MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by no-name-here | 2026-03-06 09:57:01+00:00
1. It seems like a leader would do these things if they believed in the morals/ethics of them; is the argument that leaders should avoid moral or ethical considerations and instead be solely guided by profit maximization?

2. Additionally, it’s likely that the government’s actions here will be challenged legally and might be found to be illegal, so there’s also the question of whether companies should adjust their business practices in order to avoid potentially illegal punishment by the government.
Show HN: NeoMud – A multiplayer dungeon game with AI agents that QA and playtest
by terrymaster | 2026-03-06 09:57:09+00:00
I've been building a modern take on a MUD (multiplayer text RPG) with Claude Code over the past few weeks. Kotlin server, Android client, React-based world editor. The usual hobby project stuff.

The interesting part is the agent pipeline that grew around it:

- A /game-designer agent reads all the world data files, models the combat math, and produces balance proposals with specific JSON changes
- A /playtest agent connects to the running game server over WebSocket, creates a character, explores, fights NPCs, loots items, and files GitHub issues for bugs it encounters
- A /worldmaker agent drives the world editor in a real browser via Playwright — clicks through zone editing, NPC configuration, item creation, and files issues when things break
- A /bugfixer agent picks up those issues and submits fixes

Each agent has persistent memory across sessions, so the game designer remembers its previous balance audits and the playtester remembers what areas it's already explored.

The game itself is a modern take on '90s MUDs like MajorMUD — tick-based combat, NPC behaviors (wander, patrol, pursuit), spells, skills, stealth, loot tables, vendors, trainers. 4 zones, 25 rooms, 17 NPCs. Everything is data-driven JSON — the world editor exports .nmd bundles (ZIP archives) that the server loads at startup, similar to DOOM's WAD files.

The world editor has a visual zone map where you place rooms on a shared coordinate grid, click to connect exits, and configure NPC patrol routes by clicking rooms on the map. All zones share one global coordinate space so rooms can't overlap across zones.

~45k lines of code, 830 tests across server/shared/maker, 460 AI-generated assets (images and audio). The agents have filed about 40 GitHub issues so far, most of which are legitimate.

It's a hobby project — combat balance is rough, there's no quest system yet, and it needs real multiplayer stress testing. But the feedback loop of building features and then having agents test them in the actual running application has been a surprisingly effective workflow.
by lproven | 2026-03-06 09:57:14+00:00
As I understand it, Loongson is very close to MIPS. I think I remember reading that just 4 patented instructions were removed from the MIPS ISA, and I am not even sure that they were replaced.

If so, that means that new MIPS-family hardware is being made today. And ISTM that represents a new target market or audience for this.
by StingyJelly | 2026-03-06 09:57:17+00:00
>instagram and the like are uniquely and disastrously harmful

-to both adults and children. What kind of worked for cigarettes was the huge tax so why not create a "mental health tax" based on the number of users x some addictiveness score and let meta either fix instagram, pay their users a therapy or pass the cost to them.

Instead this "protecting children" by giving them "degraded" experience will only motivate them to bypass the age verification and destroy the statistical evidence of the harm those platforms cause.
by m000 | 2026-03-06 09:57:53+00:00
Maybe it's high time for some regulation?

E.g. EU enforced mandatory USB-C charging from 2025, and pushes for ending production of combustion engine cars by 2035. Why not just make ECC RAM mandatory in new computers starting e.g. from 2030?

AMD is already one step away from being compliant. So, it's not an outlandish requirement. And regulating will also force Intel to cut their BS, or risk losing the market.
by nephihaha | 2026-03-06 09:57:56+00:00
They will probably end up following the Australian model where it is funded directly by taxation. Of course this will undermine the BBC's supposed quasi-independence.

The BBC is ridiculously slow to pick up on trends. BBC pop radio (Radio 1) only came in as a response to pirate radio. Its streaming services aren't as good as they could be, and they have the double paradox of showing the same content over and over (such as "Dad's Army" made before I was born), while keeping a lot of classic content unavailable.
by elevatortrim | 2026-03-06 09:59:27+00:00
Fair enough.

This particular article, I would say compherensive, but lacking substance.

The very promise of this article, that people primarily paying for brand name is simply wrong and it does not take too much time to spend in watch circles to know this.

What people pay is not performance/features/value, obviously. But the prime factor is also not the brand name. With the exception of Rolex, practically nobody knows if your watch costed $100 or $100,000.

What people pay for is artistry, reliability, and level-of-polish. These all have a cost that justify the price of the watch. Nobody pays $10,000 for a watch that could be produced for $100 just because of its brand name.
by dagss | 2026-03-06 09:59:31+00:00
Not commenting on this specific law, but I do believe the premise that children should be exposed to everything is wrong, and that the overall view on humans in this post is naive.

These days, exposing an immature brain to the raw internet is basically just handing the brain and personality over to be molded by large corporations and algorithms.

And humans have never been rational, self-contained actors that self-educate perfectly when exposed to information, converging on an objectively good and constructive worldview. Quite the opposite.

Humans develop in relation to one another, increasingly in relation to algorithms, and sometimes become messed up, and sometimes those mess-ups would have been avoidable had relations or exposure been different.

In fact I would say you as a parent is not doing your job if you are not trying to make sure a 12 year old isn't pulled into, say, an anorexia rabbit hole.

Whether that is best done through making sure exposure doesn't happen, or through exposure and education, will depend on the child and parent (and society) in question. What worked best for a highly rational self-reliant geek teen may simply be a disaster for another human. And what worked for an upper class highly educated family may not work for a poor family with alcoholized parents or working 18 hours a day to make ends meet.

And parents are not perfect -- if all parents were perfect, there also would be no alcoholics and drug addicts or poverty or war. But people are imperfect, and it's natural to make laws to mitigate at least the worst effects of that. (Again, haven't read this specific law proposal, but found the worldview of OP a bit naive.)
by awesomeMilou | 2026-03-06 09:59:36+00:00
But they are?

And it's a fallacy to assume that critical thinking is something that you're born with. In addition to the media landscape being completely ingrained into society. I can't really escape recommender engines anymore when consuming media.

If your exposure to media is curated since you were born, how are you going to tell if you're being deceived? It's pretty much the allegory of the cave.
by arjie | 2026-03-06 09:59:48+00:00
Usually to make that theory fit the facts, the facts of who is individualist vs. who is collectivist need to be massaged greatly. I would think, however, that most people would say that the USA is much more individualist than most. And we're coming up on about a century of America as the world's pre-eminent power and perhaps the half-century of America as the undisputed world hegemon.

In the end, all the smartphones, and the second amendment, and the male loneliness crisis, and all the terrible terrible signs of a society in decline did not stop the US from building 1100 F-35s, or creating all 3 of the world's most recent paradigm shifts (the Internet, the smartphone, LLM-based AI).

I think one model that has some use here (I lie - really it's just one I'm fond of) is that in an explore-exploit scenario, during the periods where exploring has greatest returns individualist societies perform better because distributed search is more effective, and in periods where exploitation has greatest returns collectivist societies with simple execution structures lose less to interaction costs and therefore outperform. The poor man's Coase's Theory of the Firm.

The biggest problem with it, however, is that only China has demonstrated this. Therefore, we're faced with that fun tweet:

> cars have windows and can move. houses have windows and can’t move. so it’s not the windows that make the car go, it’s something else entirely
by roryirvine | 2026-03-06 10:00:33+00:00
Yep, pretty much.

This website is a bit too hyperactive for my taste, and I can't imagine how they hope to make enough money from it to satisfy the VCs. But Bubbletea really is a great TUI and it's properly open source - so I'm happy to enjoy it while it lasts.

I'm with you on the Turbo Vision love, though. Honestly, it felt we were getting to such a good place in the early/mid 90s with beautiful, well-thought-out TUIs becoming the norm.

In retrospect, the universality of basic curses/ncurses on Unix/Linux (together with the death of DOS) was a real a step back - trapping us for a couple of decades in a local pessimum. TUIs languished, and most of us moved to a mix of CLIs and GUIs.

(There's an MIT-licensed port of Turbo Vision available now at https://github.com/magiblot/tvision - pity that it's a couple of decades too late!)
by angry_octet | 2026-03-06 10:01:41+00:00
Why would game companies be paying for rendering on my computer? My computer can fantasise player specific details, in a palette created by game artists, and and render them itself.

Game artists could indeed be working in real time in MMORPGs to tweak the world, impresarios of the shared experience. Paying for live human shaped performance art is a great way to keep human creativity central to the experience.
by camgunz | 2026-03-06 10:01:45+00:00
(the person you originally replied to is also me, tl;dr: I think engineers don't think they're authoring, but companies do)

The core feature of generative AI is the human isn't the author of the output. Authoring something and generating something with generative AI aren't equivalent processes; you know this because if you try and get a person who's fully on board w/ generative AI to not use it, they will argue the old process isn't the same as the new process and they don't want to go back. The actual output is irrelevant; authorship is a process.

But, to your point, I think you're right: companies super think their engineers have the rights to the output they assign to them. If it wasn't clear before it's clear now: engineers shouldn't be passing off generated output as authored output. They have to have the right to assign the totality of their output to their employer (same as using MIT code or whatever), so that it ultimately belongs to them or they have a valid license to use it. If they break that agreement, they break their contract with the company.
by 10729287 | 2026-03-06 10:01:46+00:00
Lepton (https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix) to the rescue. I really hope they, or someone else, will allow us to tweak the interface and come back to what we need on our productivity oriented devices, aka computers.

I've been using Vivaldi lately. It's nice but I miss some shortcuts from firefox, and it's still Google Behind.

I feel betrayed by Firefox and depressed about the internet to come a little bit more every day.
by claud_ia | 2026-03-06 10:02:54+00:00
The tension is real, but I think it's the same trust model problem that browser extensions solved years ago — just re-emerging with sharper stakes. The key insight is that 'inside the page' doesn't mean 'unlimited': you can constrain the agent to a declared action space (a list of semantic intents your app exposes) rather than letting it operate on arbitrary DOM mutations. Essentially the app becomes the API surface, and the agent calls into it rather than scripting the UI directly. The session inheritance is then a feature, not a risk, because the agent operates exactly at the permission level of the authenticated user — it can't escalate beyond what a human clicking around could do. The harder unsolved problem is prompt injection: if the page content itself can influence the agent's instructions (e.g., a user-generated comment telling the agent to 'click delete account'), you need the same kind of sandboxing logic that email clients use to strip active content.
by amtamt | 2026-03-06 10:03:04+00:00
Say a community builds a hall with an explicit intent of community use only, led by single person or a group, and then a person/ a group is appointed as a caretaker. Caretaker of the community hall decides unilaterally to convert the hall into a business convention center, razing old building to ground and rebuilding, disregarding community wishes, to make hall business friendly. How would you react to this situation? Caretaker has the ownership of the community assets, including the ground on which the hall is standing?

my understanding of the situation is:

Is the caretaker paying from his own pocket to maintain the hall? no

Is the caretaker paying from his own pocket for community usage of the hall? no

Is the caretaker spending time to maintain the community hall? yes

Is caretaker obliged to spend time on community hall? no

Is caretaker free to stop spending time on community hall? yes.

Is caretaker free to raze current hall, build new hall on same ground for new purposes WITH community agreement? YES

Is caretaker free to raze current hall, build new hall on same ground for new purposes WITHOUT community agreement (even if paying all the bill)? NO

Is caretaker free to build another similar hall someplace else? YES

Reasoning of your comment is of someone who is hell bent on staking claims on community resources (like big companies) without having slightest concern of the wishes or well-being of the community. Not sure of the commenter's motive either, given the new account with just two comments, supporting such blatant disregard of basic human decency.
Show HN: I built an AI-powered advert – is this the future of advertising?
by nickk81 | 2026-03-06 10:04:37+00:00
I've been thinking about how AI will change advertising. Instead of static banners or landing pages, what if an ad was a conversation?
I built a demo to explore this: a fictional luxury EV brand called Vela, with an AI sales consultant named Stella you can actually talk to. Ask her about range, pricing, comparisons to competitors — she knows the product inside out.
Try it here: https://99helpers.com/tools/vela-chat
The idea is simple: instead of cramming everything into a hero section and hoping someone scrolls, you let the customer ask what they actually care about. The AI handles objections, comparisons, and details on demand.
Built with my own platform (99helpers.com) which lets you give an AI chatbot a knowledge base and embed it anywhere. This is one use case I hadn't fully considered until recently — using the chatbot not for support, but as the ad itself.
Curious what HN thinks. Is conversational advertising compelling, or just a gimmick?
by shafyy | 2026-03-06 10:05:14+00:00
To add to keiferski's excellent comments: There is no such thing a truly free market. Neoliberalism is just an excuse to not care about things that stand in the way of people making more money or gaining more power.

This wealth we have built was not built on a totally free market (whatever that means), but much more social form of capitalism. The countries where there is the least povery and highest standards of living are countries that have a big social welfare state, such as the Norics.
by themafia | 2026-03-06 10:05:30+00:00
> should we simply ignore it and let the children turn out idiots as well?

Just because you're an idiot at 18 doesn't mean you are one for life.

> so that's why we designed schools that should compensate even for dumb parents.

Does that actually work?

> against the concept of putting all the responsabiliy of raising children onto the parents.

Then how do you feel about parents requiring a license before they have a child? If you wish to invite yourself into their responsibilities shouldn't you also invite yourself into their bedroom first?
by purplehat_ | 2026-03-06 10:05:46+00:00
I'm not sure anyone is being this explicitly malicious. Parents' groups, child safety organizations, and researchers have been at this for years, and while I agree with you that the solutions are very misguided, I think it does our own priorities a disservice to stick our fingers in our ears with regards to their concerns.

Can you give an example of how less private solutions will benefit them and their sponsors? I could see big tech / adtech and government surveillance benefitting but I don't think they're the ones behind this push.

As another example, consider the "small web" community, say at Bear Blog, which is a group of technically sophisticated people who routinely complain about the harms of traditional social media. I doubt most of them would support this particular implementation, but they show that there is popular support for solving the ills of at least one of the targets of this legislation.

So to answer your question, yes, I do see this as an attempt to protect people. The restriction of free speech is in my opinion a side effect of this legislation opening the way to worse-designed laws in the future.
by nephihaha | 2026-03-06 10:06:05+00:00
It may not be seen as "pay to watch", but that is effectively what it always has been. Back in the early days, that idea could be excused — because TV was basically them and ITV, and Channel 4 in the early eighties — since there was a good chance you'd be watching their content. Back in my childhood there were so few channels you could often guess what someone had watched the night before, and you would chat about it. Not anymore.

Since the emergence of VHS/DVDs, satellite television and the internet, their viewing share has reduced considerably. They've gone from being 2/3 of the available channels to 1/2, to about a dozen out of hundreds of channels.

Right now, more British under-30s are watching YouTube than the BBC, which has undermined their stranglehold on TV. Many people simply aren't watching the BBC at all. BBC3 is an attempt to appeal to the young, which has had mixed results. Many children simply don't watch BBC content anymore.
by olieidel | 2026-03-06 10:06:11+00:00
Sure, there are lots of middlemen who are more than happy to take your money to navigate this broken process, and tax advisors are probably #1 on the list :)

That being said, even throwing money at a tax advisor won't reduce the 16 steps to 1. More like 5-10.

You'll still have to to go the notary yourself, you'll still be opening the bank account yourself, you'll still be subject to Handelsregister spam and fake invoices, etc., etc.
by red_admiral | 2026-03-06 10:06:14+00:00
Isn't the legal situation the opposite here? Car manufacturers don't release schematics because they believe in "free as in freedom". In fact any interfaces you as an end-user or an independent garage can use and schematics that are released such as the protocol for the diagnostic port, are open primarily because govermnents made laws saying so.

I'm most familiar with the "right to repair" situation with John Deere, which occasionally pops up on HN. The spirit of someone who releases something under GPL seems the opposite of that?
by pydry | 2026-03-06 10:06:17+00:00
>But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write.

Are you serious? I've been hearing this constantly. since mid 2025.

The gaslighting over AI is really something else.

Ive also never seen jobs advertised before whose job was to lobby skeptical engineers over about how to engage in technical work. This is entirely new. There is a priesthood developing over this.
by customguy | 2026-03-06 10:06:28+00:00
For saving vertical space, my favorite thing about Firefox is Treestyle Tabs. I edited the CSS to make the font size a bit bigger, but make the padding so small it's slightly negative even (it would be horrible to read text like that, but for tabs it kinda works). Now I can fit ~40 tabs vertically on the screen easily, with very readable tab titles, and I can expand the sidebar at will if I want to see the full length of titles for some reason, or use F1 to toggle it on and off.

Not that this takes away from your point.. but frankly, as long as the browser UI can be customized, the default setup will never matter to me. If this appeals more to non-technical people, more power to them, as long as I can have my power user stuff, too.
by digitalPhonix | 2026-03-06 10:06:30+00:00
He’s not claiming the rewrite is a clean room implementation. In fact he’s explicitly saying it is not:

> However, the purpose of clean-room methodology is to ensure the resulting code is not a derivative work of the original. It is a means to an end, not the end itself. In this case, I can demonstrate that the end result is the same — the new code is structurally independent of the old code — through direct measurement rather than process guarantees alone.
by speed_spread | 2026-03-06 10:06:40+00:00
Cool kids had C64s. I had every other boring, flawed model. Tandy MC-10. TI-99, ZX80 (not even 81!) and some other CoCo with chiclet keys. Now I know the 6809 is actually pretty interesting but back then without video or graphic chips there wasn't much you could do as a 12 year old.

Weirdly the most fun I had was with the BASIC programmable SHARP PC-xxxx line. I still have my PC-1350 somewhere.
by quantiq | 2026-03-06 10:08:03+00:00
Yeah, I'm not even sure what this is, or whether or not this is even intended to be a serious project. It just comes across to me as deeply unprofessional. I say this as someone who doesn't even like Vercel and has their own gripes with that bizarrely run company.

The docs say that none of the code has been reviewed or tested properly, so how serious is this for people to run in a production setup where many companies are going are not going to be super enthused that their production environment has been 'vibecoded' in a week? It just reads to me like a not-so-subtle middle finger to the Vercel guys.

On a side note, I find it extremely weird that the current AI era of software development is turning the state of the entire field into a reenactment of Lord of the Flies. Bizarre behavior all around from people who should know better.
by pembrook | 2026-03-06 10:08:46+00:00
Observing people from Silicon Valley discover the concepts of "brand" and "taste" is quite amusing.

It's like watching a hyper-rational alien species trying to understand humans.

> "Wait...So you purchased this at 5X the price of another product because of how it makes you feel about yourself, and not for its utility? Fascinating!"

We've been in the brand age for 200 years. This is nothing new. Technology products have just been so uniquely useful due to fast innovation that silicon valley has largely been able to ignore the centuries old techniques of Madison Avenue.

Every single market as it matures ultimately turns into a marketing competition, not a product competition. It has always been this way. Silicon Valley is the new Detroit.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2026-03-06 10:09:58+00:00
That's really cute, it reminds me that Will Wright (creator of The Sims) has referenced this book "The Ants", by Bert Holldobler in multiple occasions as a key inspiration for his games (and in particular SimAnt) and systems thinking. Did you come across that during your research phase or had you not heard about it? I haven't read it yet, but maybe someday I'll get around to it.