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•9mo ago

Comments

panstromek•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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_•9mo 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_•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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

China Targeted Downing Street Phones for Years

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/27/chinalinked_hackers_accused_of_yearslong/
1•qwertyuiop_•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Boston, the Videogame

https://bostonvideogame.com/
1•piratebroadcast•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Pegasus3301 – a Cicada 3301–inspired online puzzle game

https://pegasus3301.com/
1•Perseus_•2m ago•0 comments

Loops

https://loops.video/about
1•doener•2m ago•0 comments

We Cut Token Usage by 83% and Still Hit 90%+ Retrieval Precision

https://www.byterover.dev/blog/maintain-90-retrieval-precision-with-83-token-reduction-file-based...
3•Arindam1729•6m ago•0 comments

LibrePCB 2.0 with new slint.rs based UI

https://librepcb.org/blog/2026-01-28_release_2.0.0/
1•rnestler•6m ago•0 comments

Claude Code Tips

https://agenticcoding.substack.com/p/32-claude-code-tips-from-basics-to
1•ykev•7m ago•0 comments

America: Re-Becoming Exceptional Again

https://gist.github.com/avkcode/c819ae510da669da1d933556fc96ada7
1•KyleVlaros•7m ago•0 comments

Pillbugs Are Getting Top Dollar Online. Poachers Have Noticed

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/climate/isopods-pillbugs-for-sale-online.html
2•leephillips•10m ago•0 comments

Stop Using Pseudo-Types

https://f2r.github.io/en/stop-using-pseudo-types.html
1•speckx•11m ago•0 comments

Ollama RLM Influenced App

https://jimliddle.github.io/Ollama-RLM-Analyzer/
1•JAL_UK•11m ago•1 comments

Russia's 1.2M casualties in Ukraine dwarf all its conflicts since WW2

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/28/europe/russia-ukraine-casualties-csis-report-intl-hnk-ml
2•RickJWagner•14m ago•1 comments

Tell your audience what your blog posts are about as early as possible

https://www.marginalia.nu/log/a_129_finding_audience/
2•marginalia_nu•15m ago•0 comments

Software is forking into content and utility. Nothing in between survives

https://moldandyeast.substack.com/p/memes-and-machines
1•rmrmrm•17m ago•0 comments

People Hate Data Centers, So the Industry Is Spending Millions to Rebrand Them

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/01/data-centers-public-opposition-industry-advertising-...
1•cdrnsf•17m ago•0 comments

Online Gambling Paradox: Cryptographic Verification and Behavioral Harm

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6065213
1•7777777phil•19m ago•0 comments

AI agent skills are scattered everywhere, so I indexed 10k

https://ai-skills.io/
1•edvaldodfreitas•20m ago•0 comments

The Refragmentation

https://paulgraham.com/re.html
1•Anon84•27m ago•0 comments

Amazon confirms 16,000 job cuts after accidental email

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2ywzxlxnlo
8•c-oreills•27m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Prism.Tools – Now 100% Offline capable

1•BLGardner•27m ago•0 comments

The Productivity Ceiling of AI Coding Tools

https://pushtoprod.substack.com/p/stop-babysitting-your-ai-coding-agents
1•sciurus•28m ago•0 comments

My Ridiculously Robust Photo Management System (Immich Edition)

https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-photo-management-system-immich-edition/
1•jmathai•29m ago•0 comments

What a Password Spray Attack Can Teach You About CIAM Integration Needs (2025)

https://ciamweekly.substack.com/p/what-a-password-spray-attack-can
1•mooreds•30m ago•0 comments

Dozens of CDC vaccination databases have been frozen under RFK Jr.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/01/rfk-jr-lets-cdc-vaccination-data-rot-dozens-of-databases-f...
3•oldnetguy•30m ago•0 comments

SkyPilot at Shopify: Multi-cloud GPUs without the pain (2026)

https://shopify.engineering/skypilot
1•tosh•31m ago•0 comments

The Seduction (and Folly) of Rollups, Points, and (Most) Time Tracking

https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-403-the-seduction-and-folly-of
1•mooreds•31m ago•0 comments

ImageFK

https://imagefk.com
1•zhouhua•31m ago•0 comments

AmiGUS sound card on my Amiga 3000

https://www.epsilonsworld.com/2026/01/amigus-sound-card-on-my-amiga-3000.html
1•doener•32m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Hardware Setup for a Beginner Tinkerer

1•aneeqdhk•32m ago•0 comments

Show HN: FLUX.2 Klein – Sub-Second AI Image Generation – 4B and 9B Models

https://flux2klein.co
1•evon0231•32m ago•0 comments