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

Echoes (Live at Pompeii)

https://genius.com/Pink-floyd-echoes-live-at-pompeii-lyrics
1•jruohonen•20s ago•0 comments

Kushner's Thrive Capital Invests $100M in Shopify

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-14/joshua-kushner-s-thrive-capital-invests-100-mi...
1•petethomas•2m ago•0 comments

QEMU CXL Escape

https://github.com/v12-security/pocs/blob/main/qemu/README.md
1•somebudyelse•4m ago•0 comments

Evidence-Based Medicine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_medicine
1•bookofjoe•5m ago•0 comments

Traverse: In-memory graph database for the modern data stack

https://traverse.truespar.com/
1•johlo•5m ago•0 comments

Tina: A strictly bounded, thread-per-core concurrency framework

https://github.com/pmbanugo/tina
1•satyapr93•5m ago•0 comments

The Colorado River Is on the Brink of Disaster

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/climate-environment/the-colorado-river-is-on-the-brink-of-disaster-62...
2•LostMyLogin•6m ago•0 comments

Ansel – OSS volume visualization tool

https://fosterdill.github.io/ansel-web/
1•fosterdill•6m ago•1 comments

The Zulip Foundation

https://blog.zulip.com/2026/05/15/announcing-zulip-foundation/
1•boramalper•7m ago•0 comments

SIMD-Accelerated Data Processing [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBLDgsU7Zn4
1•mpweiher•9m ago•0 comments

The Fulda Gap: A Cavalry Scout's Account of the End of the World That Never Came

https://twitter.com/wgmorrow/status/2055100442737037566
1•omnibrain•10m ago•0 comments

Why physicists still use Fortran (2015)

https://www.moreisdifferent.com/2015/07/16/why-physicsts-still-use-fortran/
2•downbad_•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Incorporator, Turn any API/File into typed Python graph with pipeline

https://github.com/PyPlumber/Incorporator/
1•PyPlumber•11m ago•0 comments

The Grand Tradition of Suing for School Tuition

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/carter-case-lawsuit-new-york-city-education-special-educa...
1•csheehan10•12m ago•0 comments

Satiety Index: The Secret to Long-Lasting Fullness

https://optimisingnutrition.com/satiety-index/
1•rzk•14m ago•0 comments

Heirs and Spares in Early Modern France

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/heirs-and-spares-early-modern-france
1•pepys•17m ago•0 comments

StockWire – Stock market ticker with deterministic, auditable tips

https://stockwire.work/
1•rudixworld•17m ago•0 comments

Concurrency is not Parallelism (2015) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV9rvDllKEg
1•tosh•19m ago•0 comments

OpenAI now wants ChatGPT to access your bank accounts

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/931122/openai-chatgpt-financial-accounts-plai...
2•ndr42•20m ago•0 comments

The Aperiodic Table

https://blog.jgc.org/2026/05/the-aperiodic-table.html
1•jgrahamc•21m ago•0 comments

What Color is Your Function? (2015)

https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-your-function/
1•tosh•25m ago•0 comments

Using a Nintendo Switch to Speed Up a 3D Printer

https://hackaday.com/2026/05/15/using-a-nintendo-switch-to-speed-up-a-3d-printer/
2•speckx•26m ago•0 comments

Where Did All the Soul Go?

https://arpl.dev/blog/where-did-all-the-sould-go
2•mooreds•28m ago•0 comments

Psyllium husk is being touted as nature's Ozempic

https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2025/jun/11/what-is-psyllium-husk
2•rzk•29m ago•0 comments

Microsoft/Wil: Windows Implementation Library

https://github.com/microsoft/wil
1•Tomte•30m ago•0 comments

Playing Atari music on Amiga for free

https://arnaud-carre.github.io/2026-05-15-ym-fast-emu/
3•nopakos•30m ago•0 comments

JOOQ: The easiest way to write SQL in Java

https://www.jooq.org/
1•Tomte•31m ago•0 comments

Travelers on Air Force One ordered to throw away gifts, phones after China trip

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/15/us-orders-travelers-on-air-force-one-to-throw-away-gifts-pins-a...
6•leopoldj•33m ago•0 comments

Azure Container Apps Express

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/appsonazureblog/introducing-azure-container-apps-express...
1•vyrotek•33m ago•0 comments

Trump leaves China with no agreement but cites 'good' talks with Xi

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-leaves-china-no-agreement-thorny-issues-cites...
2•kaycebasques•35m ago•1 comments