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The Billion-Dollar Industry That's Keeping Your Beer Cold and Saving Lives

https://www.texasmonthly.com/culture/billion-dollar-packaged-ice-industry-reddy/
1•momentmaker•54s ago•0 comments

Greenwich moon time? The high-stakes race to set lunar clocks

https://www.ft.com/content/d09e9c05-60c8-4c8a-8230-a5476a049b88
1•cl42•2m ago•0 comments

AI and Chauffeur Knowledge

https://www.aaron-gray.com/ai-and-chauffeur-knowledge/
1•aarongray•3m ago•0 comments

Learning about "The Unix Time-Sharing System"

https://playtechnique.io/long/the-unix-time-sharing-system.html
1•gwynforthewyn•3m ago•1 comments

Treat your brain like a baby

https://gisbi.me/blog/treat-your-brain-like-a-baby
1•Gisbitus•6m ago•0 comments

Memories stick around even after half the synapses are gone

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/memories-stick-around-even-after-half-the-synapses-are-gone/
1•sbulaev•7m ago•0 comments

The war on data centres is a bit fake

https://www.economist.com/business/2026/08/19/the-war-on-data-centres-is-a-bit-fake
1•edward•8m ago•0 comments

A Chrome extension to filter X (Twitter) posts by country or region

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/country-filter-for-x-twit/cocohplmilpblbkoikolbhakjipccioa
1•apoorvdarshan•9m ago•0 comments

ReiserFS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReiserFS
1•tosh•9m ago•0 comments

Full Self-Driving Is the Best Thing about the New Tesla Model Y

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/cars/tesla-model-y-review-13d303c1
1•bookofjoe•10m ago•1 comments

Agency Costs of Free Cash Flow, Corporate Finance and Takeovers [pdf]

https://www.liuyanecon.com/wp-content/uploads/Jensen-1986.pdf
1•highfrequency•10m ago•0 comments

Thruact – agents name a job, not a vendor

https://thruact.com
1•itsparkstime•14m ago•0 comments

The Pyramid Community Relay

https://spatianostra.com/the-pyramid-community-relay/
1•Bluestein•15m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AI as Cognitive Gym Equipment

https://bookerapp.replit.app/book/ai-cognitive-gym/ai-as-cognitive-gym-equipment
1•ersinesen•16m ago•0 comments

U.S. bond intervention is like 'paying your mortgage with your credit card,'

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/21/us-bond-intervention-shifting-problem-future-jpmorgan.html
1•johnbarron•17m ago•0 comments

Calamites is a genus of extinct arborescent (tree-like) horsetails

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calamites
1•r721•18m ago•0 comments

Why do we get sleepy? How neurons control sleep drive

https://www.unibas.ch/en/News-Events/News/Uni-Research/Why-do-we-get-sleepy-sleep-drive-sleep-reg...
1•theanonymousone•18m ago•0 comments

One of the worst scientific papers I've ever seen

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/22/this-is-one-of-the-worst-scientific-papers-ive-...
3•Tomte•21m ago•1 comments

Multilingual people may have brains up to 13 years younger

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260821012226.htm
1•theanonymousone•22m ago•0 comments

Enlightenment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_(window_manager)
1•tosh•25m ago•0 comments

Show HN: New poems, written by real people

https://firstverse.app/
1•maverik•26m ago•0 comments

Wildfires across Europe detonate forgotten World War bombs

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/europe-wildfires-world-war-bombs-b3037458.html
4•geox•28m ago•0 comments

Sea Turtle Sex Crisis: Why 99% Are Now Female

https://mazingamazingly.blogspot.com/2026/08/sea-turtle-sex-crisis-why-99-are-now.html
1•karakoram•29m ago•0 comments

The Optimization Theory of Everything

https://12gramsofcarbon.com/p/the-optimization-theory-of-everything
2•mltimdia•32m ago•0 comments

Gen-1.5 – The robot that one-shot learns with humans

https://generalistai.com/blog/gen-1.5
2•tuesdaynight•34m ago•1 comments

What the Newest Research on Wildfire Smoke Tells Us

https://www.nytimes.com/article/wildfire-smoke-health-effect.html
1•karakoram•34m ago•1 comments

Citadel Offloads 80% of Portfolio Scooped Up from Situational Awareness

https://www.ft.com/content/1603577e-89d8-4cfa-884b-b83fbb8dd20e
3•karakoram•36m ago•1 comments

Device Goes Past Equilibrium [Steve Mould] [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvkZaWLe0Sk
1•mdp2021•38m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I launched the most generous leaderboard

https://goodbid.lol/
3•xcanchal•40m ago•5 comments

FDA Approves Moderna's mRNA Flu Vaccine

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/health/mrna-flu-vaccine-moderna.html
1•gmays•43m ago•0 comments
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