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Show HN: Impossible Machines: declaratively program the physical world

https://www.impossiblemachines.xyz
23•bhaprayan•18h ago
Hey all —

Sharing a thought experiment I put together. The premise: what might declarative programming feel like for the physical world?

We’re already familiar with this paradigm in software land (eg SQL etc where we declare what we want and the execution engine figures out how).

I didn’t have access to an actuator so I mocked up the concept in software. The way it works is you demonstrate the effect and the system figures out how to achieve it. So say you want to ring a bell and you have a crank. The system will find a way to connect the two. If you add obstacles it figures out how to work around them (runs a constraint solver runs behind the scenes).

I think what’s interesting about this is being able to think about the problem at a higher level of abstraction, with the system figuring out a way to achieve the intended effect.

Anyways, curious to read reactions, feedback, and interesting ideas on how to extend this!

Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed

https://www.kimi.ai/blog/kimi-k3-1-pro
274•Jowsey•1h ago•151 comments

Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone

https://blog.calif.io/p/iphone
414•pavel_lishin•2h ago•255 comments

UUIDv7 doesn't have the properties you think it does

https://alexsci.com/blog/uuidv7-is-weird/
47•ibobev•1h ago•18 comments

Apple Music 404 Not Found

https://music.apple.com/this-url-doesnt-exist
53•frizlab•6h ago•19 comments

Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you

https://edjefferson.com/localwiki/
1004•sohkamyung•19h ago•195 comments

The Real Kevin Bacon

https://pudding.cool/2026/10/kevin-bacon/
87•xnx•3d ago•28 comments

The Missed Opportunities of Sonic 06

https://isaacmarovitz.com/posts/sonic-06/
36•ibobev•1h ago•3 comments

Canadians are running out of time to oppose Bill C-22

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/canadians-are-running-out-time-oppose-dangerous-c-22-survei...
108•hn_acker•19h ago•31 comments

How Is Music Possible

https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/music
26•rafaelc•1h ago•14 comments

I turned my TV into a Game Boy Color with a Pokemon town as my home screen

https://twitter.com/robbietilton/status/2111936458923851923
9•scrambled•56m ago•5 comments

Show HN: Impossible Machines: declaratively program the physical world

https://www.impossiblemachines.xyz
25•bhaprayan•18h ago•0 comments

Time Nuts (2005)

http://leapsecond.com/time-nuts.htm
17•jacquesm•1h ago•10 comments

Total Historian

https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/total-historian/
11•benbreen•2h ago•1 comments

LISP Comes of Age (1980)

https://microship.com/lisp-comes-of-age/
29•so-cal-schemer•23h ago•10 comments

Docker is weird

https://codeandcake.dev/posts/2026-10-22-docker-is-weird
782•psxuaw•18h ago•317 comments

Show HN: Swurf – Swipe through the real web

https://swurf.org/
13•webtjb096•11h ago•3 comments

Show HN: Searching for optimal strategies in a puzzle game with chance (Drop7)

https://drop7.dev
4•primitivesuave•1h ago•0 comments

Can we replace a $150k Looker with a bucket of HTML files?

https://david.lequin.dev/blog/bi-software-is-dead/
35•skadamat•1h ago•21 comments

Air Purifiers as White Noise Machines

https://www.jefftk.com/p/air-purifiers-as-white-noise-machines
6•luu•1h ago•0 comments

The foolishness of "natural language programming" (1978)

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html
333•xiaoyu2006•17h ago•222 comments

Gemma-4-26B-A4B with 39-69% less thinking at same accuracy

https://bottlecapai.com/post/thinkingcap-gemma-4-26b/
46•armcat•3h ago•2 comments

Ask HN: If the models are so good, why doesn't OpenAI just start 100 companies?

461•ex-aws-dude•21h ago•506 comments

Show HN: OnKey – I'm a bad singer, so I built an app to show where I'm off-key

https://github.com/dsmurrell/onkey
174•dsmurrell•1d ago•74 comments

Animations for System Builders

https://brooker.co.za/blog/2026/10/23/animations.html
4•KraftyOne•1h ago•0 comments

We have traits at home

https://www.axelmagn.com/blog/202610-zig-traits/
28•Ygg2•19h ago•6 comments

The alien space of science: Coherent but cognitively unavailable directions

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01092
180•martincsweiss•1d ago•70 comments

OpenShell – A safe, private runtime for fleets of autonomous AI agents

https://github.com/NVIDIA/OpenShell
482•niemandhier•1d ago•206 comments

How does Fable 5.1 hide messages in images?

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WHEQps5PK8LrrcTAb/how-does-fable-5-1-hide-messages-in-images
181•gmays•20h ago•61 comments

LLMs are making formal software verification feasible at a much larger scale

https://www.anthropic.com/research/formal-verification
429•johnbender•19h ago•264 comments

An alignment assessment of the UK AISI cybertesting incident

https://www.anthropic.com/research/alignment-assessment-ukaisi
10•olwmc•3h ago•1 comments