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 guided journaling during the Mental Health Awareness Month

https://journal.cubitoo.com/en
1•pawelkomarnicki•3m ago•1 comments

The Cost of Downsizing Social Security

https://www.newyorker.com/news/deep-state-diaries/the-real-cost-of-downsizing-social-security
1•littlexsparkee•7m ago•1 comments

Experimental Rust-to-CUDA Compiler

https://github.com/NVlabs/cuda-oxide
1•cgravill•7m ago•1 comments

Goodbye Slack

https://ano.chat
1•bill-cupid•7m ago•0 comments

The World Inside Neural Networks

https://www.goodfire.ai/research/the-world-inside-neural-networks
1•wsgeorge•9m ago•0 comments

Terax – a 7mb AI terminal in Rust and Tauri [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kykgXa7sm1g
2•netten•9m ago•0 comments

EU ban on Chinese inverters sparks strong response from Beijing

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/05/08/eu-ban-on-chinese-inverters-sparks-strong-response-from-be...
1•ndr42•13m ago•0 comments

Bun's experimental Rust rewrite hits 99.8% test compatibility on Linux x64 glibc

https://twitter.com/jarredsumner/status/2053047748191232310
1•heldrida•15m ago•1 comments

Steering Zig Fmt

https://matklad.github.io/2026/05/08/steering-zig-fmt.html
1•mpweiher•16m ago•0 comments

The troubled quest for tasty vegan cheese

https://www.economist.com/interactive/1843/2026/05/08/grate-expectations-the-troubled-quest-for-t...
1•pingou•17m ago•1 comments

Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage

https://www.theverge.com/tech/924933/google-chrome-4gb-gemini-nano-ai-features
1•elemar•21m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Cheapshot – GPS-based mobile game

https://cheapshot.co/
1•pakenrol•25m ago•2 comments

Autoenshittification (Background on WEI and Google Cloud Fraud Defence)

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
1•Voultapher•25m ago•1 comments

Radiolaria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiolaria
1•majkinetor•29m ago•0 comments

Vision: An Agent-Authored Control Architecture (Whitepaper)

https://sbarron.com/whitepapers/vision-system
1•iampneuma•30m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I Build a SaaS Loading Time Anxiety and Cost Calculator

https://vnta.agency/tools/saas-loading-time-anxiety-calculator
1•kartik_malik•40m ago•0 comments

Engineers Are Drifting

https://exhaustedmind.substack.com/p/your-engineers-are-already-drifting
1•Psychoterapist•41m ago•0 comments

Frontier plane reportedly strikes pedestrian on Denver Airport runway

https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/09/us/frontier-reportedly-pedestrian-denver-runway-hnk
1•Tomte•42m ago•0 comments

Claude Knew It Was Being Tested. Anthropic Built a Tool to Detect It

https://firethering.com/anthropic-nla-claude-thoughts-interpretability/
2•steveharing1•44m ago•0 comments

Squint

https://squint-cljs.github.io/squint/
2•Tomte•45m ago•0 comments

Elon Musk faces criminal probe in France after ignoring summons in X case

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/elon-musk-faces-criminal-probe-in-france-after-ignori...
5•ndsipa_pomu•45m ago•0 comments

Export NotebookLM Responses as Properly Cited Docx/PDF [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jx0j9JsQ5o
2•MassiveLy_Easy•46m ago•1 comments

How to turn work into cinematic videos with NotebookLM

https://www.theaithinker.com/p/how-to-turn-work-into-cinematic-videos
1•adamfaik•49m ago•0 comments

Cloudflare Drops on Sales Forecast Miss, Job Cuts

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-07/cloudflare-forecast-misses-estimates-announces...
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•52m ago•0 comments

Plan9: The Squeal to Unix [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbsQCnDHkZo
1•zeristor•52m ago•0 comments

Threats by artificial intelligence to human health and human existence (2023)

https://gh.bmj.com/content/8/5/e010435
2•janandonly•56m ago•0 comments

What Does 'Depth' Mean in Mathematics?(2014) – John Stillwell [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jp49wGhAG8
1•nill0•56m ago•0 comments

Apple May Drop Base $599 MacBook Neo as Chip, DRAM Costs Climb

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/07/apple-drop-base-macbook-neo-costs-climb/
3•pjmlp•58m ago•1 comments

Mathematical Depth Workshop (2014) – Robert Geroch [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfuIfCI5NOw
1•nill0•59m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Dikaletus – meeting recording and transcription using Mistral AI

https://codeberg.org/MimosaDev/dikaletus
2•phillc73•59m ago•0 comments