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

Incident updates, interruptions and the 30 minute window

https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/incident-updates-and-interruptions/
1•fanf2•1m ago•0 comments

Certificate Transparency Logs as Communication Channel

https://latedeployment.github.io/posts/certificate-transparency-as-communication-channel/
1•elegantgate•2m ago•0 comments

I've build agent which runs my Twitter account on auto-pilot

1•bmykhaylivvv•2m ago•0 comments

Alarm overload is undermining safety at sea as crews face thousands of alerts

https://www.lr.org/en/knowledge/press-room/press-listing/press-release/2026/alarm-overload-is-und...
2•geox•3m ago•0 comments

SVT-AV1 4.0 Released with More Performance Optimizations

https://www.phoronix.com/news/SVT-AV1-4.0
1•ksec•7m ago•0 comments

LLMs Don't Hallucinate – They Drift

https://figshare.com/articles/conference_contribution/Measuring_Fidelity_Decay_A_Framework_for_Se...
2•knowledgeinfra•9m ago•1 comments

Trump Pushes A.I. Data Centers, but the GOP Is Cool to One in Alabama

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/25/us/politics/trump-ai.html
3•zerosizedweasle•15m ago•0 comments

The Origin of Cascades - on the History of CSS (2020)

https://talks.hiddedevries.nl/2gDDUr
1•omer_balyali•18m ago•0 comments

Doom has been ported to an earbud

https://doombuds.com
1•arin-s•21m ago•2 comments

Jesus in 404: Growing up in a secret nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

https://vincent404.substack.com/p/jesus-in-404
2•Vincent_Yan404•23m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Mindwork – AI workspace for focused personal knowledge management

https://mindwork.it.com/
2•obadakhalili•27m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Turning global news sentiment into a live market

https://blohem.misya.me/
1•mekod•29m ago•1 comments

Supply Chain Security starts early

https://gppmad.github.io/posts/supply-chain-security/
1•gppmad•29m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AgentHub – A unified SDK for LLM APIs with faithful validation

https://github.com/Prism-Shadow/AgentHub
1•PrismShadow•33m ago•0 comments

Some Thoughts on AI

https://mattbruenig.com/2026/01/19/some-thoughts-on-ai/
2•jamesponddotco•34m ago•0 comments

The Math on AI Agents Doesn't Add Up

https://www.wired.com/story/ai-agents-math-doesnt-add-up/
1•BerislavLopac•34m ago•2 comments

Need academic volunteer for Guinness World Record verification

1•princevashisht•37m ago•0 comments

Show HN: First Valkey-specific VS Code extension (open source Redis fork)

https://github.com/BetterDB-inc/vscode
2•kaliades•37m ago•1 comments

The Ladder to Nowhere: How OpenAI Plans to Learn Everything About You

https://insights.priva.cat/p/the-ladder-to-nowhere-how-openai
2•privacat•38m ago•1 comments

'Amelia': the AI-generated British schoolgirl, a far-right social media star

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jan/25/ai-generated-british-schoolgirl-becomes-far-righ...
2•pseudolus•38m ago•1 comments

Go 1.26 Is Around the Corner: Small Changes, Big Impact for Real-World Go System

https://medium.com/@anand.hv123/go-1-26-is-around-the-corner-small-changes-big-impact-for-real-wo...
1•throwaway2037•40m ago•0 comments

DigiAgriApp – Software solution aimed at farmers

https://gitlab.com/digiagriapp
1•basemi•40m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Crystal Upscaler – AI image upscaler built for portraits and faces

https://crystalupscaler.com/
1•charlie0simmon•44m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Bonsplit – tabs and splits for native macOS apps

https://bonsplit.alasdairmonk.com
5•sgottit•46m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Baby Dance AI – Turn baby photos into dance videos in 30 seconds

https://babydanceai.com
1•charlie0simmon•46m ago•0 comments

GLM4.7-Flash vs. other Local LLM. Tested also with OpenCode [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJptWelwpc
2•grigio•48m ago•0 comments

State Terror Has Arrived

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/opinion/state-terror-has-arrived.html
14•_tk_•51m ago•3 comments

Show HN: SeedVR2 – One-step AI video upscaling to 4K, 10x faster

https://seedvr2.net
1•charlie0simmon•51m ago•0 comments

Stackmaxxing Recursion for Days [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQKSyPYF0-Y
1•ironbound•51m ago•1 comments

Chinese Programmer Dies from Overwork at 32;Added to Work Chat While in Hospital

https://www.asiaone.com/china/32-year-old-programmer-china-allegedly-dies-overwork-added-work-gro...
4•pella•51m ago•0 comments