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Accidentally Turing-Complete

https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complete.html
25•bschne•11mo ago

Comments

panstromek•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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_•11mo 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_•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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

To Sit by the Water

https://tinkelenberg.com/posts/to-sit-by-the-water/
1•tinkelenberg•44s ago•0 comments

Transport Canada warned about WestJet seating hazard weeks before viral video

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/transport-canada-westjet-seating-layout-hazard-9.7142069
1•luu•57s ago•0 comments

Velxio 2.0 – Emulate Arduino, ESP32, and Raspberry Pi 3 in the Browser

https://github.com/davidmonterocrespo24/velxio
1•dmcrespo•1m ago•0 comments

Type Theorists need to take a look at Zig

https://pure-systems.org/posts/2026-03-27-the-type-theorists-need-to-take-a-look-at-zig.html
1•doyougnu•7m ago•1 comments

CppCon: C++ Beats Rust in JSON Serialization [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mcgk3CxHYMs
1•fthiesen•7m ago•0 comments

Quadratic Micropass Type Inference

https://articles.luminalang.com/a/micropass-inference/
3•simvux•8m ago•0 comments

Where Agents Converge

https://danthegoodman.substack.com/p/where-agents-converge
1•dangoodmanUT•10m ago•0 comments

How to Make Programming Terrible for Everyone

https://jneen.ca/posts/2026-03-27-how-to-make-programming-terrible-for-everyone/
1•jneen•10m ago•0 comments

I scored every NYC building for distress using 37M public data points and ML

https://sillview.nyc
1•ThomasThuillier•11m ago•0 comments

Steam Wishlist Pulse > track wishlist spikes and changes for game devs

https://github.com/hortopan/steam-wishlist-pulse
1•remakeru•11m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Fallow – Find unused code, duplication, and complexity in TS/JS (Rust)

https://github.com/fallow-rs/fallow
1•bartwaardenburg•11m ago•0 comments

AI bug reports went from junk to legit overnight, says Linux kernel czar

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/greg_kroahhartman_ai_kernel/
3•amarant•15m ago•0 comments

Agents of Chaos

https://agentsofchaos.baulab.info/report.html
1•luu•15m ago•0 comments

I don't understand graphical abstracts. So I both hate and admire this one (2025)

https://scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/2025/09/23/i-dont-understand-graphical-abstracts-so-i...
1•rossant•19m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Building your first ASGI framework – step-by-step lessons

1•grandimam•19m ago•0 comments

Offprint: Publishing infrastructure for the open web, built on AT Protocol

https://offprint.app
2•icy•20m ago•0 comments

Show HN: GladAItor – Judge AI Products for Free

https://glad-ia-tor.com/
2•Enjoyooor•21m ago•1 comments

Basecamp Becomes Agent Accessible

https://world.hey.com/dhh/basecamp-becomes-agent-accessible-3ae6b949
1•FigurativeVoid•22m ago•0 comments

Memory Crystal – persistent memory for AI agents (MIT)

https://github.com/memorycrystal/memorycrystal
1•memorycrystal•22m ago•0 comments

Truck hunting on the Ho Chi Minh trail

https://historynet.com/truck-hunting-ho-chi-minh-trail/
1•berkeleyjunk•24m ago•0 comments

Migrating Infrastructure Off Coolify

https://www.coryd.dev/posts/2026/migrating-infrastructure-off-coolify
1•cdrnsf•27m ago•0 comments

The telnyx packages on PyPI have been compromised

https://lwn.net/Articles/1065059/
4•amcclure•28m ago•0 comments

The many failures leading to the LiteLLM compromise

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1064693/d00a7f49a30161da/
1•amcclure•29m ago•0 comments

Was the Iran War Caused by AI Psychosis?

https://houseofsaud.com/iran-war-ai-psychosis-sycophancy-rlhf/
2•decimalenough•29m ago•0 comments

Journaling for people who don't journal

https://maxgirkins.com/writings/email-to-self
1•mgirkins•30m ago•0 comments

A new TypeScript CSS parser with all modern features (nesting, scopes,)

https://github.com/node-projects/css-parser
1•jogibear9988•30m ago•0 comments

GM requires you to submit their opt-out form multiple times with name variations

https://gmcontactpreferences.com/opt-out-all.jsp
2•zephyreon•30m ago•4 comments

David Sacks Is No Longer the White House AI and Crypto Czar

https://www.theverge.com/policy/902140/david-sacks-out-ai-crypto-czar
3•kklisura•31m ago•0 comments

AI data centres can warm surrounding areas by up to 9.1°C

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2521256-ai-data-centres-can-warm-surrounding-areas-by-up-to-...
2•johnbarron•32m ago•0 comments

My Prodigal Brainchild

https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/my-prodigal-brainchild
4•jethronethro•33m ago•0 comments