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BLISS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLISS
1•tosh•1m ago•0 comments

Local Apps – The simple solution to desktop web applications

https://gist.github.com/samholmes/d777d537ec8334cc87ff89055f99785d
1•samholmes•1m ago•0 comments

Jscrambler 8.14.0 Compromised with Credential Stealer

https://safedep.io/jscrambler-npm-supply-chain-compromise/
1•abhisek•1m ago•0 comments

Anthropic found a hidden space where Claude puzzles over concepts

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/07/09/1140293/anthropic-found-a-hidden-space-where-claude-p...
1•Gooblebrai•1m ago•0 comments

Google Opposes Site Blocking in Europe as US Piracy Blocking Plans Gain Momentum

https://torrentfreak.com/google-opposes-site-blocking-in-europe-as-u-s-piracy-blocking-plans-gain...
1•aa_is_op•3m ago•0 comments

Leaded Gas Was a Known Poison the Day It Was Invented (2016)

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-invented-180961368/
2•downbad_•3m ago•1 comments

Window Function (SQL)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_function_(SQL)
1•tosh•6m ago•0 comments

Anthropic Tried to Charge a Korean user $16.6M

https://www.internationalcyberdigest.com/anthropic-tried-to-phantom-charge-16-6m/
1•agentifysh•6m ago•0 comments

Local Agent Toolkit – delegate small coding tasks to local Ollama models

https://github.com/tomerzipori/local-agent-toolkit
1•sadgasm•6m ago•1 comments

Drunken Confession Shatters Wedding Dreams

https://etechx.co.ke/drunken-confession-shatters-wedding-dreams
2•ndegekm•6m ago•0 comments

Earendel (Astronomical Object)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earendel_(astronomical_object)
3•brainlessdev•7m ago•0 comments

Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative
2•jason_s•7m ago•0 comments

Video Rental Shop Revival

https://racketmn.com/does-minneapolis-have-a-video-rental-guild-if-so-saturn-video-is-its-newest-...
2•nate•8m ago•1 comments

A tool to see your raw YC Paxel scores

https://paxel.obaid.wtf/index.html
2•TheWeiHu•8m ago•0 comments

Elon Musk's family foundation took Tommy Robinson to Russia, says Musk's father

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/11/elon-musk-family-foundation-took-tommy-robinson-t...
2•bbg2401•9m ago•0 comments

The four horsemen behind Postgres outages

https://malisper.me/the-four-horsemen-behind-thousands-of-postgres-outages/
2•tosh•9m ago•0 comments

Nvidia, CoreWeave, and Nebius: Inside the Circular Financing of the GPU Boom

https://io-fund.com/ai-stocks/nvidia-coreweave-nebius-circular-financing-gpu-boom
2•adletbalzhanov•9m ago•0 comments

Reject Modernity, Return To 80s, Learn C

https://hackaday.com/2026/07/10/reject-modernity-return-to-80s-learn-c/
2•CharlesW•14m ago•0 comments

The Governance of Reasoning: Foundations of Epistemic Engineering

https://zenodo.org/records/21312267
2•javieralbuixech•15m ago•0 comments

Map of All Known Knowledge

1•Abhishek000001•15m ago•0 comments

Primary Deficits: A Short History

https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2026/07/primary-deficits-a-short-history/
2•loughnane•17m ago•0 comments

Monitoring DNS Registry Mutations with an Ensemble Anomaly Detection Framework

https://www.sidnlabs.nl/nieuws-en-blogs/thesis-monitoring-dns-registry-mutations-with-an-ensemble...
2•speckx•19m ago•0 comments

Active Record Migrations

https://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_migrations.html
2•tosh•22m ago•0 comments

Germany's richest man takes on Big Tech

https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-richest-man-takes-on-big-tech/a-77893723
5•vrganj•22m ago•0 comments

Engineering Strategy and Vision Series

https://yusufaytas.com/series/engineering-strategy-vision
4•yusufaytas•23m ago•1 comments

Valar Atomic's Ward 250 Becomes 2nd Reactor to Go Critical Under DOE Pilot

https://www.powermag.com/valar-atomics-ward-250-becomes-second-reactor-to-go-critical-under-doe-p...
1•ksec•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Darnlink – self-healing Markdown links that survive refactors (by UUID)

https://github.com/txemi/darnlink
1•txemi•24m ago•0 comments

Female US rower completes historic solo journey from California to Hawaii

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/04/california-hawaii-rowing-solo-journey
28•speckx•27m ago•4 comments

Odyssey: Scalable PostgreSQL Connection Pooler

https://github.com/yandex/odyssey
1•tosh•28m ago•0 comments

AI Found a Root Bug in Linux That Everyone Missed for 15 Years

https://www.wired.com/story/security-news-this-week-ai-found-a-root-bug-in-linux-that-everyone-mi...
1•joozio•30m 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