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Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain

https://www.404media.co/your-ai-use-is-breaking-my-brain/
1•bonsai_spool•31s ago•0 comments

Meta to receive $3.3B in tax breaks for its $10B Louisiana data center

https://fortune.com/2026/05/14/meta-data-center-tax-break-hyperion-louisiana/
3•logickkk1•6m ago•1 comments

Claude FM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmQ7jRgf4f0
2•arishi•11m ago•0 comments

Judge Bars Kars4Kids from Broadcasting 'Misleading' Ads in California

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/15/us/kars4kids-advertising-banned-california.html
8•xnx•11m ago•0 comments

Hotel check-in system exposed 1M passports and driver's licenses

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/15/a-hotel-check-in-system-left-a-million-passports-and-drivers-li...
2•p_stuart82•13m ago•0 comments

Ask an Astronaut: 333 hours of Q&A footage with astronauts

https://askanastronaut.issinrealtime.org/
1•gaws•13m ago•0 comments

Obsidian Radar Plugin

https://github.com/lfcipriani/obsidian-radar
2•lfcipriani•13m ago•0 comments

The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup

https://claude.com/blog/the-founders-playbook
2•shenli3514•13m ago•0 comments

Fedora Hummingbird: Taking the Hummingbird model to the full operating system

https://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-hummingbird-linux-taking-the-hummingbird-model-to-the-full-os/
1•abdelhousni•14m ago•1 comments

Google's Gemini Omni video model surfaces ahead of I/O debut

https://www.testingcatalog.com/googles-gemini-omni-video-model-surfaces-ahead-of-i-o-debut/
1•gmays•15m ago•0 comments

Analysis of 70 years of "Eurovision" lyrics

https://puntofisso.net/eurovision/
1•gaws•15m ago•0 comments

WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64

https://github.com/ThroatyMumbo/WinCE64
3•xyru•15m ago•0 comments

The Magic of Meetups

https://elijahpotter.dev/articles/product-product-product
1•chilipepperhott•17m ago•0 comments

OpenAI Models in OpenClaw, Done Right

https://openclaw.ai/blog/openai-models-in-openclaw-done-right
1•sansuk•19m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Claude Code vs. Codex Global Usage Leaderboard

https://costhawk.ai/leaderboard
2•optimizethis•20m ago•0 comments

Stop state surveillance in Canada. Stop Bill C-22

https://www.jccf.ca/stop-bill-c-22-stop-surveillance-in-canada/
2•YoctoYARN•20m ago•0 comments

Learning, Fast and Slow: Towards LLMs That Adapt Continually

https://gepa-ai.github.io/gepa/blog/2026/05/11/learning-fast-and-slow/
2•LakshyAAAgrawal•25m ago•0 comments

A New Kind of Family-Separation Crisis

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/05/honduras-deportations-without-children/687153/
2•paulpauper•25m ago•0 comments

I Was Drowning Running 14 Markets Alone. So I Built a $0.41/Day AI Employee

https://medium.com/@alanscottencinas/i-was-drowning-running-14-markets-alone-so-i-built-a-0-41-da...
1•encinas88•25m ago•0 comments

State media control influences large language models

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10506-7
1•paulpauper•25m ago•0 comments

What I've Been Reading

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/05/what-ive-been-reading-288.html
2•paulpauper•26m ago•0 comments

THORChain exploit hits Bitcoin, Ethereum, and BSC: Hackers steal over $10M

https://ambcrypto.com/thorchain-exploit-hits-bitcoin-ethereum-and-bsc-hackers-steal-over-10-mln/
6•wslh•27m ago•1 comments

Tell HN: Audible app used 19.8GB of data while not being used

2•jimnotgym•27m ago•1 comments

Show HN: X open sourced their algorithm

https://www.xalgorithm.xyz/en
3•hsnrique•28m ago•0 comments

Does Trump Mobile know how many stripes are on the American flag?

https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/931347/trump-mobile-t1-phone-logo-flag-stars-stripes
4•droidjj•31m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Emergence World: World building as a way to evaluate LLMs

https://world.emergence.ai/
2•deepakakkil•31m ago•0 comments

ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline

https://twitter.com/baseballot/status/2055309076209492208
34•cmsparks•31m ago•7 comments

Dual Intel Arc Pro B60(48G) Inference, Virtualization, and Gaming Testing

https://www.lttlabs.com/articles/2026/05/15/maxsun-intel-arc-pro-b60-dual-48g-turbo-review
3•LabsLucas•32m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Reviewing Plan from Plan Mode

3•dennis3124•33m ago•0 comments

Cvl: A C++26 library for mutating consteval state

https://github.com/friedkeenan/cvl
2•friedkeenan•34m 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.
jcgrillo•1y ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
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/