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Eric Trump–Backed Israeli Founder Flies Drones over End Zones and into War Zones

https://www.vanityfair.com/story/xtend-defense-drones-gaza
1•grandpajoey•35s ago•0 comments

MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M3.1-Flash

https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M3.1-Flash
1•Philpax•2m ago•0 comments

1Password launches a way for AI to log in for you without seeing your password

https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/22/1password-launches-a-way-for-ai-agents-to-log-in-on-your-behalf...
1•willmarch•3m ago•0 comments

Home Prices Are Starting to Fall in Some Pockets of the U.S.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/22/business/mortgage-rates-housing-costs.html
2•lxm•6m ago•1 comments

Canva's first in-house AI image model plans designs before generating them

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1017151/canva-craft-in-house-ai-model
1•willmarch•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Most feature complete Apple notes MCP bridge

https://github.com/xiaofeng-han/apple-notes-mcp
1•hhhanxfus•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A Mandelbrot and Julia explorer in the browser using WebGPU

https://fractallens.com/fractals/
1•Ladi_M•11m ago•0 comments

Node2Shell: Node.js Brotli vulnerability allows remote code execution

https://www.aikido.dev/blog/node2shell-nodejs-brotli-rce-cve-2026-111497
3•Fordec•17m ago•0 comments

CVE-2026-109619 PHP Sentinel

https://github.com/Taz1920/php-sentinel
1•Ryantjbirdusnav•18m ago•0 comments

The foolishness of "natural language programming" (1978)

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html
3•xiaoyu2006•20m ago•1 comments

Affluent and Older Americans Got Much Richer in Postpandemic Years

https://www.wsj.com/economy/affluent-and-older-americans-got-much-richer-in-the-postpandemic-year...
2•tchalla•26m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Export Visible WhatsApp Web Contacts to Excel or CSV in Chrome

https://contacts.wawebplus.com/
1•complanboy2•27m ago•0 comments

Twitch Plays: Interpretability of Bonsai-8B

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ozbbzsh49wvgfbCDp/twitch-plays-ai-interpretability-of-bonsai-8b
1•mordymoop•28m ago•1 comments

Selling GPU Credits

1•levitaplows•29m ago•0 comments

Apple's $2k iPhone Duo is selling for as little as $800

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/10/22/appleas-2000-iphone-duo-is-already-selling-for-as-little-as...
1•mgh2•30m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: I acquired a 4-letter domain, what would you do with it?

1•normalocity•41m ago•0 comments

Livestream GLM-5.3 playing Minecraft

https://twitch.sailresearch.com/watch.html
1•bobstax•44m ago•1 comments

Mississippi AG says use of force was 'justified' in fatal shooting of toddler

https://www.npr.org/2026/10/21/nx-s1-6009535/mississippi-ag-says-use-of-force-was-justified-in-fa...
2•AdmiralAsshat•46m ago•0 comments

Wolfram Rule 30 Prizes

https://rule30prize.org/
1•Anon84•48m ago•0 comments

Cannabis legalisation and cardiovascular hospitalisations in the USA

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/16/10/e111050
1•gumby•48m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Bloom – an org-mode compatible Android app for managing notes and tasks

https://github.com/rrajath/bloom
1•rrajath•49m ago•0 comments

What FDE Means at OpenAI

https://openai.com/index/forward-deployed-engineering-means/
1•shenli3514•53m ago•1 comments

Never-Before-Seen Images Reveal Damage at U.S. Bases in Middle East

https://meidasnews.com/news/so-much-worse-than-people-realize-never-before-seen-images-reveal-dam...
3•slowin•56m ago•0 comments

Warhound raises $200M to engineer war dogs and arm them with Anduril gear

https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/22/ben-lamm-raises-200m-for-warhound-to-engineer-war-dogs-and-arm-...
2•csh0•58m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Making a smart TV dumb and then smart

https://github.com/anubhavmalhotra/r2d2-tv
2•animalhot•1h ago•0 comments

Elon Musk Just Threatened the Coming Democratic Majority

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/elon-musk-just-threatened-the-coming
6•chmaynard•1h ago•0 comments

Scoop: Unvetted AI agents are accessing U.S. bank accounts

https://www.axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agents-banks-unauthorized-accounts-access
2•choult•1h ago•3 comments

GM Aims to Bring 'Eyes-Off' Driving to AI-Powered Cars Within 2 Years

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/21/business/gm-ai-electric-vehicles-china.html
2•bookofjoe•1h ago•1 comments

From Eyeballs to ARR: Buzzy Pricing Metrics and the AI Trade

https://aswathdamodaran.substack.com/p/from-eyeballs-to-arr-buzzy-pricing
2•toomuchtodo•1h ago•0 comments

America is Booming into a Ghost Town [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0RuKswLAo
2•idbnstra•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