frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Accidentally Turing-Complete

https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complete.html
25•bschne•1y ago

Comments

panstromek•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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_•1y 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_•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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

A community for ideas that haven't earned their place yet

https://articles.ideaorbits.org/a/ideaorbits-design-guide/
1•yannana•47s ago•0 comments

Instagram's New Logo

https://www.theverge.com/tech/979583/this-is-instagrams-new-logo
2•embedding-shape•4m ago•0 comments

Minnesota Senate Primary: The Growing Partisan Divide over Israel

https://medium.com/freedomofthought/minnesotas-senate-primary-and-the-growing-partisan-divide-ove...
1•raynchad•5m ago•0 comments

OpenAI slows release of Astra model citing cyber capabilities

https://www.axios.com/2026/08/07/openai-astra-model-delay-cybersecurity-risks
1•Bluestein•5m ago•0 comments

The Download: Flock's new rules, cloning's future, and children's cells

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/08/14/1142033/the-download-flock-new-rules-cloning-future/
1•joozio•10m ago•0 comments

Reliance on Vision Drove Varied Brain Development in Primates

https://trinity.duke.edu/news/brain-development-primates-research
1•wjSgoWPm5bWAhXB•12m ago•0 comments

Anthropic sees AI risks rising, no plan to release stronger "Model 2"

https://www.axios.com/2026/08/14/anthropic-model-2-ai-risk
2•ironyman•12m ago•0 comments

Auto-research with codex: How I achieved a 232x Faster Kernel

https://sankalp.bearblog.dev/autoresearch/
1•tosh•12m ago•0 comments

Chrome Web Store will remove all MV2 extensions on August 31st

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate/mv2-deprecation-timeline
2•insin•13m ago•0 comments

DNA reveals a society organised around women in pre-Roman Britain

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2584364-dna-reveals-a-society-organised-around-women-in-pre-...
1•Anon84•14m ago•0 comments

OpenAI rolling out ads for Europe later this month

https://openai.com/policies/eu-privacy-policy-preview/
4•notenlish•20m ago•2 comments

Rowly – find out what an anonymous user can do to your Supabase app

https://rowly.me
1•popkoren•25m ago•0 comments

Kernel Context Switch Costs and Spin Locks in Perf Profile: A Practical Study

https://medium.com/@dichenldc/kernel-context-switch-costs-and-spin-locks-in-perf-profile-a-practi...
1•birdculture•25m ago•0 comments

We checked 254,854 biggest Telegram channels. One in five is dead. tglist.io

https://tglist.io/rnd/telegram-graveyard
1•coubri•30m ago•0 comments

Working with AI Feels More Like Leadership Than Coding

https://allen.bargi.org/notes/working-with-ai-feels-like-leadership/
2•allenb•33m ago•0 comments

Vacuum birefringence and the polarized X-ray emission from a radio magnetar

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19446
1•westurner•38m ago•1 comments

The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk

https://spectrum.ieee.org/3m-floppy
1•Bluestein•38m ago•0 comments

LiquidGlassSkill: Claude skill to implement Apple Liquid Glass UI styles

https://github.com/stormaref/LiquidGlassSkill
2•avestura•40m ago•0 comments

Trump directs Navy to return to steam catapults on aircraft carriers

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/6029103-trump-orders-navy-catapult-reversal/
3•vrganj•42m ago•0 comments

Roblox Is Now Under Investigation by the U.S. Senate over Child Safety

https://kotaku.com/roblox-is-now-under-investigation-by-the-u-s-senate-over-child-safety-2000724465
1•taimurkazmi•47m ago•0 comments

Kyūjō Incident

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
1•chistev•47m ago•0 comments

Intel CEO hints at return to the memory business – market is ripe for innovation

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/intel-ceo-hints-at-return-to-the-memory-business-...
2•doener•48m ago•0 comments

Men and Women Can Now Send the First Message on Bumble [pdf]

https://s202.q4cdn.com/372973788/files/doc_news/2026/Aug/11/Chat-XP-Release-for-IR-Site.pdf
1•doener•51m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Gogc98 – live visualisation of the go allocator and GC

https://github.com/MichaelMure/gogc98
1•michaelmure•51m ago•0 comments

HyperOSUnfucker is an Android app that unlocks hidden system performance

https://github.com/Enki013/hyperosunfcker
2•Bluestein•54m ago•0 comments

TTSProof Automated failure-mode QA for text-to-speech systems

https://pypi.org/project/ttsproof/
1•Bluestein•56m ago•0 comments

Commodore 64 raycasting in 160x200 with textures [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-jgsFJfmS8
1•sandebert•1h ago•0 comments

Kessler Syndrome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
3•chistev•1h ago•0 comments

An office suite for the intelligence age

https://macro.com/
2•gritzko•1h ago•0 comments

Training AI Scientists to Replicate Research

https://inherentlabs.ai/research/training-to-replicate
1•dhruv3006•1h ago•0 comments