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

ELT and MCP: exposing warehouse data to LLMs without shipping the data

https://thenewstack.io/how-precog-adds-business-context-to-make-enterprise-data-ai-ready/
1•jfinegold•3m ago•1 comments

Tell HN: We have not yet discovered the rules of vibe coding

1•0xbadcafebee•5m ago•0 comments

Tesla patents 'clever math trick' for HW3, but nothing points to promised FSD

https://electrek.co/2026/01/21/tesla-patents-clever-math-trick-hw3-nothing-delivering-promised-se...
1•breve•5m ago•0 comments

China's oldest carmaker begins testing solid-state EV batteries in vehicles

https://electrek.co/2026/01/22/chinas-oldest-carmaker-begins-testing-solid-state-ev-batteries/
2•breve•10m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Please wish me luck for my exam

3•Imustaskforhelp•10m ago•2 comments

Jake the Lawyer Explains ICE and Illegal Immigration [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NosECXHMGFU
1•zahlman•11m ago•0 comments

Estonia Wikipedia being replaced by pro Kremlin narrative by editors

https://twitter.com/ellatravelslove/status/2014280386201727259
1•nailer•22m ago•3 comments

Vimeo starts layoffs after acquisition by Bending Spoons

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/22/vimeo-starts-layoffs-after-acquisition-by-bending-spoons/
2•absqueued•25m ago•3 comments

The Tighter Weave: On Editing and Not Editing

https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/place-and-revolution/articles/the-tighter-weave
1•herbertl•26m ago•0 comments

The Work Behind the Writing: On Writers and Their Day Jobs

https://lithub.com/the-work-behind-the-writing-on-writers-and-their-day-jobs/
1•herbertl•27m ago•0 comments

AWS in 2026: The Year of Proving They Still Know How to Operate

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/aws-in-2026-the-year-of-proving-they-still-know-how-to-operate/
1•mooreds•30m ago•0 comments

A Controversial Video-Game Designer Returns with a New Game and More Controversy

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-01-22/jonathan-blow-a-controversial-video-game-de...
2•DustinEchoes•31m ago•1 comments

Cost-Effectiveness of Language Models for Time Series Anomaly Detection

https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/17/1/72
2•PaulHoule•32m ago•1 comments

Why leaders often disappoint us

https://ariadne.space/2026/01/22/why-leaders-often-disappoint-us.html
2•milkglass•34m ago•0 comments

Computer vision papers reimplemented with minimal PyTorch code

https://github.com/MaximeVandegar/Papers-in-100-Lines-of-Code
1•maxvdg•36m ago•1 comments

Stochastic Mirrors rather than Stochastic Parrots?

1•EdNutting•37m ago•0 comments

I was detained at Davos for my hardware prototype; Swiss police audited the Rust

https://www.semafor.com/article/01/22/2026/an-entrepreneurs-13-hours-in-davos-jail-the-food-was-p...
3•reutinger•40m ago•1 comments

ICE detains five-year-old Minnesota boy arriving home, say school officials

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/21/ice-arrests-five-year-old-boy-minnesota
28•0x54MUR41•42m ago•3 comments

Seeking Co-Founder for Declarative Application Editor

1•mwhite•46m ago•2 comments

Authorization Before Retrieval: Making RAG Safe by Construction

https://www.windley.com/archives/2026/01/authorization_before_retrieval_making_rag_safe_by_constr...
1•mooreds•54m ago•0 comments

Week 1: EE 292P Atoms, Bits, and the National Interest

https://hnvr.medium.com/week-1-ee-292p-atoms-bits-and-the-national-interest-the-technology-enviro...
1•malchow•55m ago•0 comments

Why doing a mix of exercise could be the key to longer life

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0y9pqe2zro
3•kareemm•56m ago•0 comments

Monitor Cron Jobs Without Migration – DeadManPing

https://www.deadmanping.com/blog/monitor-cron-jobs
1•BlackPearl02•58m ago•0 comments

Starting a Startup at 25, 35, or 45 Is Not the Same Decision

4•alx_sukhanov•1h ago•4 comments

We spent 5 YEARS building New York City in Minecraft [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZouSJWXFBPk
1•KolmogorovComp•1h ago•0 comments

Rent-Only Copyright Culture Makes Us All Worse Off

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/rent-only-copyright-culture-makes-us-all-worse
8•hn_acker•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Memcachex, a high-performance Memcached client for Go

https://github.com/atsegelnyk/memcachex
1•atsegelnyk•1h ago•1 comments

Utah Continues to Ban More Books, Even as It Racks Up More Lawsuits

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/22/utah-continues-to-ban-more-books-even-as-it-racks-up-more-law...
6•hn_acker•1h ago•0 comments

Kona: Energy-Based Models (EBMs) for AI Reasoning

https://logicalintelligence.com/kona-ebms-energy-based-models
2•gfortaine•1h ago•0 comments

Revealjs-skill: a better way for Claude to make presentations

https://github.com/ryanbbrown/revealjs-skill
1•ryanbbrown•1h ago•0 comments