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 Tale of Blog Spam

https://dennisforbes.ca/blog/microblog/2026/11/blog_spam/
1•llm_nerd•2m ago•0 comments

Musk and Gwynne Shotwell on AI Risks, Peer Review, Starship, Terafab, Merger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwBOQeFPAwg
1•andsoitis•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: KeyPad – Universal Control like keyboard/mouse for iPhone, iPhone Duo

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/keypad-bluetooth-keyboard/id1491684442?mt=12
1•toolbunch•4m ago•0 comments

Slonbase update: Lessons from the Show HN launch, trade-offs, and what's next

https://slonbase.com/
1•ayeshrodz•4m ago•0 comments

China seeks high-tech upper hand in industry carrying 80% of global trade

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-seeks-high-tech-upper-hand-industry-carrying-80-global-...
1•onemoresoop•5m ago•0 comments

SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell on Elon Musk

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/2119909709197279420
1•andsoitis•9m ago•0 comments

Vector Decision Models Typed decisions over embeddings you have

https://markrussinovich.github.io/venn-vdm/
1•shanselman•10m ago•0 comments

Proton CEO dismisses AI security-test request as 'bullshit and loser thinking'

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1xilgwk/manifestos_fear_and_loser_thinking_inside_pr...
3•skeptic_ai•10m ago•1 comments

Show HN: BetterMan – man pages for all of Debian, with explain and portability

https://betterman.sh
1•amanthanvi•10m ago•1 comments

A Brief History of Sierra Online (2017)

https://retrofreakreviews.com/2017/01/30/sierra-retrospective/
2•freshtake•10m ago•0 comments

Canada renews the Local Journalism Initiative and extends journalism tax credit

https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/11/its-either-this-or-death-frankly-canada-renews-the-local-journa...
1•rdmuser•13m ago•3 comments

Short seller flagged Jensen Huang ties to suspected Chinese spy 6 months before

https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/09/a-short-seller-flagged-nvidia-ceos-ties-to-a-suspected-chinese-...
2•donsupreme•15m ago•0 comments

Anthropic reportedly plans to move forward with IPO plans

https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/09/anthropic-reportedly-plans-to-move-forward-with-ipo-plans/
2•inthebay•17m ago•1 comments

CUDA+ROCm dual-back ends LLM inference for mixed-vendor GPUs (up to 48% faster)

https://github.com/mw00/project-maya/pull/879
2•renwujun•18m ago•1 comments

Checking Module Boundaries in a Java Monolith

https://foojay.io/today/enforce-java-module-boundaries-with-modulith-rules/
1•fksubs•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Blabla Meter – Jev scores how useful page content is before you read it

https://github.com/maths-oliveira/blabla-meter
1•mmaths•18m ago•0 comments

N-Able Disables Cloud Services Following Disclosure of Able2Shell Exploit Chains

https://www.huntress.com/blog/n-able-disables-cloud-services-following-disclosure-of-able2shell-e...
1•jodrellblank•23m ago•1 comments

Database Architects: The Benchmarking Crisis

http://databasearchitects.blogspot.com/2026/10/the-benchmarking-crisis.html
1•muehlbau•23m ago•0 comments

Boston Dynamics Launches Next Generation Stretch Robot

https://bostondynamics.com/news/boston-dynamics-launches-next-generation-stretch-robot/
1•gmays•23m ago•0 comments

Tabernetes: Kubernetes in the Browser Tab

https://jkroepke.de/tabernetes/
2•linkdd•23m ago•0 comments

Database Architects: Next-Level Benchmarking Overfitting

http://databasearchitects.blogspot.com/2026/11/next-level-benchmarking-overfitting.html
2•muehlbau•24m ago•0 comments

Use ChatGPT subscription for "good" iPhone autocorrect

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/intellikey/id1667188645
1•unktomi•25m ago•1 comments

Starship – Go for Orbit [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ySMdUIF3cY
1•moondistance•26m ago•0 comments

Torrent Underground: inside the exclusive world of private torrent trackers

https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/1027614/torrent-movies-file-sharing-download-piracy
1•ValentineC•26m ago•0 comments

AI and Irontown

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/11/9/irontown/
1•lumpa•26m ago•0 comments

Formalizing CPython

https://broyojo.com/python-formalization/
2•carnevalem•26m ago•0 comments

Muru: HTTPS in Development

https://grahamdumpleton.me/posts/2026/11/muru-https-in-development/
1•lumpa•26m ago•0 comments

Measuring how AI agents handle everyday wet-lab science

https://openai.com/index/measuring-how-ai-agents-handle-wet-lab-science/
1•gmays•32m ago•0 comments

New FreeBSD pkgbase-update(8) Tool

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2026/11/10/freebsd-pkgbase-update-tool/
2•vermaden•41m ago•0 comments

How a mathematical discovery changed the rules of chess

https://www.infinitelymore.xyz/p/thue-morse-sequence
1•FillMaths•44m ago•0 comments