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

Show HN: Find the Shortest Path in 24 steps

https://pathology.thinky.gg/level/hi19hi19/against
1•k2xl•20s ago•0 comments

Security tools inside coding agents get ignored unless we do things

https://www.boringappsec.com/p/edition-34-a-consensus-is-finally
1•joj123•4m ago•0 comments

You all think it's normal to sit behind a laptop all day

1•shoman3003•5m ago•0 comments

Yunwu

https://yunwu.ai/
2•handfuloflight•17m ago•0 comments

Wan Streamer v0.1: End-to-End Real-Time Interactive Foundation Models

https://wan-streamer.com/
1•ilreb•20m ago•0 comments

Powerful back-to-back earthquakes strike Venezuela, collapsing buildings

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c621z18wznet
1•tartoran•24m ago•1 comments

Projectlens v1.0.6 released, supports npkill

https://www.npmjs.com/package/projectlens
1•dagmawibabi•25m ago•1 comments

Alternatives to Nested If Function

https://medium.com/@crispomwangi/7-alternatives-to-nested-if-function-a9cb07f3df1e
1•andsoitis•35m ago•0 comments

LXM: Better Splittable Pseudorandom Number Generators (and Almost as Fast) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXh86oA-WOE
1•matt_d•35m ago•0 comments

The Unbearable Cheapness of Open Weight Models

https://jamesoclaire.com/2026/06/25/the-unbearable-cheapness-of-open-weight-models/
3•ddxv•37m ago•0 comments

Europe swelters under deadly 'Omega' heatwave, more records broken

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/power-cuts-france-leave-thousands-sweltering-amid-sc...
3•rawgabbit•38m ago•2 comments

This One's Not AI

https://blog.tacoda.dev/this-ones-not-ai-992c95537790
2•tacoda•39m ago•2 comments

Calculus in Coinductive Form (1998)

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/705675
1•measurablefunc•43m ago•0 comments

Tldr we built the fastest and most compact embedded vector database in the world

https://github.com/Egoist-Machines/LodeDB
1•erinmeryl•45m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Where is our profession (programmer) going?

6•syntaxbush•47m ago•1 comments

China's Electric Vehicle Exports Reach Record High in May

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-24/china-s-electric-vehicle-exports-reach-record-...
2•xbmcuser•47m ago•0 comments

Home Feed does not show releases

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/146124
1•oaix•47m ago•0 comments

Supeintelligence Future

1•Siarchitect•49m ago•3 comments

Satteri: A Markdown pipeline forged in Rust for the JavaScript world

https://satteri.bruits.org/
1•handfuloflight•56m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Drive your already-logged-in Chrome from any AI agent

https://github.com/leeguooooo/chrome-use
1•leeguoo•56m ago•0 comments

Medical students are using popular research tool to pump out misleading studies

https://www.science.org/content/article/medical-students-are-using-popular-research-tool-pump-out...
2•rndsignals•58m ago•0 comments

Chinese scientists unveil glowing Avatar-like plants that could light cities

https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/04/02/chinese-scientists-unveil-glowing-avatar-like-plants-tha...
3•thunderbong•1h ago•0 comments

Are you better than the screen watchers?

https://sailsandcommas.com/2026/05/30/are-you-better-than-the-screen-watchers/
1•Curiositry•1h ago•0 comments

Cloudflare launched self-managed OAuth for all

https://blog.cloudflare.com/oauth-for-all/
15•terryds•1h ago•2 comments

Libaui – Tk clone in XCB and C

https://github.com/onanaxm/libaui
2•onuelito•1h ago•0 comments

Zombie unicorns are haunting Silicon Valley

https://www.economist.com/business/2026/06/21/zombie-unicorns-are-haunting-silicon-valley
2•andsoitis•1h ago•2 comments

Electronics can now be printed onto living tissues

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/06/24/electronics-can-now-be-printed-onto-l...
3•andsoitis•1h ago•0 comments

Scbkr – an owner-signed responsibility-chain workbench for local LLMs

https://github.com/HIJO790401/scbkr-local-responsibility-model
2•look888•1h ago•0 comments

SystemVerilog

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SystemVerilog
1•handfuloflight•1h ago•0 comments

Accidental Anonymity

https://macwright.com/2026/06/24/accidental-anonymity
1•maxutility•1h ago•0 comments