI model do you use for what?

1•akashwadhwani35•1h ago•0 comments

Yep, we're using OpenClaw to date now

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/02/yep-were-using-openclaw-to-date-now/
3•TMWNN•1h ago•0 comments

Unearthing the Reality of "Zombie Energy Systems" in Africa's Energy Transition

https://www.catf.us/resource/unearthing-reality-zombie-energy-systems-africas-energy-transition/
2•bryanrasmussen•1h ago•0 comments

Another day, another illegal billion-dollar bribe to raise your electricity pric

https://electrek.co/2026/06/30/another-day-another-illegal-billion-dollar-bribe-to-raise-your-ele...
3•xbmcuser•1h ago•1 comments

The Factorio Effect

https://dangrafham.com/the-factorio-effect
1•freediver•1h 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