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•9mo ago

Comments

panstromek•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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_•9mo 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_•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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

Claude Code disproportionately benefits those who touch type

https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/claude-code-disproportionately-benefits-those-who-touch-type/
1•hiAndrewQuinn•1m ago•0 comments

ttyrecall: Recall, but for terminals

https://github.com/kxxt/ttyrecall
1•homebrewer•2m ago•0 comments

MIT mathematicians solve age-old spaghetti mystery (2018)

https://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-mathematicians-solve-age-old-spaghetti-mystery-0813
1•thunderbong•8m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What are best ways to contribute to science in free time?

1•gajnadsgjoas•8m ago•0 comments

We Built an AI to Solve the Paradox of Choice in a $50B Industry

https://www.bassfinity.com/guides/gear-tackle/essential-bait-tackle-guide
1•jequals5•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Turn photos into buildable brick mosaics with build instructions

https://brickhippo.com/
1•DeployToProd•9m ago•1 comments

Square Face Icon Generator

https://squarefaceicon.org/
1•zidana•12m ago•1 comments

VPinFE a VPinball Front End for Linux, Mac and Windows

https://github.com/superhac/vpinfe
1•abs7120•12m ago•0 comments

Reverse Engineering River Raid with Claude, Ghidra, and MCP

https://quesma.com/blog/ghidra-mcp-unlimited-lives/
1•stared•14m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Giving Claude Code "hands" to deliver local files (P2P, No Cloud)

https://github.com/nuwainfo/ffl-mcp
2•bear330•16m ago•1 comments

The influencer World Cup: FIFA and TikTok deal targeting an avalanche of posts

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/jan/24/influencer-world-cup-fifa-tiktok
1•beardyw•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A project planning tool designed around drvleopers

https://getfrostbyte.dev/
2•thamiltonsmith•18m ago•0 comments

Psychopathic female criminals show unexpected patterns of emotional processing

https://www.psypost.org/psychopathic-female-criminals-exhibit-unexpected-patterns-of-emotional-pr...
2•binning•18m ago•0 comments

A tiny tool to extract data from any website

https://superdevpro.com/web-scraper
1•mddanishyusuf•22m ago•0 comments

Maternity care is failing women on an epic scale

https://millihill.substack.com/p/maternity-care-is-failing-women-on
2•binning•23m ago•0 comments

Genetic Data from over 20k U.S. Children Misused for 'Race Science'

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/us/children-genetics-race-science.html
2•perihelions•23m ago•0 comments

Asbestos found in children's play sand sold in UK

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/24/childrens-play-sand-hobbycraft-asbestos-removed-...
3•binning•24m ago•0 comments

What does it feel like to be an agent?

https://liamconnell.github.io/blog/2026/01/23/what-does-it-feel-like-to-be-an-agent/
2•liamconnell•25m ago•0 comments

JVIC: New web-based Commodore VIC 20 emulator

https://vic20.games/#/basic/24k
2•lance_ewing•28m ago•1 comments

Show HN: ReTraced – Job scheduler that makes retries visible as data (v1.0)

https://github.com/Anshikakalpana/ReTraced
1•Anshikakalpana•32m ago•0 comments

Thinking about memory for AI coding agents

3•hoangnnguyen•33m ago•0 comments

Show HN: DayZen: Visual day planner for ADHD brains

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dayzen-visual-time-planner/id6754326173
17•Kavolis_•33m ago•4 comments

A terminal-based coding agent

https://shittycodingagent.ai/
3•doppp•33m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built A GUI for managing waypoints in large-scale robot navigation

https://github.com/Yutarop/waypoints_editor
1•ponta17•36m ago•0 comments

Monster High Characters

https://monster-high-characters.com
3•jokera•37m ago•0 comments

Why Read Novels?

https://dynomight.net/novels/
4•dynm•48m ago•0 comments

Forgotten Polygons: Multimodal Large Language Models Are Shape-Blind

https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15969
2•chbint•49m ago•0 comments

Built a library of LLM prompts for RAG

https://agentset.ai/rag-prompts
1•midamurat•50m ago•0 comments

Terence Tao: A collection of optimization problems in mathematics

https://github.com/teorth/optimizationproblems
1•zaikunzhang•51m ago•0 comments

Show HN: ResourceAI – Local LLM inference optimized for consumer iGPUs

1•Fenix46•53m ago•0 comments