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•11mo ago

Comments

panstromek•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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_•11mo 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_•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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

Eating more fruits and vegetables tied to unexpected lung cancer risk

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/04/260417224454.htm
1•amichail•11s ago•0 comments

How (and why) we rewrote our production C++ front end infrastructure in Rust

https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2026/04/17/how-and-why-we-rewrote-our-production-c-frontend-inf...
1•maxloh•1m ago•0 comments

Optimizing Ruby Path Methods

https://byroot.github.io/ruby/performance/2026/04/18/faster-paths.html
1•weaksauce•2m ago•0 comments

Wishes for Ron Conway

https://om.co/2026/04/18/wishes-for-ron-conway/
2•rmason•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Coelanox – auditable inference runtime in Rust (BERT runs today)

https://www.coelanox.com/
1•Shark1n4Suit•7m ago•0 comments

The largest collection of black markers

https://www.prune.dirt.fyi/p/prune-getting-high-on-your-own-supply
1•zeech•8m ago•0 comments

Nuke Engineer Rants

https://nukerants.fi/index.php/cover
1•DamonHD•9m ago•0 comments

PostgreSQL production incident caused by transaction ID wraparound

https://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/i-too-have-a-production-story-a-downtime-caused-by-post...
1•tcp_handshaker•10m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built a tool that reads 2000 health studies a day so you dont have to

https://www.polivora.com
1•ledil•16m ago•1 comments

Shiplog – Push changelogs from your terminal or let AI write them

https://shiplog.page/
1•EgorNaumenko•16m ago•0 comments

How Unique Are Mythos's Hacking Capabilities?

https://jonathanpgabor.substack.com/p/how-unique-are-mythoss-hacking-capabilities
1•BenPace•17m ago•1 comments

How Long Can You Keep Peptides After Reconstitution?

https://www.robustenough.com/p/psychedelics-arent-just-serotonin
1•BenPace•18m ago•0 comments

Why Do LLMs Suck at Editing?

https://lifeimprovementschemes.substack.com/p/why-do-llms-suck-at-editing
1•BenPace•18m ago•2 comments

How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?

https://crescita.cc/
1•modelcroissant•20m ago•1 comments

Output Isn't Design

https://twitter.com/karrisaarinen/status/2045257582470983691
1•rmason•21m ago•0 comments

Urban Exploration Resource

https://www.uer.ca/
1•Cider9986•21m ago•0 comments

Rare 1897 Film Discovered Features the First On-Screen Appearance of a Robot

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/rare-1897-film-discovered-in-an-old-trunk-in-michigan-f...
1•rmason•22m ago•0 comments

IIDX and Tetris lovers, here's a puzzle game for you

https://kully.itch.io/complete-the-square
1•akully•22m ago•1 comments

Zevism

https://ancient-forums.com/
1•yhugfdrthh•23m ago•0 comments

Great white sharks are overheating

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16042026/great-white-sharks-ocean-warming/
2•Cider9986•24m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Has zooming out helped you deal with AI anxiety?

1•ItsClo688•24m ago•0 comments

Lessons from running 14 AI agents in production for 6 months

https://orgtp.com/blog/the-weight-is-wrong-without-it
1•dsteel•33m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How can I support the AI resistance movement financially?

6•roschdal•35m ago•4 comments

I built a simple uptime monitoring tool focused on fewer false alerts

https://pulsorup.com/
1•shura_dev•37m ago•1 comments

Defending Our Consciousness Against the Algorithms

https://nautil.us/defending-our-consciousness-against-the-algorithms-1279260
3•Brajeshwar•38m ago•0 comments

Accelerating Medical Treatments for Serious Mental Illness

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/04/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-is-acceleratin...
1•bkudria•40m ago•0 comments

How are you getting your first 100 paying teams for a Slack/Google Chat tool?

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-are-you-getting-your-first-100-paying-teams-for-a-slack-goo...
1•nehaagoyal•42m ago•0 comments

CrossOver 26.1 released for Linux and macOS

https://old.reddit.com/user/Wine_Reviews/comments/1sp6xl3/crossover_261_released_for_linux_and_mac/
1•twickline•42m ago•0 comments

The cost of inconsistent standups (and how we fixed it)

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/the-hidden-cost-of-inconsistent-standups-and-how-we-fixed-it-wb...
1•nehaagoyal•42m ago•0 comments

OpenAI Pulls Back from Stargate Norway Data Center Deal as Microsoft Takes Over

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/openai-stargate-norway-project-microsoft.html
1•ninjahawk1•43m ago•0 comments