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

Former EU commissioner and activists barred from US

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/24/us-state-department-visa-ban-former-eu-commiss...
1•robin_reala•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: SatoriDB – embedded vector database written in Rust

1•joeeverjk•7m ago•1 comments

Handy Phone Features Can Save You Holiday Time

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/24/technology/personaltech/save-holiday-time-with-these-handy-sma...
1•fleahunter•15m ago•0 comments

Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/23/memory_software_opinion/
2•pjmlp•16m ago•1 comments

Microarchitecture: What Happens Beneath [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVVNtG5dgks
1•dernett•24m ago•0 comments

Synadia response to Jepsen test of NATS 2.12.1

https://www.synadia.com/blog/jepsen-nats-2-12-1
1•Kinrany•24m ago•1 comments

No Stars

https://adactio.com/journal/22317
1•ArmageddonIt•25m ago•0 comments

Scope Creep- Why website projects don't finish on time

https://psavage.net/why-website-projects-go-off-the-rails-scope-creep-explained/
1•phillsav•26m ago•0 comments

New project idea and need company to Adopt it

https://www.google.com/
1•abdelazizElhor•30m ago•1 comments

Permission Systems for Enterprise That Scale

https://eliocapella.com/blog/permission-systems-for-enterprise/
2•eliocs•33m ago•0 comments

US sanctions EU government officials behind the DSA

https://mastodon.social/@fj/115773761468906515
4•pojntfx•40m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Free QR Code Generator – Dynamic Tracking and Custom Logo – QrBarKit

https://qrbarkit.com/
1•daniel0306•42m ago•0 comments

Microsoft rolls out hardware-accelerated BitLocker in Windows 11

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-rolls-out-hardware-accelerated-bitlocker...
1•thunderbong•46m ago•1 comments

LongCat Avatar: Turn Any Photo into a Talking Video

https://www.longcatavatar.net/
1•chengzeyi•47m ago•1 comments

Slate AX: Wi-Fi 6 Gigabit travel router

https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-axt1800/
1•cl3misch•47m ago•0 comments

Unintentional Type Theory

https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/unintentional+type+theory
1•measurablefunc•48m ago•0 comments

Google 2025 recap: Research breakthroughs of the year

https://blog.google/technology/ai/2025-research-breakthroughs/
2•Anon84•53m ago•0 comments

UK to ban deepfake AI 'nudification' apps

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq8dp2y0z7wo
3•GaryBluto•55m ago•1 comments

Ten mistakes marred firewall upgrade at telco, contributing to 2 deaths

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/19/optus_emergency_outages_cause_report/
1•GaryBluto•57m ago•0 comments

Airplane lands itself after in-flight emergency, a first for aviation automation

https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/23/us/airplane-lands-itself-first-aviation-automation
1•breve•58m ago•1 comments

Starlink satellite fails, polluting orbit with debris and falling toward Earth

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/23/starlink_satellite_fails_debris/
4•beardyw•1h ago•0 comments

Is This Normal? My new projector's picture is dull even though I paid for 4K

1•SorabAlavi•1h ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Anybody here ever write apps for Windows Phone?

1•ge96•1h ago•0 comments

What happened next:how a rape and murder case was solved 58 years later

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/dec/24/what-happened-next-how-a-shocking-and-case-w...
2•zeristor•1h ago•2 comments

I built an AI app for deep research, reverse image search, and price comparison

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/claritycheck-deep-search-ai/id6747683917
1•mamunaso•1h ago•2 comments

Trump Admin Reinvents US Digital Services Program After Elon Musk Fired Experts

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/12/23/trump-admin-reinvents-us-digital-services-program-after-elon-...
3•beardyw•1h ago•0 comments

Appark

https://appark.ai/en
1•xuechen006•1h ago•0 comments

Next JavaScript app is hacked, you just don't know it yet

https://audits.blockhacks.io/audit/your-next-js-app-is-already-hacked
2•block_hacks•1h ago•1 comments

The dpkg shell implementation (by Ian A. Murdock)

https://www.dpkg.org/history/ancient/dpkg-0.93beta.sh
1•fisheuler•1h ago•0 comments

Nobody knows how large software products work

https://www.seangoedecke.com/nobody-knows-how-software-products-work/
1•danielfalbo•1h ago•0 comments