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People Photographed with Their Vehicles

https://martinroemers.com/homo-mobilis/photos/
1•bookofjoe•1m ago•0 comments

"Coupons and Tampons in a Summer Snow" an AI Pop Hit

https://app.napster.com/creations/track/ffd925e6-bc73-4cba-8710-6e5f14e94936/7b6c02d3-e2f4-4a1b-b...
2•6stringmerc•2m ago•0 comments

Moltbook leaks the keys of every agent

https://www.threads.com/@naveed_ullah600/post/DUMun_HDAFd
3•kevin061•3m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How did you get from learning to code to making your first dollar?

1•chistev•3m ago•0 comments

Changes to the Irish Times Stylebook

https://www.irishtimes.com/media/2026/02/01/message-from-the-editor-its-the-way-we-say-it/
1•trigger•3m ago•1 comments

Cap Twelve Years Later: How the "Rules" Have Changed

https://www.infoq.com/articles/cap-twelve-years-later-how-the-rules-have-changed/
1•onurkanbkrc•7m ago•0 comments

Kleiner Perkins was written off. Then an unlikely VC showed up

https://fortune.com/2026/01/31/inside-vc-firm-kleiner-perkins-turnaround-mamoon-hamid/
1•tosh•9m ago•0 comments

Incompressible File. A File That Resists Compression

https://v0id-user.mataroa.blog/blog/incompressible-file-a-file-that-resists-compression/
1•v0id_user•11m ago•0 comments

What if you Topologically Sorted Code?

https://slydite.com/blog/toposort
2•Slydite•12m ago•1 comments

Show HN: BPU – An embedded scheduler for stable UART pipelines

1•DenisDolya•12m ago•0 comments

Musk admits no Optimus robots are doing 'useful work' at Tesla

https://electrek.co/2026/01/28/musk-admits-no-optimus-robots-are-doing-useful-work-at-tesla-after...
2•saubeidl•13m ago•0 comments

I Test Drove a Chinese EV. Now I Don't Want to Buy American Cars Anymore

https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/chinese-ev-test-drive-xiaomi-su7-c3e59282
4•impish9208•19m ago•1 comments

How to think like a strategic genius (5d thinking)

https://letters.thedankoe.com/p/how-to-think-like-a-strategic-genius
1•kaizenb•19m ago•0 comments

Heritability of intrinsic human life span is about 50%

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz1187
1•XzetaU8•19m ago•0 comments

Remarkable Pro Colors

https://www.thregr.org/wavexx/rnd/20260201-remarkable_pro_colors/
1•ffaser5gxlsll•20m ago•0 comments

US Marine Corps develops first 3D printed drone with no China-sourced parts

https://www.tomshardware.com/3d-printing/us-marine-corps-develops-first-ndaa-compliant-3d-printed...
1•giuliomagnifico•21m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Free depreciation calculator (no login, no back end, 3KB gzipped)

https://www.mydepreciation.org
1•ludydev•25m ago•0 comments

'Kessel Run' Air Force software development division

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessel_Run
1•samizdis•26m ago•0 comments

Data Poems

https://dr.eamer.dev/datavis/poems/
1•putzdown•26m ago•0 comments

ICE protester says her Global Entry was revoked after agent scanned her face

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/ice-protester-says-her-global-entry-was-revoked-after...
5•heisenbit•27m ago•2 comments

Launching My Side Project as a Solo Dev: The Walkthrough

https://alt-romes.github.io/posts/2026-01-30-from-side-project-to-kickstarter-a-walkthrough.html
2•romes•34m ago•0 comments

Show HN: UCPtools – Check if AI shopping agents can find your store

https://ucptools.dev
1•nolpak14•34m ago•1 comments

Show HN: A site where anyone can rename any location on Earth

https://rename.world
2•kafked•34m ago•0 comments

FOSDEM 2026 Schedule

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/
1•ksec•36m ago•0 comments

The Class 230 battery trial

https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-class-230-battery-trial.html
2•zeristor•39m ago•1 comments

The Case for Universal Basic Income

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/5713876-ai-displacement-and-ubi/
4•msolujic•41m ago•1 comments

Shakespeare and Mathematics

https://www.folger.edu/podcasts/shakespeare-unlimited/shakespeare-and-mathematics/
1•bryanrasmussen•42m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AgentGram – Open-source social network for AI agents

https://github.com/agentgram/agentgram
1•iisweetheartii•42m ago•0 comments

Geoengineering options to prevent Thwaites Glacier collapse

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/01/thwaites-glacier-sea-level-rise-sea-curtain/685846/
1•samizdis•43m ago•1 comments

The foldable iPhone will make sure future Galaxy phones have batteries

https://www.phonearena.com/news/foldable-iphone-will-make-sure-galaxy-phones-have-massive-batteri...
1•01-_-•44m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•9mo ago

Comments

thechao•9mo 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•9mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•9mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•9mo 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•9mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•9mo 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•9mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•9mo 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_•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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/