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•8mo ago

Comments

panstromek•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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_•8mo 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_•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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

A16Z big ideas 2026: Part 1

https://a16z.com/newsletter/big-ideas-2026-part-1/
1•hubraumhugo•1m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Would you hire someone who codes using agents?

1•grandimam•6m ago•0 comments

Why Did the World Get So Ugly? – Alain de Botton

https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/within-reason/id1458675168
1•szemy2•11m ago•1 comments

The Year in Computer Science

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-year-in-computer-science-20251216/
1•pykello•12m ago•0 comments

Critic: Code Inspection System in Opera Software (2019?)

https://sudonull.com/post/135595
1•todsacerdoti•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Code webapps like it is 2010 – with agents & modern tech. A starter

https://github.com/tom-010/boring-stack
1•tom010•13m ago•0 comments

Cursed Bundler: Using go get to install Ruby Gems

https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/25/cursed-bundler-using-go-get-to-install-ruby-gems.html
1•SPBS•17m ago•0 comments

My Journey to a NixOS Router

https://chrisdell.info/my-journey-to-a-nixos-router/
1•cjdell•17m ago•0 comments

Schleps All the Way Down

https://www.saeedreza.com/notes/schleps-all-the-way-down
1•srabeat•23m ago•0 comments

Show HN: SVT – A fast terminal image viewer with sxiv-like keybindings

https://github.com/kan-bayashi/svt
1•kan-bayashi•23m ago•0 comments

Update on my journey toward the Rust compiler team

https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1pw5i9y/4_months_later_update_on_my_journey_toward_the/
1•nhatcher•25m ago•1 comments

Google is letting users swap out Gmail addresses without losing their data

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-12-26/google-will-let-users-swap-out-gmail-addresses-...
2•not4uffin•27m ago•0 comments

NyroDB – Universal rust database engine, model based, fast

https://github.com/TheRemyyy/nyro-db
1•TheRemyyy•28m ago•1 comments

Tourism Crisis Hits the United States in 2025 as International Visitor Plunge

https://www.travelandtourworld.com/news/article/tourism-crisis-hits-the-united-states-in-2025-as-...
3•mindracer•31m ago•0 comments

You can't design software you don't work on

https://www.seangoedecke.com/you-cant-design-software-you-dont-work-on/
1•todsacerdoti•32m ago•0 comments

What condition one in Antarctica looks like [video]

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Cq7GB1vp5dw
2•keepamovin•32m ago•0 comments

Aged care centre confronts racism with cultural celebrations

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-25/aged-care-centre-starts-cultural-celebrations-to-address-r...
1•Tomte•33m ago•0 comments

Claude Code Auto Improve

https://github.com/Polandia94/auto-improvement
2•polandia94•36m ago•1 comments

Hanuman Chalisa English

https://hanuman-chalisa-bhajan.blogspot.com/2010/01/shri-hanuman-chalisa-english.html
1•janebush08•41m ago•0 comments

Rilmenidine extends lifespan and healthspan in Caenorhabditis elegans

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acel.13774
2•manidoraisamy•47m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Stripe default config often bypasses AVS

https://ghostaudit.io/
3•fitzz•48m ago•1 comments

Arcan 0.7.1 – Minutes to Midnight

https://arcan-fe.com/2025/12/27/arcan-0-7-1-minutes-to-midnight/
1•todsacerdoti•48m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Learn how to make your first open source pull request on GitHub

https://github.com/firstcontributions/first-contributions
3•sudo_bangbang•49m ago•0 comments

How to Get a Scholarship Without Ielts or Toefl (International Students)

https://grantjobsandscholarship.blogspot.com/2025/12/how-to-get-scholarship-without-ielts-or.html
1•frankchidera900•50m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What's your health/fitness/wellness routine?

1•akhilnchauhan•53m ago•1 comments

Reasoning tools knowledgebase of thinking patterns from various domains

https://github.com/dvdarkin/reasoning-tools
1•dvdarkin•55m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Snapalabra – A daily exercise for learning new vocabulary

2•detectivestory•56m ago•1 comments

Dev-db: TypeScript-first mock database generator with realistic data in seconds

https://github.com/calvin-kimani/dev-db
1•kimanicalvin•58m ago•0 comments

Show HN: An AI pipeline to find anomalies in FDA medical device reports

https://maude-analysis.onrender.com/
2•smugesh•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: AgentCmds – A directory of slash commands for AI agents

https://agentcmds.work/
2•ho_ba•1h ago•1 comments