frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Accidentally Turing-Complete

https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complete.html
25•bschne•12mo ago

Comments

panstromek•12mo ago
Nice list. Some of those are arguably not accidental, TypeScript type system seems kinda obvious to be turing complete when it tries to describe dynamically typed langauage.
WalterGR•12mo ago
x86 MOV instruction: “The mov-only DOOM [game] renders approximately one frame every 7 hours, so playing this version requires somewhat increased patience.”
a_cardboard_box•12mo ago
Rule 110 is only Turing-Complete if you have an infinitely large array of cells, and are able to initialize it with an infinite repeating pattern. If I'm not mistaken, HTML+CSS can only do a fixed-sized array.

With a Turing-Complete language, if a program runs out of memory on one machine, you can run the same code on a bigger machine without modifying it, and it can use the additional memory. With fixed-length rule 110, you need to modify the code if you want to use more memory.

256_•12mo ago
This is addressed in the second paragraph of TFA:

"Stuff which is somehow limited (stack overflows, arbitrary configuration, etc) is still considered Turing complete, since all "physical" Turing machines are resource limited."

In my opinion, worrying about infinite memory, in regards to Turing completeness, makes the task of implementing computation much less interesting.

Also, I'm pretty sure CSS only does one generation (or a finite number of them) before stopping anyway.

256_•12mo ago
Logic in Doom is particularly interesting to me. Apparently you can fit ~64k logic gates in a map (using the method described). From [1]:

"As the DOOM engine was not designed to be an interpreter, there are some constraints on our programs written against it. The biggest one is how large our programs can be. Since each gate uses at least one tag, we can use this as a metric to derive an upper-bound on the size of a program. As the DOOM engine uses 16-bit tags, this means we can have, at most, 65535 gates. This is not a particularly large number. We may be able to implement a very small CPU but this limit will be hit pretty quickly I believe."

The z80 had ~8,500 transistors. The 8086 had ~29,000 (checking Wikipedia). You could get far fewer if you use a 1-bit microarchitecture, I'm sure. I think there was a DEC (PDP?) computer that used that trick to have a really low transistor count, but I don't remember what it was called.

The real problem is RAM; for this you may as well cheat and modify Doom's code to add a RAM chip, and I/O while you're at it.

You could create a CPU in Doom implementing an architecture for which a C compiler exists, capable of compiling Doom, and run it in the CPU in Doom. For "reasonable" speed you'd have to do more than one simulation step per frame render (in the host Doom). If you ran it for long enough maybe you could get a full frame of Doom in Doom.

[1]: https://calabi-yau.space/blog/doom.html

karmakaze•12mo ago
Doom running in TypeScript static type checker[0].

> half trillion lines of types totaling 177 terabytes ran through the type checker around the clock for 12 days to get the first frame

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43184291

karmakaze•12mo ago
My favorite one is Conway's Game of Life. It's perhaps the least surprising one, but it's also the most visually appealing. Really like this video that leads up to making the Game of Life in itself[0]. It's something you can show a non-technical person and they can get a sense of how crazy it is that something so simple can do anything.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk2MH9O4pXY

We're Using So Much AI That Computing Firepower Is Running Out

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-is-using-so-much-energy-that-computing-firepower-is-running-out-15...
1•ryan_j_naughton•2m ago•0 comments

Grok Voice Think Fast 1.0

https://x.ai/news/grok-voice-think-fast-1
1•deadalus•3m ago•0 comments

Oracle's Deluge of AI Debt Pushes Wall Street to the Limit

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/oracle-ai-demand-debt-04977749
1•ryan_j_naughton•4m ago•0 comments

Canonical Releases Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Resolute Raccoon

https://canonical.com/blog/canonical-releases-ubuntu-26-04-lts-resolute-raccoon
1•ggraphilia•4m ago•0 comments

Unlimited access to Reddit, and Twitter, access anything with supermcp

https://webmatrices.com/supermcp
1•bishwasbh•6m ago•0 comments

Anthropic tested removing Claude Code from the Pro plan

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/anthropic-tested-removing-claude-code-from-the-pro-plan/
2•celadevra_•10m ago•0 comments

S&box – Game engine built on Source 2 and .NET from creators of Garry's Mod

https://github.com/Facepunch/sbox-public/
1•vyrotek•15m ago•0 comments

Share X 20.0

https://getsharex.com/changelog#v20.0.0
1•pentagrama•17m ago•0 comments

Habitual coffee intake shapes the microbiome, modifies physiology and cognition

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-71264-8
9•scubakid•29m ago•0 comments

New Blood CEO Dave Oshry on Indie Strategy: "We Pump New Blood into Old Genres"

https://80.lv/articles/new-blood-ceo-dave-oshry-on-indie-strategy-we-pump-new-blood-into-old-genres
4•doppp•29m ago•0 comments

Shelter Aid

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shelter-aid/id6762375916
2•starboyy•34m ago•1 comments

Mullvad to add feature that forces all iOS traffic through the VPN tunnel

https://cyberinsider.com/mullvad-to-add-feature-that-forces-all-ios-traffic-through-the-vpn-tunnel/
3•Cider9986•35m ago•1 comments

AI run store in SF can't stop ordering candies and paying women less.

https://sfist.com/2026/04/21/ai-store-manager-paying-female-employees-less-cant-stop-ordering-can...
4•fragmede•36m ago•0 comments

Study shows removing exposure to plastic from our food chain yields quick result

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-23/plastic-packaging-body-chemicals-study/106594194
2•xbmcuser•38m ago•0 comments

The Surveillance Accountability Act

https://www.surveillanceaccountability.com
2•Cider9986•40m ago•0 comments

French police look at claim of sensor tampering to win weather bets

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/23/hairdryer-or-lighter-french-police-look-at-claim-of...
2•geox•40m ago•0 comments

Control Workspace Intelligence for generative AI features [AI defaults on]

https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/gemini/control-workspace-intelligence
1•lancewiggs•43m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What are the best developer tools built around Markdown?

1•dhruv3006•44m ago•0 comments

Mahjong: A Visual Guide

https://themahjong.guide/
1•iamwil•53m ago•1 comments

DeepSeek V4 is out. the best open-source on coding. here's the breakdown

3•Alisaqqt•53m ago•1 comments

Ada's Technical Books in Seattle will close

https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/capitol-hill-bookstore-adas-will-close-fuel-coff...
2•so-cal-schemer•55m ago•1 comments

Free API for real-time Australian emergency data (27 feeds, all 8 states)

https://emergencyapi.com
1•JackDemps•56m ago•0 comments

The Toroidal Momentum Engine: A Workable Version of Infinity

https://zenodo.org/records/19572243
4•SCAQTony•56m ago•0 comments

Mini ML Blog

https://mni-ml.github.io/
2•SoulMan•58m ago•0 comments

Nvidia's B200 costs around $6,400 to produce

https://epoch.ai/data-insights/b200-cost-breakdown
3•KnuthIsGod•59m ago•0 comments

Privacy Setup for Android 16 with GrapheneOS

https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/privacy-setup-for-android-16-with-grapheneos/
2•HotGarbage•1h ago•0 comments

Equity for Europeans

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/4/23/equity-for-europeans/
4•Tomte•1h ago•0 comments

If AI existed in 2011 would we still have the modern web

https://webmatrices.com/post/if-ai-existed-in-2011-would-we-still-have-the-modern-web
1•bishwasbh•1h ago•0 comments

Is possible a language easy as py, fast as C, more secure than Rust?

1•jerryzhang66•1h ago•1 comments

Harnesses Explained: The Inner and Outer Workings of the Coding Agent Harness

https://codagent.beehiiv.com/p/harnesses-explained
3•paulcaplan•1h ago•1 comments