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•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

Ask HN: JumpCloud Billing and Cancellation

1•sgammon•4m ago•0 comments

2028: Two scenarios for global AI leadership

https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership
2•gmays•7m ago•0 comments

Multi-Agent Orchestration System: Hermes (Windows) ↔ OpenClaw (WSL)

https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/hermes-openclaw-orchestration
2•theG0DSMACKED•8m ago•0 comments

Austrian Power Giants

https://www.apg.at/en/projects/austrian-power-giants-1/
1•Kaibeezy•11m ago•0 comments

Learn Anything with Lesson Generator Skill

https://github.com/dair-ai/dair-academy-plugins/blob/main/plugins/lesson-generator/skills/lesson-...
1•omarsar•11m ago•0 comments

AI writes x86_64 asm and eBPF for fractals on /dev/fb0, in a browser VM

https://zozo123.github.io/wolfram-fb0/
1•zozo123-IB•12m ago•0 comments

Squares in Squares

https://kingbird.myphotos.cc/packing/squares_in_squares.html
1•carlos-menezes•14m ago•0 comments

Stop Wasting Tokens on Android Automation

https://handsets.dev/blog/stop-wasting-tokens-on-android-automation/
1•gaojiuli•15m ago•0 comments

Kysely 0.29

https://github.com/kysely-org/kysely/releases/tag/v0.29.0
1•bundie•15m ago•0 comments

Bursting the AI Bubble: Fed Could Take Away the "Who Could Have Known?" Defense

https://deanbaker22.substack.com/p/bursting-the-ai-bubble-the-fed-could
2•bediger4000•16m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Pro Health Ledger – An open-source, net-neutral reputation system

1•muglikar•16m ago•0 comments

Microsoft's 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025)

https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/09/03/microsoft-open-source-historic-6502-basic/
1•GTP•18m ago•0 comments

I Made the Same Game in Unity and Godot, Which Engine Is Better [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB7v-ezqcJM
1•HelloUsername•21m ago•0 comments

25 years, 793,199 fashion records: non-White models 4.5× more likely plus-size

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2602380123
8•falconer2vi•22m ago•4 comments

Lupine: A GPU-over-IP Bridge

https://github.com/lupinemachines/lupine
1•kevmo314•30m ago•0 comments

Oxia ― Metadata Store and Coordination System

https://oxia-db.github.io/
1•mooreds•30m ago•0 comments

Getting the (staff) title where you are

https://staffeng.com/guides/getting-the-title-where-you-are/
2•mooreds•31m ago•1 comments

DeepSeek reasonix, DeepSeek native coding agent with high caching and low cost

https://esengine.github.io/DeepSeek-Reasonix/
3•Alifatisk•32m ago•0 comments

Mouthwords

https://everythingchanges.us/blog/mouthwords/
1•mooreds•34m ago•0 comments

OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/19/anthropic-openai-karpathy-andrej-claude
2•synapsehub_ai•34m ago•1 comments

Russell's Paradox [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymGt7I4Yn3k
2•stormdennis•36m ago•0 comments

'He refused to quit:' 27-year walk around the world

https://www.rmoutlook.com/mountain-guide/he-refused-to-quit-fundraiser-for-man-on-27-year-walk-ar...
2•Kaibeezy•37m ago•0 comments

Constraint Decay: The Fragility of LLM Agents in Back End Code Generation

https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06445
3•wek•39m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A picker that maps local LLMs to hardware, hardware to LLMs

https://llmrequirements.com/
2•truetotosse•43m ago•1 comments

Alyx – Crypto Portfolio Dashboard on New Tab

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/alyx-—-crypto-portfolio-d/nmchlndcajncggcpeokebegjhlje...
2•Teyz•48m ago•0 comments

Your Clippy Config Should Be Stricter

https://emschwartz.me/your-clippy-config-should-be-stricter/
2•blenderob•52m ago•0 comments

The guide to RL environments: building and scaling them in the LLM era

https://huggingface.co/spaces/AdithyaSK/rl-environments-guide
2•kunalsin9h•53m ago•0 comments

PromptVC

https://www.promptvc.io/blog/introducing-promptvc
2•justicea83•53m ago•0 comments

Charging power bank left in checked baggage diverts easyjet flight

https://simpleflying.com/easyjet-flight-diverted-power-bank-charging-luggage/
3•giuliomagnifico•53m ago•3 comments

AI Proves Mathematicians Wrong

https://www.heise.de/en/news/AI-proves-mathematicians-wrong-11303022.html
3•NicoHartmann•53m ago•1 comments