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Software Piracy Statistics – 2026 Outlook

https://www.revenera.com/blog/software-monetization/software-piracy-stat-watch/
1•keepamovin•56s ago•0 comments

From car and phone to tractors, populist wave to end 'captive' repair economy

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/25/right-to-repair-consumer-prices-affordability-economy-elections.html
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•1m ago•0 comments

The Fermi Paradox Is Nerdslop

https://monismos.substack.com/p/the-fermi-paradox-is-nerdslop
1•eatitraw•6m ago•0 comments

New study bridges the worlds of classical and quantum physics

https://news.mit.edu/2026/new-study-bridges-classical-and-quantum-physics-0421
1•leephillips•6m ago•0 comments

21-year-old Polish Woman Fixed a 20-year-old Linux Bug

https://itsfoss.com/news/kamila-enlightenment-e16-bug/
1•tempodox•7m ago•0 comments

Tuta: FOSS email service with privacy, encrypt emails, contacts and calendar

https://github.com/tutao/tutanota
1•maxloh•7m ago•0 comments

Command Line Argument Parser with C++26 reflection

https://github.com/nathan-baggs/clap
2•dalvrosa•8m ago•0 comments

The Fermi Paradox (2014)

https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html
1•simonebrunozzi•8m ago•0 comments

AI Adoption in the United States and Its (Tiny) Labor Market Impact

https://macromostly.substack.com/p/an-update-on-ai-adoption-in-the-united
1•m-hodges•8m ago•1 comments

History and Los Alamos (2003)

https://sgp.fas.org/eprint/meade.html
1•simonebrunozzi•11m ago•0 comments

Someone recreated StumbleUpon but for Startup landing pages

https://buildhop.io
1•jacobcounsell•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Vibe-choded project that took me ten seconds to generate

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c4/Human_Feces.jpg
1•claude_van_damn•16m ago•0 comments

AI News Aggregator – The Wire

https://www.thewire.ink/
1•nmilodev•17m ago•1 comments

GloVe Galaxy Explorer

https://glove.theory-a.com
1•notShabu•20m ago•0 comments

Local-Run Graph-Based Scalable AGI

https://boggersthefish.com/
1•explaingarlic•21m ago•1 comments

Survival Is the Only Success

https://ofdollarsanddata.com/survival-is-the-only-success/
1•speckx•26m ago•0 comments

Is "Outsourcing Our Thinking to AI" a Bug or a Feature?

https://slashdot.org/submission/17346722/is-outsourcing-our-thinking-to-ai-a-bug-or-a-feature
1•theodpHN•27m ago•0 comments

DeepSeek V4 in vLLM: Efficient Long-Context Attention

https://vllm-website-pdzeaspbm-inferact-inc.vercel.app/blog/deepseek-v4
1•Palmik•27m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I got tired of boring SQL tutorials, so I built a game

https://sqlprotocol.com
1•ItaiZeilig•28m ago•2 comments

Multi-player agents don't fit in the sandbox

https://www.mendral.com/blog/multi-player-agents-sandbox
1•shad42•28m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Duckville, a persistent-world life SIM where you're a duck

https://duckville.town
1•stfurkan•28m ago•0 comments

GPT hallucinated a bug in my code, so I 'fixed' it

https://www.droppedasbaby.com/posts/2602-02/
1•offbyone42•29m ago•0 comments

UK to permanently ban future generations from buying cigarettes

https://nypost.com/2026/04/21/world-news/uk-to-permanently-ban-future-generations-from-buying-cig...
3•ivewonyoung•31m ago•3 comments

How People Smuggle the Internet Through DNS [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bnir1IQAPPE
2•hexomancer•32m ago•0 comments

Claude Code Tips I Wish I'd Had from Day One

https://marmelab.com/blog/2026/04/24/claude-code-tips-i-wish-id-had-from-day-one.html
2•adunk•33m ago•0 comments

20 Years Ago, I Spent $8 on This. My Life Was Never the Same

https://ryanholiday.net/20-years-ago-i-spent-8-on-this-my-life-was-never-the-same/
1•speckx•34m ago•0 comments

TSMC Says ASML's Latest Chipmaking Gear Is Too Pricey to Use

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-22/tsmc-says-asml-s-latest-chipmaking-gear-is-too...
2•spenrose•37m ago•0 comments

New 21-character nuclear command message observed during April exercise window

https://neetintel.substack.com/p/its-just-an-exercise-bro
1•Quasimarion•38m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built an automatic micropayment-ish system to support the Web

https://www.inamoon.com
1•mankins•40m ago•1 comments

Cloaca (art installation)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca_(art_installation)
1•fecalorimeter•42m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•11mo ago

Comments

thechao•11mo 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•11mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•11mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•11mo 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•11mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•11mo 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•11mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•11mo 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_•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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/