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

To deter bioterrorism, U.S. imposes new rules on ordering synthetic DNA

https://www.science.org/content/article/deter-bioterrorism-u-s-imposes-new-rules-ordering-synthet...
1•Metacelsus•2m ago•0 comments

Memory Safety Bugs in Rust Standard Library

https://forge-blog.github.io/posts/rust-std-memory-safety/
1•maxloh•6m ago•0 comments

Leica Cyclone REGISTER 360 2026.1.1 download

1•asksoft•6m ago•0 comments

Stomachion Puzzle – Play Online

https://puzzlewhere.com/solve/stomachion
1•bkevitt•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Daily GPU Rental Prices Across AWS, Azure, RunPod and Vast.ai

https://taipeiledger.com/gpu/
2•khoonie•9m ago•0 comments

How the Wildlife Black Market Works [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_oMb90boiU
1•gmays•12m ago•0 comments

Matching product records with a decision model

https://codecut.ai/typesafe-jev-vs-rapidfuzz-sentence-transformers/
1•khuyentran1401•14m ago•0 comments

Virtual Surveyor 10.3 drone-surveying and mapping

1•asksoft•21m ago•0 comments

DiffX – Next-Generation Extensible Diff Format (2025)

https://diffx.org/
2•zenincognito•21m ago•0 comments

Freya: Build cross-platform, performant, accessible and unique apps with Rust

https://freyaui.dev/
1•andunie•23m ago•0 comments

Qwen4-Max is now in Preview

https://twitter.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2120335993643684315
6•potwinkle•26m ago•0 comments

The FDA Hides Where Your Drugs Are Made [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MwQeiiO9Ec
1•dataflow•26m ago•0 comments

Signs You're Working in a Feature Factory (2016)

https://cutle.fish/blog/12-signs-youre-working-in-a-feature-factory/
2•sren•28m ago•0 comments

Movistar Blocks Its Own Support Forum Under LaLiga Anti-Piracy Order

https://torrentfreak.com/movistar-blocks-its-own-support-forum-under-laliga-anti-piracy-order/
1•gslin•30m ago•0 comments

Hooked on Tuna

https://blue-continuum.com/hooked-on-tuna
3•dnetesn•36m ago•0 comments

Rooting Multiple ISPs with Hyperglass

https://hyperpwn.xyz/
2•csmantle•43m ago•0 comments

Brazil's Largest Port Hit by Major IT Outage; Suspected Ransomware Cyberattack

https://uknip.co.uk/news/uk/uk-news/brazils-largest-port-hit-by-major-it-outage-amid-suspected-ra...
1•dvaplima•45m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Why doesn't Ramp AI Index include OpenRouter or other aggregators?

2•ddxv•47m ago•0 comments

Anthropic Software Engineer Salaries

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/anthropic/salaries/software-engineer
1•zuhayeer•49m ago•0 comments

The indie game community is in disarray over AI and Big Walk

https://www.theverge.com/games/1030994/big-walk-independent-games-festival-igf-ai
2•tasoeur•50m ago•0 comments

State of the tech job market: late 2026

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/state-of-the-tech-job-market-late
1•flowerlad•52m ago•2 comments

Discontinuation of Google and Apple Accounts Linking to Nintendo Accounts

https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Support/Nintendo-Account/Discontinuation-of-Google-and-Apple-accou...
2•thunderbong•52m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A company running in an AI harness

https://restless.run/
2•yaoke259•52m ago•3 comments

GSD-LQ: Zero-calibration sub-4-bit compression and 7B in 3.78 GB VRAM

https://github.com/Phantom309-CED/GSD-LQ/tree/main/gsd_lq_v2
1•Phantom309-CED•54m ago•0 comments

Tokenizers

https://jechevarria.com/blog/2026/11/11/tokenizers/
1•j_echevarria•54m ago•0 comments

Toyota Sees a U.S. Future for Tiny Trucks with a Devoted Following (Kei Trucks)

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/10/business/toyota-kei-pickup-truck.html
2•rawgabbit•55m ago•0 comments

Microsoft employee price list from 1987

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20261110-00/?p=112843/
1•soheilpro•1h ago•0 comments

A great old-timey game-programming hack (2013)

https://blog.moertel.com/posts/2013-12-14-great-old-timey-game-programming-hack.html
25•palsecam•1h ago•4 comments

How to Be a Good Farrier: What the Car Teaches Us About AI and Your Job

https://www.sethserver.com/ai/how-to-be-a-good-farrier.html
1•sethito•1h ago•0 comments

E-means: outperforming k-means (in one-tenth the epochs)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09501
1•Anon84•1h ago•0 comments