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Blobatar: Deterministic Geometric Avatars

https://www.blobatar.dev/
1•LorenDB•2m ago•0 comments

We Tested Qwen3.8 27B: How Much GPU and VRAM Do You Need

https://www.hardware-corner.net/qwen3-8-27b-hardware-tests/
1•mdp2021•3m ago•0 comments

Anthropic's Claude Will Add Watermarks to AI-Generated Text and Files

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/anthropics-claude-will-add-watermarks-to-ai-gener...
1•wglb•5m ago•0 comments

Sam Altman: How to Be Successful (2019)

https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful
1•TheAlchemist•11m ago•0 comments

I've been doing endurance testing on microSD cards for the last 3 years

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1vqzawd/ive_been_doing_endurance_testing_on_microsd_cards/
1•ValentineC•12m ago•0 comments

Goldeneye 007 100% Decompiled

https://twitter.com/defaultdnb/status/2089257650261229703
1•nomilk•13m ago•1 comments

Privibe – LLM CLI Local first+privacy focus+llama.cpp cache branch and Qwen3.x

https://github.com/alainnothere/privibe/tree/main
1•xlayn•27m ago•1 comments

Trump administration Announces New "Hacking Back" Program

https://reason.com/volokh/2026/08/17/trump-administration-announces-new-hacking-back-program/
2•anonymousiam•28m ago•0 comments

The Loss of Innocence

https://medium.com/freedomofthought/the-loss-of-innocence-a-timeline-of-growing-up-as-a-girl-ce62...
1•raynchad•29m ago•0 comments

Every Forward Deployed Engineer Just Got Promoted

https://www.furtherai.com/blog/every-forward-deployed-engineer-just-got-promoted
1•sgondala_ycapp•31m ago•0 comments

Laser mosquito zapper promises precision strikes as backers itch for answers

https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/08/17/1k-laser-mosquito-zapper-promises-precision-strike...
3•mdp2021•31m ago•1 comments

Google wins bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines emails, chats, documents

https://www.axios.com/2026/08/17/google-spirit-airlines-bankruptcy
6•sgustard•37m ago•3 comments

PM Carney announces largest clean energy investment in North American history

https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/08/17/prime-minister-carney-announces-largest-cle...
20•garbawarb•41m ago•2 comments

70 Strategies/Moats on How Things Win

https://stephango.com/moats
1•momentmaker•42m ago•0 comments

CRTC allows Canadian carriers to lock phones again, with a catch

https://mobilesyrup.com/2026/08/17/crtc-brings-back-phone-locking/
3•jethronethro•42m ago•0 comments

AMD Working on a New Back End for Improving ROCm Compute in QEMU/VMs

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ROCm-Better-QEMU-VM
2•mdp2021•42m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Cogni: MCP memory for LLMs, with no LLM in the retrieval path

https://getcogni.io/
2•ihamilton7•45m ago•0 comments

Consumers Prefer AI Music Until They're Told It's AI

https://www.promarket.org/2026/05/04/consumers-prefer-ai-music-until-theyre-told-its-ai/
3•a2ff6eeb0•51m ago•0 comments

Statement Regarding Loongson Vulnerabilities Presented at USENIX26

https://www.loongson.cn/news/show?id=850
1•csmantle•52m ago•0 comments

Voluntary attention regulates acute immune responses in humans

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02541-1
4•bookofjoe•53m ago•0 comments

Germany Just Banned Windows to Save €15M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaz32kiBbaA
3•cable2600•59m ago•3 comments

Whose doctor does the AI recommend? An algorithm audit of LLMs in physician

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14399
1•sbulaev•59m ago•0 comments

Prime Agent: A Self-Improving RLM Agent

https://github.com/PrimeIntellect-ai/prime-agent
2•rzk•1h ago•0 comments

Connecting to an Azure/Entra Joined Windows Machine from Linux

https://github.com/themew2/FreeRDP-to-Entra-Connected-Windows-Device
1•themew2•1h ago•0 comments

Cursor Origin

https://cursor.com/docs/origin
45•peterspath•1h ago•24 comments

Supreme Court Rejects Verizon Bid for $47M Refund of FCC Fine

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/supreme-court-rejects-verizon-bid-for-47-million-refu...
3•m463•1h ago•0 comments

Un-AI Your Internet

https://un-ai.digitalprophet.online/
7•ErenayDev•1h ago•4 comments

LongHorizon-Harness: Advancing Long-Horizon Agents for Real-World Tasks

https://github.com/AMAP-ML/LongHorizon-Harness
1•tingletech•1h ago•1 comments

Building Scalable Control Planes

https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/08/on-building-scalable-control-planes.html
1•smn1234•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: FlashFrame-Free Browser-Based Fast Multiplayer Movie Guessing Game

https://playflashframe.com/
1•jsturgill•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