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Antarctica Starts Here.
Personal blog · drwho.virtadpt.net/archivesystemsprogramming
Antarctica Starts Here. is a personal blog at drwho.virtadpt.net about systems and programming. Since 2011, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 8 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-22, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog's hosted paper showing that the x86 mov instruction is Turing complete, and an archived post about large-scale neural modelling (SPAUN). The comments cite these as sources without assessing the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The personal homepage of The Doctor.
Most-linked posts?
- /files/mov.pdf3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-05-19
What Hacker News says?
This paper ( `mov` is Turing Complete ) [1] and this StackOverflow post [2] about why this is possible is probably more interesting to most people than the actual implementation. [1]: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/files/mov.pdf [2]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61048788/why-is-mov-turi...
Comment linking /files/mov.pdf
on “Movfuscator: Compile C into only mov instructions”Submitted MOV is Turing-complete (2013) [pdf] as a story · 66 points
HN discussionIt's particularly bad with x86 due to the enormous variety of encodings and prefixes accumulated over the last half-century in the architecture. For example, the two instructions: mov rax, [table + rax*8] mov [table + rax*8], rax plus some lookup tables make a Turing-complete subset: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/files/mov.pdf (With jumping via conditional faulting done with an invalid MOV, of course.) There are many o…
Comment linking /files/mov.pdf
on “Undocumented x86 instructions to control the CPU at the microarchitecture level [pdf]”Submitted Building a Weather Station as a story · 3 points
HN discussionNot exactly news, I've been using it for years. Very useful for automating things like cutting and pasting from pdf's. I'd really like to see someone hook it up to SPAUN. What's SPAUN? I'll let the Doctor explain http://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2012/12/09/large-scale-neu... http://nengo.ca/build-a-brain/spaunvideos
Comment linking /archive/2012/12/09/large-scale-neurosimulation
on “Sikuli: Write scripts using GUI buttons and screenshots”Submitted Setting Up a Private Matrix Server as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHmm, given that "mov is Turing-complete" [0], is it possible to get around the requirement that loops must be fully unrolled? Obviously you couldn't tell if your algorithm was finished, but if you could ask the key holder if the algorithm had completed or needed more work, you could theoretically compute any algorithm. What am I missing? [append] Perhaps, could you create a "fully homomorphically encrypted" 6502, wh…
Comment linking /files/mov.pdf
on “Google’s Fully Homomorphic Encryption Compiler – A Primer”Submitted SOPA review and circumvention overview as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
