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

Picasso: Creator and Destroyer

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1988/06/picasso-creator-and-destroyer/305715/
1•breve•2m ago•0 comments

Go Delete Yourself from the Internet. Seriously.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/personal-information-privacy-deleteme-2ceea2ad
1•xqcgrek2•5m ago•1 comments

AWS: How do you do, fellow kids? Please watch our keynotes in Fortnite

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/02/aws_reinvent_fortnite/
1•gnabgib•7m ago•0 comments

Brownian Spin-Locking Effect

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-025-02413-5
1•QueensGambit•7m ago•0 comments

Wine 11.0 RC4 – Run Windows Applications on Linux, BSD, Solaris and macOS

https://www.winehq.org/announce/11.0-rc4
1•neustradamus•7m ago•0 comments

Pain killer taken by millions linked to deadly heart conditions, study finds

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-15414287/Painkiller-tramadol-opioid-deadly-heart-condi...
1•haltingproblem•8m ago•0 comments

Torn City

https://www.torn.com/index.php
1•psalminen•8m ago•0 comments

Elon Musk Says He's Removing 'Sustainable' from Tesla's Mission

https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-says-hes-removing-sustainable-from-teslas-mission-2000703528
2•toomanyrichies•8m ago•0 comments

Google Reveals the Top Searches of 2025

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-reveals-the-top-searches-of-2025/563738/
1•gnabgib•14m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Maple – Multi-agent protocol with resource-aware scheduling

https://github.com/maheshvaikri-code/maple-oss
1•maheshvaikri99•16m ago•0 comments

Newsly – Analyze Polymarket Events

https://newsly.studio
1•polyGuest•20m ago•1 comments

Python 3.6-3.14 Performance on M1, M5 and Zen2

https://crewtech.se/b/1/index.html
1•apelapan•23m ago•1 comments

Elon Musk drops sustainable from Tesla's mission as he completes his villain arc

https://electrek.co/2025/12/26/elon-musk-drops-sustainable-teslas-mission-completes-villain-arc/
8•breve•24m ago•1 comments

Systems Are Sticky (2024)

https://dottedmag.net/blog/systems-are-sticky/
1•xk3•28m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Anyone Still Using Snipcart?

1•youz•29m ago•0 comments

Machine-Driven Code Review

https://bits.logic.inc/p/code-review-without-bottlenecks
1•sgk284•30m ago•0 comments

The moral critic of the AI industry–a Q&A with Holly Elmore

https://www.foommagazine.org/the-moral-critic-of-the-ai-industry-a-q-a-with-holly-elmore/
1•paulpauper•31m ago•0 comments

Unknown Knowns: Five Ideas You Can't Unsee

https://linch.substack.com/p/unknown-knowns
1•paulpauper•31m ago•0 comments

Show HN: An app to learn about the world

1•davit_kocharyan•34m ago•0 comments

Nvidia-Groq deal is structured to keep 'fiction of competition alive'

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/26/nvidia-groq-deal-is-structured-to-keep-fiction-of-competition-ali...
5•1vuio0pswjnm7•36m ago•0 comments

Crafting Effective Conference Session Titles for 2026

https://julieyack.com/2025/12/26/ai-cant-save-a-bad-session-abstract-but-it-can-help-make-a-meh-o...
1•rbanffy•36m ago•0 comments

Trump Invited White South Africans to America. One Ended Up in Detention

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/us/trump-afrikaner-ice.html
4•vinni2•36m ago•0 comments

Israel becomes first country to formally recognise Somaliland as state

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-recognises-somaliland-somalias-breakway-region-i...
2•GaryBluto•41m ago•1 comments

Tmux and SSH Agent Forwarding

https://blog.feld.me/posts/2025/12/tmux-ssh-agent-forwarding/
1•zdw•41m ago•0 comments

A Wealth Tax Floated in California Has Billionaires Thinking of Leaving

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/technology/california-wealth-tax-page-thiel.html
7•vinni2•42m ago•4 comments

Show HN: Soil – Systematic autopsy database for dead organizations

https://www.soil.rip/
1•ostashenkods•43m ago•1 comments

Conservative and Christian? US right champions psychedelic drugs

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/26/us-right-champions-psychedelic-drugs
2•bookofjoe•43m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Open source, self-hosted AI nutritionist for diabetes (Laravel/React)

https://github.com/acara-app/plate
1•tuvshaw•45m ago•1 comments

The William Wallace Effect

https://twitter.com/GruPiotr/status/2004673526679155065
1•piotrgrudzien•46m ago•0 comments

Extremal descendant integrals on spaces of curves: inequality proved with AI

https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14575
1•thunderbong•46m ago•0 comments