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•10mo ago

Comments

panstromek•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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_•10mo 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_•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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

The Tech Corps

https://www.peacecorps.gov/ways-to-serve/tech-corps/
1•giuliomagnifico•1m ago•0 comments

The Age of the Starchitect Is Over

https://www.dezeen.com/2026/02/23/starchitects-owen-hopkins-opinion/
1•wjSgoWPm5bWAhXB•2m ago•0 comments

How An Olympics Photographer Proves the Authenticity of His Photos

https://petapixel.com/2026/02/21/a-look-at-an-image-verification-process-for-olympics-photos/
1•lode•3m ago•0 comments

Day 1461 of Putin's Three-Day War

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/day-1461-of-putins-three-day-war
3•rbanffy•7m ago•0 comments

The Wall Street Putsch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
1•Betelbuddy•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Prism AI – open-source research agent that visualizes concepts

https://github.com/precious112/prism-ai-deep-research
2•PreciousH•8m ago•1 comments

Dictionary Compression is finally here, and it's ridiculously good

https://httptoolkit.com/blog/dictionary-compression-performance-zstd-brotli/
2•pimterry•8m ago•0 comments

Facebook's Fascination with My Robots.txt

https://blog.nytsoi.net/2026/02/23/facebook-robots-txt
1•Ndymium•11m ago•1 comments

Show HN: HelixNotes – Local Markdown notes, no cloud, Rust and Tauri

https://helixnotes.com/
1•ArkHost•11m ago•0 comments

Kruptein; a Node.js symmetric encryption module

https://github.com/jas-/kruptein
1•jas-•12m ago•1 comments

AV1Converter

https://github.com/framicheli/av1converter
1•francescomi•12m ago•0 comments

Is MotionCanvas abandoned? motioncanvas.io returns NXDOMAIN; repo looks stale

https://motioncanvas.io/
1•prathje•13m ago•1 comments

World Monitor is an Open Source Real-Time Global Intelligence Dashboard

https://worldmonitor.app/
1•Brajeshwar•14m ago•0 comments

Show HN: DuoBook turns URLs into level-adjusted bilingual stories

https://duobook.co/news#url-grounded-story-import-wikipedia-youtube-captions-news
1•celltalk•17m ago•0 comments

Code Mode by Cloudflare: give agents an entire API in 1,000 tokens

https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode-mcp/
1•tin7in•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Potatoverse platform for webapps, SQLite and static binary

https://github.com/blue-monads/potatoverse
4•born-jre•18m ago•0 comments

Bambuddy – Self-Hosted Print Management for Bambu Lab

https://bambuddy.cool
1•sabatesduran•19m ago•0 comments

Rm9sbG93ZXJz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rm9sbG93ZXJz
1•lastposter•19m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Monolith e-commerce platform for serverless

https://www.hoikka.dev/
1•zernobilly•19m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Rynko – A deterministic JSON-to-PDF and Excel rendering engine

https://www.rynko.dev/developers
1•ksrijith•19m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Claude Code Open – AI coding platform with Web IDE and 37 tools

https://github.com/kill136/claude-code-open
1•694623326•21m ago•0 comments

Yunet Code Template for $1.00

https://buy.stripe.com/cNi4gyfzIbn06llaTz3ZK01
1•popcornisgold•22m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Librarium – fan out research queries to many search/AI APIs in parallel

https://github.com/jkudish/librarium
1•joeykudish•23m ago•1 comments

V&A acquires early YouTube webpage

https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/acquiring-an-early-youtube-watch-page-and-its-first-ever-video
1•beel•23m ago•0 comments

Pantalk – Open-source unified messaging gateway for AI agents

https://pantalk.dev/
1•_pdp_•24m ago•1 comments

Hetzner's Statement on Price Adjustment

https://www.hetzner.com/pressroom/statement-price-adjustment/
3•soruly•24m ago•1 comments

Why Vibe Coding Feels So Addictive

https://twitter.com/EmmettMaher/status/2013406291314491792
2•tosh•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built Quikspace to help startup save time on tiny tasks

https://www.quikspace.io/
1•vinzdg•25m ago•0 comments

'A.I. Literacy' Is Trending in Schools. Here's Why

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/business/ai-literacy-faq.html
1•furcyd•26m ago•0 comments

Hetzner (European hosting provider) to increase prices by up to 38%

https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1rce0lf/hetzner_european_hosting_provider_to_increase/
18•doener•28m ago•1 comments