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

Im cancelling my Claude Code subscription

https://numerlab.org/2026/07/22/im-canceling-claude-subscription/
1•wallach-game•3m ago•1 comments

Sandboxing Script Extensions with GraalVM

https://medium.com/graalvm/sandboxing-script-extensions-with-graalvm-f192a8fb0c5f
1•grashalm•4m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: People who are opposed to advertising, how do you promote your business?

1•chistev•4m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Forkbench – a native-Mac control room for running CLI coding agent

https://forkbench.com
1•forkbench•4m ago•0 comments

Flashtools – a PNG to WebP converter that never uploads your files

https://flashtools.app/
1•chochinize•7m ago•0 comments

The Boring Frontier of Robotics

https://www.alexinch.com/blog/boring-frontier
1•ainch•7m ago•0 comments

The Leading Deepfake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/us/ai-deepfake-hany-farid.html
2•ping_ch•9m ago•1 comments

Report and Recommendations for Renewing American Scientific Discovery

https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/07/45470/
1•simonpure•11m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: A Minimalist Messaging Platform

1•testfolk•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I mapped my AI coding setup – 90 of 103 installed skills never fire

https://github.com/Pycomet/agent-atlas
2•Codefred•14m ago•0 comments

Generating optimal Minecraft farm layouts with the CP-SAT solver

https://github.com/Serranegra/optifarm
1•scrlk•15m ago•0 comments

The wall every Flutter builder hits, and the ways around it

https://nowa.dev/blog/why-we-built-our-own-flutter-runtime/
1•raeddev•16m ago•0 comments

China's AI models have Trump's AI world at war with itself

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/07/20/1140675/chinas-ai-models-have-trumps-ai-world-at-war-...
3•simonebrunozzi•17m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Is Your Work Stressful?

1•julienreszka•18m ago•0 comments

One Too Many – Collectable Card Game (Beta Preview)

https://onetoomany.pages.dev/
1•gkasev•19m ago•1 comments

OpenAI Hacks Hugging Face, What Happened, Alignment and Paper Clips

https://stratechery.com/2026/openai-hacks-hugging-face-what-happened-alignment-and-paper-clips/
2•swolpers•20m ago•0 comments

Will your job be replaced by AI? Here are the roles most affected

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn7nllr4vd6o
2•password54321•22m ago•0 comments

$5B CEO says unemployed Gen Z should be out 3 days a week building their network

https://fortune.com/2026/07/21/netskope-ceo-sanjay-beri-5-billion-gen-z-networking-jobs-never-pub...
2•robtherobber•22m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Llamatop - see what the various cores on your macbook are doing!

https://github.com/fragmede/llamatop
1•fragmede•22m ago•1 comments

Measuring Reward-Seeking via Contrastive Belief Updates

https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18966
1•sbulaev•28m ago•0 comments

French parliament backs social media ban for children under 15

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/french-lawmakers-vote-social-media-ban-children-2026-07-21/
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•29m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Dex – Explore any Data Warehouse without worrying about costs

https://github.com/exmergo/dex
3•marcociavarella•29m ago•0 comments

Anthropic's landmark $1.5B copyright settlement is approved

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/20/anthropics-landmark-1-5b-copyright-settlement-is-approved/
1•doener•30m ago•0 comments

Show HN: The BUSY build system now generates CMake so you can easily use LeanQt

https://github.com/rochus-keller/BUSY/blob/main/docs/The_BUSY_Build_System_Users_Guide.adoc
1•Rochus•32m ago•0 comments

Shape-shifting mirrors on NASA's new space telescope could unveil Jupiters like

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/07/22/1140701/shape-shifting-mirrors-roman-space-telescope/
1•joozio•33m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Sunflowers

https://sunflowersgame.com/
2•pompomsheep•35m ago•2 comments

NVLink, NVSwitch, and All That

https://blog.doubleword.ai/nvlink-scale-up
4•somnial•36m ago•1 comments

Kalshi debuts US midterms hub for election forecasts and polling data

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/kalshi-debuts-us-midterms-hub-election-forecasts-polling-data-20...
2•1vuio0pswjnm7•36m ago•0 comments

AI investment boom puts Big Tech's free cash flow under pressure

https://www.reuters.com/business/ai-investment-boom-puts-big-techs-free-cash-flow-under-pressure-...
3•1vuio0pswjnm7•38m ago•0 comments

Kenze – An interactive shell for wrangling files bigger than your RAM

https://github.com/Kenzy-Zero/kenze
1•kenzy_zero•38m ago•0 comments