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Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260515-the-1950s-blunder-which-causes-mass-hay-fever-in-japan
1•ranit•1m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Should I learn to code in 2026?

1•vrinda13•2m ago•0 comments

Thioacetone (Wiki)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thioacetone
1•sans_souse•4m ago•0 comments

XINF MCP Server

https://xinf.dev/mcp
2•ZeroTerabytes•8m ago•2 comments

Canonical launches Ubuntu Core 26

https://canonical.com/blog/canonical-launches-ubuntu-core-26
1•LopRabbit•9m ago•0 comments

Ben Welsh made an index of all FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

https://fivethirtyeightindex.com/
1•ChocMontePy•10m ago•1 comments

'We don't see a robot as a threat: simply another form of presence in the world'

https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2026-05-16/takeshi-yoro-anatomist-in-japan-we-dont-see-a-...
1•Geekette•12m ago•0 comments

Sci/acc: what happens to science after super-intelligence?

https://willzeng.com/shared/sciacc.html
1•wzeng•14m ago•0 comments

Ubuntu Core 26 targets IoT, offers up to 15 years of security maintenance

https://www.cnx-software.com/2026/05/19/ubuntu-core-26-targets-iot-devices-and-embedded-systems-o...
2•0in•18m ago•0 comments

On Guard! The Story of SAGE [IBM, 1956]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFGco9ZsFGE
1•doctaj•21m ago•1 comments

Optimize_anything: A Universal API for Optimizing Any Text Parameter

https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19633
4•LakshyAAAgrawal•23m ago•1 comments

Google accused of pushing 'free for life' G Suite users onto paid plans

https://www.theregister.com/applications/2026/05/19/google-accused-of-pushing-free-for-life-g-sui...
4•0in•24m ago•0 comments

Chairman and Commssioners – CFTC

https://www.cftc.gov/About/Commissioners/index.htm
1•seliopou•33m ago•0 comments

Towards Identifying the Economics and Efficiency of Fuzzers vs. Agents

https://dangerouserrors.com/posts/2026-04-06-towards-identifying-the-economics-of-fuzzers-vs-agents/
2•mooreds•39m ago•0 comments

Writing clear docs when you naturally think in code

https://www.knowledgeowl.com/blog/posts/writing-docs-when-you-think-in-code
1•eigenBasis•40m ago•1 comments

Cavity quantum electrodynamics control of quantum Hall stripes

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-026-03287-3
2•bookofjoe•43m ago•0 comments

US Justice Department 'forever' bars IRS from auditing Trump's past tax returns

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/19/trump-irs-settlement-tax-returns
7•embedding-shape•49m ago•1 comments

Poor grip strength linked to greater odds of developing depression

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-early-poor-strength-linked-greater.html
1•Gaishan•52m ago•0 comments

Stop paying $360/year to access your own email history

https://mailvaulty.com
1•khaledsabae•52m ago•1 comments

LLMs Are Revealing How Low the Bar Is (and Lowering It Even Further)

https://countercraft.substack.com/p/llms-are-revealing-how-low-the-bar
3•crescit_eundo•56m ago•0 comments

State Space Models, Explained Through Code

https://karthik-ragunath-ananda-kumar-blogs.notion.site/State-Space-Models-Explained-Through-Code...
1•eigenBasis•57m ago•0 comments

StartupStarter – we built a company brain so AI can do your work

https://startupstarter.co/
1•SCJB•1h ago•3 comments

Google Cloud has blocked our account, making some Railway services unavailable

https://twitter.com/i/status/2056883076496789854
7•bundie•1h ago•3 comments

An AI Co-Scientist for Hypothesis Generation from Google DeepMind

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10644-y
3•car•1h ago•0 comments

Windows on Nintendo 64

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGS9su_inBY
3•cedel2k1•1h ago•0 comments

Everything You Do Is Being Recorded

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/ai-wearable-surveillance-countermeasures/687203/
2•breve•1h ago•1 comments

Railway Blocked by Google Cloud

https://status.railway.com/?date=20260519
82•aarondf•1h ago•15 comments

Google's First AI Smart Glasses Launching This Fall with iPhone Support

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/19/google-ai-smart-glasses-iphone-support/
1•mikhael•1h ago•0 comments

I made an App that uses local LLMs to monitor your screen

1•roy3838•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: The user agents crawling HN today

https://ai.realhackers.org/user_agents.txt
2•Bender•1h ago•1 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