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Bluesky Is Made with AI

https://bsky.app/profile/jay.bsky.team/post/3micqcyeawc2g
1•ronsor•53s ago•0 comments

Sequential Optimal Packing for PCB Placement

https://blog.autorouting.com/p/sequential-optimal-packing-for-pcb
1•seveibar•2m ago•0 comments

Scientists crack a 20-year nuclear mystery behind the creation of gold

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/03/260313002633.htm
1•prabal97•6m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Auto sketch prompt and AI renderings for architects

https://renderai.app/
1•franrai•8m ago•1 comments

Croatia's Football Team Signed Deal with Fake Gambling Sponsor Rep

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/04/01/croatian-football-teams-deal-with-gambling-sponsor/
1•lschueller•8m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What happens when you block/mark as spam a call or text?

1•dsalzman•9m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Is this type of person rare?

1•piratesAndSons•9m ago•0 comments

What Claude Code Leak Teaches Us About Agent Skills

https://skilldb.dev/blog/claude-code-leaked-what-500k-lines-teach-us-about-agent-skills
2•dev_chad•9m ago•0 comments

An Aroma Most Beguiling

https://orionmagazine.org/article/an-aroma-most-beguiling/
1•Petiver•9m ago•0 comments

Optimizing Page Size

https://www.redblobgames.com/blog/2026-03-25-optimizing-page-size/
1•ingve•10m ago•0 comments

Robotics Infra: Deploying DeepMind's MuJoCo on Azure, Part 2: Microsoft Heard Us

https://www.hapticlabs.ai/blog/2026/03/31/deploying-mujoco-on-azure-ml-part-2
2•mexitlan•12m ago•0 comments

The Habitable Zone

https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/habitable-zone/
1•thunderbong•12m ago•0 comments

Are We Having Fun Yet?

https://makoism.com/are-we-having-fun-yet/
1•speckx•12m ago•0 comments

SpaceX confidentially files to go public at $1.75T, reports say

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/01/spacex-public-offering-stock-market
4•bookofjoe•13m ago•0 comments

How to Get to Tomorrow

https://campedersen.com/kardashev
1•aduffy•15m ago•0 comments

PHPantom: A Fast PHP Language Server Built in Rust

https://github.com/AJenbo/phpantom_lsp
1•Kovah•15m ago•0 comments

NASA's Artemis II Crew Launches to the Moon (Official Broadcast) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf_UjBMIzNo
2•twalichiewicz•16m ago•0 comments

ESLint plugin that audits vibe-coded Next.js apps before a dev touches them

https://github.com/srk0102/stackrules
1•srk0102200•16m ago•0 comments

MCP isn't winning because it's technically necessary – it won the way syslog won

https://nickromito.substack.com/p/what-are-my-thoughts-on-mcp
2•nromito•17m ago•0 comments

High-performance cell atlas workflow driven by manifold fitting

https://phys.org/news/2026-02-high-cell-atlas-workflow-driven.html
1•PaulHoule•19m ago•0 comments

Making and Meeting Moloch: Game design and the pressure to make numbers go up

https://knowingken.com/making-and-meeting-moloch
1•andthenzen•19m ago•0 comments

Trinity-Large-Thinking: Scaling an Open Source Frontier Agent

https://www.arcee.ai/blog/trinity-large-thinking
2•linolevan•19m ago•0 comments

Robot Umpires Have Arrived–and They're Making Baseball Players Shrink

https://www.wsj.com/sports/baseball/mlb-robot-umpires-abs-shrinking-65eaacf5
1•coloneltcb•20m ago•0 comments

Artemis Astronauts Board Spacecraft for NASA Moon Launch

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04/01/science/moon-nasa-artemis-launch
3•Alupis•22m ago•1 comments

SpaceX files for IPO, targets $1.75T valuation

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/04/spacex-finally-files-for-ipo-targets-1-75-trillion-valuation/
6•AndrewDucker•25m ago•2 comments

NASA Teams Readying Artemis II Moon Rocket for Launch

https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2026/03/31/nasa-teams-readying-artemis-ii-moon-rocket-for-lau...
1•Alupis•25m ago•0 comments

Affected by This LastPass Breach? How to Get a Cut of the $24.5M Settlement

https://www.pcmag.com/news/affected-by-this-lastpass-breach-how-to-get-a-cut-of-the-245m-settlement
3•fraXis•27m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Modern AI assisted goals and performance management

https://prfrm.architectfwd.com
2•quintes•28m ago•0 comments

pg_plan_alternatives: Tracing PostgreSQL Query Plan Alternatives Using eBPF

https://jnidzwetzki.github.io/2026/03/04/pg-plan-alternatives.html
2•tanelpoder•28m ago•0 comments

We scanned 73 open-source MCP servers. Here's what source code analysis found

1•sigildev•30m 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/