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: A police department for your Claude Code agents

https://github.com/varmabudharaju/agent-pd/blob/master/README.md
1•softie123•41s ago•0 comments

How Worried Should You Be About Climate Change?

https://mishaglouberman.substack.com/p/how-worried-should-you-be-about-climate
1•smartmic•1m ago•0 comments

PhysicsIntern: From an Autonomous Benchmark-Runner to a Research Sidekick

https://huggingface.co/blog/dlouapre/physics-intern
1•ForgotIdAgain•1m ago•0 comments

Jiff

https://lib.rs/crates/jiff
1•tosh•1m ago•0 comments

Viscribe – OSS image analysis tools for AI agents

https://github.com/itsperini/viscribe
2•itsperini•1m ago•0 comments

The secrets and truth inside Chungking Mansions

https://multimedia.scmp.com/chungking-mansions/index.html
1•keiferski•1m ago•0 comments

Israel expanded propaganda contract with Trump's former campaign manager

https://jackpoulson.substack.com/p/israel-expanded-propaganda-contract
2•untiledsource•2m ago•0 comments

Xbox CEO Says Current Margins 'Cannot Continue' in Public Letter to Staff

https://www.engadget.com/2191897/xbox-ceo-says-current-margins-cannot-continue-in-public-letter-t...
2•BeetleB•4m ago•0 comments

DDD: Dopamine Driven Development

https://johncodes.com/archive/2025/10-12-ddd/
1•jpmcb•4m ago•0 comments

Israel's Paid U.S. Influencer Network Exposed – – Imemc News

https://imemc.org/article/israels-paid-u-s-influencer-network-exposed/
2•untiledsource•5m ago•0 comments

Iran threatens Elon Musk's companies in Middle East: Iranian state media

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/11/iran-threatens-elon-musks-companies-in-middle-east-iranian-state-...
1•u1hcw9nx•6m ago•0 comments

The Post-Transformer Edge: LFM 2.5 vs. MT-LNN (AwareLiquid)

https://github.com/everest-an/M1
1•EverestAn•6m ago•0 comments

Debootstrapping without archeology: stacked implementations in Camlboot

https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.09231
1•fanf2•6m ago•0 comments

Euro-Office must default to ODF to be considered "genuinely European"

https://www.neowin.net/news/euro-office-must-default-to-odf-to-be-considered-genuinely-european-l...
1•bundie•6m ago•0 comments

VDBBench 2.0: now measures cost, not just performance

https://zilliz.com/blog/vdbbench-adds-cost-aware-benchmarking-for-vector-databases
1•Fendy•7m ago•1 comments

Velxio 3.0 – An AI hardware Agent that designs circuits an emulator

https://github.com/davidmonterocrespo24/velxio/releases/tag/v3.0.0
1•dmcrespo•7m ago•0 comments

AI Economics for Dummies

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ai-economics-for-dummies
1•amatheus•7m ago•0 comments

Right to Repair activist sues Samsung for not honouring warranty on a 4TB SSD

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/louis-rossman-threatens-to-take-samsung-to-court-...
1•thisislife2•8m ago•0 comments

Rust-like compiler pipeline to resolve Matlab language semantics

https://runmat.com/blog/inside-runmat-runtime-compiler-pipeline
1•finbarr1987•9m ago•1 comments

Swift Runs Everywhere. I Checked

https://aleahim.com/blog/swift-runs-everywhere/
3•tracymiranda•11m ago•1 comments

Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did

https://www.righto.com/2012/02/apple-didnt-revolutionize-power.html
2•geerlingguy•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Real Job Check – paste a job post, get a cited real-or-scam verdict

https://realjobcheck.com/
1•biotechdude•13m ago•0 comments

GPT-4.1's sampling distribution for random numbers is not uniform

https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1tn5s18/oc_i_asked_gpt_to_pick_a_random_number_...
1•bear_with_me•14m ago•0 comments

Open source AI currency whitepaper

https://github.com/lehanepatrick148-cloud/cipher-whitepaper
1•ciphercphr•15m ago•1 comments

LLMs are not an acceptable high level language

https://federicopereiro.com/llm-not-high/
1•swah•15m ago•0 comments

There Is Life Before and After Main in Rust

https://grack.com/blog/2026/06/11/life-before-main/
1•mmastrac•15m ago•0 comments

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire

https://unskippablecutscene.substack.com/p/the-roof-the-roof-the-roof-is-on
1•peoplelizard•17m ago•0 comments

Codex usage grows after Fable nerf model release

https://twitter.com/i/status/2064727949274955953
1•m3h•18m ago•0 comments

The Trouble with Font Previews

https://unsung.aresluna.org/the-trouble-with-font-previews/
2•abnercoimbre•19m ago•0 comments

Building Agents Without Harness-Engineering

https://rajitkhanna.com/agents/
2•rajit•19m ago•0 comments