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•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

Free/OSS agentic API interrogator

https://github.com/dapooleygmailcom/gaiia-mcp-server
1•dapooley•3m ago•1 comments

Make America AI-Ready

https://beta.dol.gov/ai-ready
1•andsoitis•5m ago•0 comments

Transmission Spectroscopy of the Habitable Zone Exoplanet LHS1140B (2024)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.15136
1•johnbarron•6m ago•0 comments

Tubestack: YouTube <> Substack

https://anishlk.com/tubestack/
1•anishlk•6m ago•1 comments

Budi – local-first AI coding cost tracker (Rust, tails local logs, no proxy)

https://getbudi.dev/
1•siropkin•10m ago•0 comments

Japan's New Care Workers: Bodybuilders, Wrestlers and MMA Fighters

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/world/asia/japan-care-workers-bodybuilders-sumo-mma.html
1•danso•18m ago•1 comments

The Fall of the Theorem Economy

https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/the-fall-of-the-theorem-economy
1•cubefox•18m ago•0 comments

Surprising Signs of an Atmosphere Around a Tiny World, Billions of Miles Away

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/science/plutino-atmosphere-astronomy-pluto.html
1•lxm•27m ago•0 comments

Energy Prices Are Driving Demand for Solar Panels and Heat Pumps

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/business/europe-solar-panels-iran-war.html
1•lxm•28m ago•0 comments

Catch breaking API changes before merge

https://ImpactGuard.dev
1•dclavijo•32m ago•0 comments

Challenging the Way We Pedal

https://hackaday.com/2026/05/09/challenging-the-way-we-pedal/
1•lxm•35m ago•0 comments

Mariculture Systems to begin the construction of Portugal aquaculture facility

https://www.seafoodsource.com/news/aquaculture/mariculture-systems-approved-to-begin-the-construc...
1•mooreds•36m ago•0 comments

How we know if our agent is right

https://www.mendral.com/blog/how-we-know-if-our-agent-is-right
2•shad42•37m ago•0 comments

A Preview of the Future

https://unsung.aresluna.org/a-preview-of-the-future/
2•zdw•40m ago•0 comments

Make America AI Ready: Strengths, Weaknesses, and Recommendations

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/05/05/make-america-ai-ready-strengths-weaknesses-and-recomme...
5•Kye•44m ago•1 comments

Bonsai of the Imperial Palace [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXoECYXr_Bk
1•tkgally•46m ago•0 comments

Diversity as the Bottleneck in Self-Play

https://ivison.id.au/2026/05/06/self-play.html
1•jxmorris12•46m ago•0 comments

Learning on the Shop floor

https://twitter.com/tobi/status/2053121182044451016
2•jmacd•48m ago•0 comments

New map shows where electric truck charging is scaling

https://electrek.co/2026/05/08/new-map-electric-truck-charging-is-scaling/
2•Bender•51m ago•0 comments

¡Hola, soy DORA. Why hasn't AI improved my metrics?

https://www.vaines.org/posts/2026-05-09-why-hasnt-ai-improved-my-metrics/
1•gpi•54m ago•0 comments

UK wants fresh fingerprints on £300M biometrics platform

https://www.theregister.com/public-sector/2026/05/09/uk-wants-fresh-fingerprints-on-300m-biometri...
1•Bender•1h ago•0 comments

The new Wild West of AI kids' toys

https://www.wired.com/story/the-new-wild-west-of-ai-kids-toys/
1•Bender•1h ago•0 comments

AI Productivity Fails

https://blog.sshh.io/p/how-ai-productivity-fails
3•sshh12•1h ago•0 comments

You Need AI That Reduces Maintenance Costs

https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/blog/2026/you-need-ai-that-reduces-your-maintenance-costs
4•cratermoon•1h ago•0 comments

PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs

https://kotaku.com/playstation-3-emulator-devs-politely-ask-that-people-stop-flooding-it-with-ai-...
48•stalfosknight•1h ago•15 comments

Usein

1•USEIN•1h ago•0 comments

Rep. Crane Introduces Legislation to Pause and Reform the Broken H-1B Visa

https://crane.house.gov/2026/04/22/rep-crane-introduces-legislation-to-pause-and-reform-the-broke...
5•rawgabbit•1h ago•1 comments

Zero-native by Vercel: Build tiny desktop and mobile apps with Zig and web UI

https://github.com/vercel-labs/zero-native
1•maxloh•1h ago•0 comments

Antikythera Mechanism (oldest known analogue computer)

https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=120
3•p0u4a•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Gawk Dev – live feed tracking what's happening across AI tools

https://gawk.dev
1•Srinathprasanna•1h ago•0 comments