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

Show HN: Silera.ai – Synthetic data for computer vision quality inspection

https://app.silera.ai/
1•jmalevez•1m ago•0 comments

Carapace

https://carapace.sh/
1•tosh•3m ago•0 comments

Snowflake: Cortex Code

https://www.snowflake.com/en/news/press-releases/snowflake-unveils-cortex-code-an-ai-coding-agent...
1•tosh•3m ago•0 comments

The invisible bubbles that spread cancer could also help stop it

https://theconversation.com/the-invisible-bubbles-that-spread-cancer-could-also-help-stop-it-271593
1•PaulHoule•4m ago•0 comments

Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/06/chrome_mv3_no_harm_ad_blocking/
1•Brajeshwar•4m ago•0 comments

Structures Within the Earth Have Altered Magnetic Field for Millions of Years

https://www.wired.com/story/titanic-structures-earth-magnetic-field-millions-of-years/
1•Brajeshwar•4m ago•0 comments

Show HN: An iOS mileage tracker I built because I hate forced logins

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mileage-journal/id6758159503
1•Akzid•4m ago•0 comments

The Epidemic Born Out of Poverty

https://nautil.us/the-forgotten-epidemic-born-out-of-poverty-1265766/
1•Brajeshwar•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Ruby-libgd – Native 2D graphics engine for Ruby (no CLI, no JavaScript)

1•ggerman2025•5m ago•0 comments

Tell HN: Cursor is appending Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent cursor.com>

1•waynenilsen•5m ago•0 comments

Agentic Coding Mentor

https://git.medlab.host/ntnsndr/agentic-coding-mentor/
1•ntnsndr•5m ago•0 comments

Jeff Bezos Just Taught Liberal Elites How Oligarchy Works

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/jeff-bezos-finally-pulls-the-mask
1•connor11528•6m ago•0 comments

Show HN: VideoZero – 2D Video Generation

https://videozero.ai/
1•prathje•7m ago•0 comments

Lfgtm Claude Code Plugin

https://github.com/octavehq/lfgtm
1•connor11528•7m ago•0 comments

Agile Coach's Solution: Break Technical Problems into Smaller Stories

https://agilelie.com/blog/agile-coach-never-wrote-code
1•birdculture•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: PanicLock – macOS has no Touch ID kill switch like iOS, so I built one

https://github.com/paniclock/paniclock
1•seanieb•7m ago•1 comments

TikTok told to change 'addictive design' by EU or face fines

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr7j7n315lmo
1•maartin0•8m ago•0 comments

App that compares live Uber, Lyft and Waymo prices

https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/hackney-uber-lyft-waymo-21336526.php
2•jessiefisher•9m ago•1 comments

The reporter who tried to replace herself with a bot

https://www.platformer.news/journalism-job-automation-claude/
1•speckx•10m ago•0 comments

Seltani: An online, shared, text-based, open-source fan project based on the My

https://eblong.com/zarf/essays/seltani-talk/
1•todsacerdoti•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Whispem – a small, readable interpreted language

https://github.com/whispem/whispem-lang
1•whispem•11m ago•0 comments

Every major galaxy speeding away from Milky Way, except 1 – we know why

https://www.livescience.com/space/cosmology/every-major-galaxy-is-speeding-away-from-the-milky-wa...
1•stronglikedan•13m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: 900x downgrade of Perplexity Pro – anyone else hit?

1•pshirshov•18m ago•0 comments

I Built a System That Reads the Fine Print of 969 Corporate Legal Documents

https://leahey.org/blog/2026/02/06/tos-tracker-fine-print.html
1•tldrthelaw•19m ago•0 comments

I Chose Ruby over Python

https://batsov.com/articles/2025/09/12/why-i-chose-ruby-over-python/
2•tosh•20m ago•0 comments

Claude Code Is the Inflection Point

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/claude-code-is-the-inflection-point
2•taubek•20m ago•0 comments

Show HN: GitClaw – An AI assistant that runs in GitHub Actions

https://github.com/SawyerHood/gitclaw
3•sawyerjhood•21m ago•0 comments

US job market posted the weakest growth outside of a recession since 2003

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/05/economy/us-jobs-data-layoffs-hiring
3•speckx•21m ago•0 comments

The Chrysalis Backdoor: A Deep Dive into Lotus Blossom's Toolkit

https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/tr-chrysalis-backdoor-dive-into-lotus-blossoms-toolkit/
2•9woc•22m ago•0 comments

macOS No Longer Ships with Emacs

https://batsov.com/articles/2025/01/12/macos-no-longer-ships-with-emacs/
1•tosh•25m ago•0 comments