frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

What happens when you combine mind mapping with courses?

https://pathmind.app/landing/
1•WebToolsCaE•1m ago•1 comments

Gemini's new Personal Intelligence will look through your emails and photos

https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-gemini-personal-intelligence/
1•daniel_iversen•2m ago•1 comments

The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10800/pg10800-images.html
1•Rendello•2m ago•0 comments

Nuclear weapons are now ESG compliant

https://www.ft.com/content/f789a262-e774-41b2-8f36-0995650e6a16
1•pseudolus•2m ago•1 comments

Agent Skills: AI Agents for React and Next.js Workflows

https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-skills
1•napolux•2m ago•0 comments

Claude Code plugin that rings your phone when a run needs you

https://github.com/ZeframLou/call-me
1•mustaphah•3m ago•0 comments

Simulating AI Semantic Collapse Using Convex Hulls

https://zenodo.org/records/18242108
1•Mhh1430•3m ago•0 comments

Phases of Ice

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_ice
1•wjb3•4m ago•0 comments

Can You Trust Published ANN Benchmarks for Databases?

https://blog.ydb.tech/are-published-ann-benchmarks-dbms-results-trustworthy-f2573eca4e07
2•robocomp•6m ago•0 comments

Levers of Light

https://royalicing.com/2026/levers-of-light
1•burntcaramel•6m ago•0 comments

Coal power generation falls in China and India for first time since 1970s

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/13/coal-power-generation-falls-china-india-since-1970s
1•pseudolus•7m ago•0 comments

Universal Commerce Protocol: What Merchants Need to Know

https://ecomhint.com/blog/universal-commerce-protocol
1•jakubrusniok•7m ago•0 comments

Google taps emails and YouTube history in push for personalised AI

https://www.ft.com/content/9bbdf59e-ce46-4176-aab9-b45a3f49fc4e
1•Eden09•9m ago•1 comments

Sun Position Calculator

https://drajmarsh.bitbucket.io/earthsun.html
3•sanbor•10m ago•1 comments

Prompt Repetition Improves Non-Reasoning LLMs

https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14982
1•jsphweid•12m ago•0 comments

StoicCredit – turning credit report PDFs into actionable funding roadmaps

https://stoiccredit.com/
1•jomendezp•13m ago•1 comments

Airlines to save big money on fuel as new weight loss pills gain popularity

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/14/airlines-to-save-on-fuel-as-weight-loss-pills-grow-popular-wall-s...
2•koolba•20m ago•0 comments

Optimal transition pathways to a net-zero power grid in the Philippines

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X25002561
1•PaulHoule•20m ago•0 comments

Hey, The Good Guys just called They'd like some data

https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/1004
1•allreduce•21m ago•0 comments

Nation-Wide Verizon Outage

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/verizon-outage-disrupts-calling-data-201539439.html
1•geophile•22m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A discussion-first community for opinions

https://opinora.com/en
1•taptap4•23m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A self-hosted code search with bulk replace and auto PRs

https://techquests.dev/projects/code-search
1•aanogueira•23m ago•0 comments

Do AI models Reason or merely Regurgitate?

https://bigthink.com/the-present/do-ai-models-reason-or-regurgitate/
1•bonkerbits•24m ago•2 comments

Provenance Emulator: Atari, Commodore, Game Boy and More

https://provenance-emu.com/
3•janandonly•24m ago•0 comments

CMV: If North Korea didn't have nuclear, it would have become another Venezuela

1•webtcp•27m ago•2 comments

Digg.com relaunch public beta is live

https://digg.com
7•andrewblossom•32m ago•3 comments

Off the Grid by Alexander Endrullat

https://peopleofprint.com/general/off-the-grid-by-alexander-endrullat/
1•starkparker•35m ago•0 comments

X 'acting to comply with UK law' after outcry over sexualised images

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/14/x-acting-to-comply-with-uk-law-after-outcry-ov...
2•chrisjj•38m ago•0 comments

Reflecting on 2025

https://rolando.is/typing/2025/reflecting_on_2025/
1•rnmp•39m ago•0 comments

A New Anti-Political Fervor

https://www.noemamag.com/a-new-anti-political-fervor/
5•antonomon•40m ago•1 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/