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Hegseth's War on Anthropic Encounters the First Amendment

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/27/hegseths-war-on-anthropic-encounters-the-first-amendment/
1•cdrnsf•35s ago•0 comments

About the Atmosphere

https://toni.org/2026/03/27/about-the-atmosphere/
1•Kye•1m ago•0 comments

Red Teaming Would Fix Liberalism's Crisis

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-27/red-teaming-could-save-liberalism-from-its-...
2•petethomas•3m ago•0 comments

US Tech Companies Must Be Liable for Facilitating Persecution and Torture Abroad

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/us-tech-companies-must-be-accountable-us-courts-facilitating-p...
1•hn_acker•4m ago•1 comments

Mount any SEC EDGAR filer's complete filing history as a virtual filesystem

https://github.com/sampagon/edgar-mount
1•sampagon•5m ago•0 comments

CrackArmor: Critical AppArmor Flaws Enable Local Privilege Escalation to Root

https://blog.qualys.com/vulnerabilities-threat-research/2026/03/12/crackarmor-critical-apparmor-f...
1•type0•7m ago•0 comments

Moats, or castles in the air?

https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/moats-or-castles-in-the-air-c6de3e56
1•hhs•8m ago•0 comments

Malicious IoliteLabs VSCode Extensions Target Solidity Developers with Backdoor

https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/malicious-iolitelabs-vscode-extensions-target-solidity-developer...
2•kurmiashish•9m ago•0 comments

Alan Cache – the best caching library? (Part 1)

https://medium.com/alan/alan-cache-the-best-caching-library-part-1-e9e68ecf39dd
1•damsieboy•10m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Echoes of Deception

https://deception.madoke.org/
1•madoek•11m ago•0 comments

Building a Firewall via Endpoint Security?

https://objective-see.org/blog/blog_0x86.html
1•sashk•11m ago•0 comments

Researchers use quantum biosensors to peer into the inner workings of cells

https://artsci.washu.edu/ampersand/washu-researchers-use-quantum-biosensors-peer-inner-workings-l...
1•hhs•12m ago•0 comments

Post reporters called the White House. Their phones showed 'Epstein Island.'

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2026/03/27/white-house-google-database-epstein/
1•doener•14m ago•0 comments

Google warns quantum computers could hack encrypted systems by 2029

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/26/google-quantum-computers-crack-encryption-2029
1•doener•15m ago•0 comments

Exact Geometric Resolution of Cosmological Constant Problem: The Flat 3-Torus

https://zenodo.org/records/19241283
1•avonmach•20m ago•0 comments

Sashiko agentic Linux kernel code review system

https://github.com/sashiko-dev/sashiko
1•_____k•22m ago•0 comments

Engineers do get promoted for writing simple code

https://www.seangoedecke.com/simple-work-gets-rewarded/
1•aidenn0•22m ago•0 comments

SlopCodeBench: Benchmarking How Coding Agents Degrade over Long-Horizon Tasks

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24755
1•FiberBundle•27m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Show the ancestry of your code changes visually

https://www.codeboarding.org/diagrams
1•brovatten•27m ago•1 comments

Weak models excel at long context tasks

https://www.together.ai/blog/plan-divide-conquer
1•zagwdt•27m ago•0 comments

Both radiologists and AI struggle to identify 'deepfake' X-rays

https://radiologybusiness.com/topics/artificial-intelligence/both-radiologists-and-ai-struggle-id...
2•hhs•27m ago•0 comments

Ssereload(1) Introduction

https://timmarinin.net/2026/ssereload/
1•birdculture•28m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Multiplayer Local-First OpenClaw Native Mac App

https://clawcoda.com/
1•EthOptimist•29m ago•0 comments

Claude's popularity is forcing it to hit the brakes on users

https://www.businessinsider.com/claude-usage-caps-changes-popularity-anthropic-2026-3
1•almog•30m ago•0 comments

Software Performance Engineering: The Ideas I Keep Coming Back To

https://ricomariani.medium.com/software-performance-engineering-the-ideas-i-keep-coming-back-to-6...
1•cdrnsf•31m ago•0 comments

Dokis – Runtime RAG provenance enforcement without an LLM call

https://github.com/Vbj1808/dokis
1•Vbj1808•32m ago•0 comments

What if CRDTs for version control worked at entity granularity instead of lines?

1•rs545837•33m ago•0 comments

YouTube video uses the Klingon audio track to provide a Side B

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/I87xXqkbXMA
1•simonjgreen•36m ago•1 comments

Chat with multiple AI models at once

https://99helpers.com/tools/ai-chat
1•nickk81•38m ago•1 comments

Are We Approaching an Unprecedented Energy Crisis?

https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/dispatch-energy/iran-war-energy-crisis-hormuz/
1•simonebrunozzi•39m 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•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•10mo 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•10mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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/