frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

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

Vibe Working

https://www.trie.dev/
1•Kriptering•14s ago•1 comments

Smashing the NIMBYs Created Modern Capitalism

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-abolishing-the-stakeholder-state-caused-the-industrial-revol...
1•karakoram•19s ago•0 comments

Identity, memory, secrets that survive model switch

https://signetai.sh/
1•627467•2m ago•0 comments

Data Story: The strait went dark

https://demos.minusx.app/l/strait-of-hormuz-the-day-the-oil-lanes-went-dark-6kjt5lcg1gp5d3l49mx
1•nuwandavek•3m ago•0 comments

A Federal Regulator Wants to Fast-Track AI Data Centers onto the Power Grid

https://gizmodo.com/a-federal-regulator-wants-to-fast-track-ai-data-centers-onto-the-power-grid-2...
1•derbOac•4m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How are you managing MCP servers across a team?

1•vitorbaptistaa•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: PinLeads

https://pinleads.org
1•jrh89•5m ago•0 comments

Too Liked to Be Useful

https://yusufaytas.com/too-liked-to-be-useful
9•montrealish•15m ago•1 comments

Show HN: I built a multiplayer dominoes game

https://www.pipsgg.com
1•minicliprocks•16m ago•1 comments

Constrained Modeling for Coding Agents

https://github.com/dannylee1020/kkt
1•dannylee1020•16m ago•0 comments

Palmier – a free video editor built for AI

https://www.palmier.io/
1•artur_makly•19m ago•0 comments

A Beginner's Guide to Robotics Hardware

https://interlatent.com/blog/interlatent-robotics-hardware-guide
2•sebg•25m ago•0 comments

The Oura $400 Ring Is Designed to Die [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqCp-z9WAkA
1•SockThief•25m ago•0 comments

Why Weibo's tiny VibeThinker-3B has the AI world arguing over benchmarks again

https://venturebeat.com/technology/why-weibos-tiny-vibethinker-3b-has-the-ai-world-arguing-over-b...
5•gmays•27m ago•0 comments

Reinforcement learning towards broadly and persistently beneficial models

https://alignment.openai.com/beneficial-rl/
1•jawiggins•30m ago•0 comments

Hackers Found a Back Door into the American Living Room

https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/how-hackers-found-a-back-door-into-the-american-living-roo...
1•rawgabbit•32m ago•0 comments

Connecting Peripherals to Atari 8-bit Computers

https://www.goto10retro.com/p/connecting-peripherals-to-atari-8
2•rbanffy•32m ago•0 comments

All Tomorrow's Parties

https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/all-tomorrows-parties/
1•wassimans•33m ago•0 comments

CEOs: How to Not Screw Up Your AI Memo

https://www.callercallsback.com/p/ceos-heres-how-to-not-screw-up-your
1•ohjeez•36m ago•0 comments

Transgenic hookworm secretes anti-tetrodotoxin human single chain antibody

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-73447-9
2•phront•39m ago•0 comments

Netflix Viewing Activity

https://www.netflix.com/login?nextpage=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.netflix.com%2Fviewingactivity
1•meken•40m ago•0 comments

Setting Up a New Windows Laptop in 2026

https://matthewquerzoli.com/blog/18-06-2026-setting-up-a-new-windows-laptop-in-2026
2•Quiza12•41m ago•1 comments

Zero-Touch OAuth for MCP

https://blog.modelcontextprotocol.io/posts/enterprise-managed-auth/
4•niyikiza•43m ago•2 comments

The software industry: annealing, but wrong

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20260531
2•sebg•44m ago•0 comments

SubQ – a sub-quadratic LLM built for multi-million token reasoning

https://subq.ai/
2•modinfo•44m ago•0 comments

Shape Suffixes – Good Coding Style

https://medium.com/@NoamShazeer/shape-suffixes-good-coding-style-f836e72e24fd
1•sebg•47m ago•0 comments

How will AI make moral decisions for you and me?

https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/technology/2026/what-shapes-ai-moral-decisions
1•knowablemag•50m ago•0 comments

The ancient book of wisdom at the heart of every computer (2014)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/21/ancient-book-wisdom-i-ching-computer-binary-code
2•mot2ba•50m ago•0 comments

Documenting Architecture Decisions (2011)

https://www.cognitect.com/blog/2011/11/15/documenting-architecture-decisions
2•ramoz•52m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Are companies still hiring data scientists?

1•ivaivanova•52m ago•0 comments