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Show HN: Free tool that turns market research into a personal branding strategy

https://www.intelcue.ai/tools/personal-branding-strategy-builder
1•intelcue•4m ago•0 comments

Singapore Switches on Biological Computing Rack with Living Human Neurons

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-biological-computing-rack-apac-singapore/
1•the-mitr•5m ago•0 comments

Luanti removed from Google Play due to baseless AI copyright notice

https://blog.luanti.org/2026/08/27/luanti-dmca-tracer-ai/
1•miniBill•6m ago•0 comments

Challenges when writing gren-format

https://gilramir.github.io/gren-format-lib/grenFormatChallenges.html
1•Skinney•7m ago•0 comments

Oj: your Rust native replacement for Vite

https://rapha.land/introducing-oj/
1•flashblaze•9m ago•0 comments

AI writing has begun to appear on the opinion pages

https://www.semafor.com/article/08/26/2026/ai-writing-has-already-begun-to-appear-on-oped-pages
1•andsoitis•10m ago•0 comments

Hy4 Preview

https://hy.tencent.ai/research/hy4-preview
2•cmitsakis•16m ago•0 comments

Hy4 Preview

https://huggingface.co/tencent/Hy4-preview
2•yogenpro•16m ago•0 comments

We ran X (Twitter) ads for 4 months and here are the results

1•Daniel-Pan•16m ago•0 comments

Talk Is Cheap. Code Is Cheap. Show Me the Source

https://idlip.in/posts/show-me-source/
1•rapnie•22m ago•0 comments

Wage Against The Machine – each country's AI task purchasing power

https://watm.ddyo.dev/
2•danr4•23m ago•0 comments

A Looming Rare Earth Shortage Threatens Critical Tech

https://spectrum.ieee.org/rare-earth-shortage
2•JeanKage•26m ago•1 comments

I Had Claude and Codex Rewrite the Same App. The One with Better Architecture

https://medium.com/@yalovoy/i-had-claude-and-codex-rewrite-the-same-app-the-one-with-better-archi...
1•zero-ground-445•27m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Classroom Timer – Free Online Countdown for Teachers

https://classroomtimers.app
2•doublez85•30m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What new skills are you learning to hedge against AI

5•quaintdev•31m ago•2 comments

Anchoring Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge Systems: Prior Scores Compromise Evaluation

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25869
1•sbulaev•33m ago•0 comments

Poka-Yoke

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke
3•EndXA•34m ago•0 comments

Idea Miner – Real paid freelance task data, clustered into demand trends

https://idea-miner.com/en/
1•alexstarks•37m ago•0 comments

Sanjeev Gupta’s family takes out £24mn mortgage on Belgravia mansion

https://www.ft.com/content/dedd5e48-2825-4218-a8bd-16df80fe761d
11•petethomas•48m ago•0 comments

Bloated C++ Code

https://pvs-studio.com/en/blog/posts/cpp/1402/
1•never_inline•52m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Teaching a Neural Net to Fight

https://blog.lukesalamone.com/posts/fighting-game-rl/
1•salamo•53m ago•0 comments

Living Forces and Stationary Action: Leibniz at the Limits of Analytic Mechanics

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10699-026-10031-w
1•andsoitis•56m ago•0 comments

When You Need an MCP Server and When You Don't

https://jasondoyle.ie/whitepapers/when-you-need-an-mcp-server/
2•jasondoyle•57m ago•0 comments

Newton and Leibniz

http://faculty.humanities.uci.edu/bjbecker/RevoltingIdeas/leibniz.html
1•andsoitis•57m ago•0 comments

Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

https://modal.cx/blog/announcing-flatpak-sta/
2•eigenspace•57m ago•0 comments

4K Video Feedback Fractal Device, Fractals Without a Computer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XjQ10ph4yo
1•thebeardisred•58m ago•0 comments

My Business Is Dying

https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2026-08-28-business-is-dying/
44•4pkjai•59m ago•20 comments

Show HN: Mdtensor – A Modern C++ Tensor Library with a NumPy-Like Interface

https://github.com/chansoonlim/mdtensor
1•lcyy3•1h ago•0 comments

Anthropic in talks with chip start up MatX to speed up chip design, sources say

https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2026/08/28/exclusive-anthropic-planned-then-abandoned-7...
2•geoffbp•1h ago•1 comments

Google DeepMind is losing its grip on elite AI talent, new data shows

https://fortune.com/2026/08/27/google-deepmind-losing-talent-to-rival-ai-labs-startups-new-data-s...
1•geoffbp•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