All Topics

Discussions center on whether certain payments, deals, or practices involving government officials or businesses constitute bribery, with debates over definitions, legality, and distinctions from taxes or lubrication.

Users debate the origins, appropriateness, and alternatives for names of software tools, programming languages, and projects, often critiquing confusing or off-putting choices like GIMP or similarities to existing tools.

Comments compare semiconductor process nodes between Intel (e.g., 10nm, 7nm) and TSMC (e.g., 7nm, 5nm, 3nm), debating equivalences, Intel's delays and struggles, and TSMC's leadership in advanced manufacturing.

Commenters debate the overuse of the 'startup' label, irony of advice applying to startups, and criticisms of startup hype versus defenses of startup practices.

The cluster focuses on discussions about the quality and realism of AI-generated or cloned voices in a demo video, with users debating whether they sound human-like, match specific individuals, or resemble text-to-speech with uncanny valley effects.

Discussions center on whether true value is limited to monetary or market-based measures, arguing for intrinsic, personal, social, and non-economic forms of value creation independent of financial gain.

Comments discuss frustrations with poor code quality, untested code, bad leadership, and team dysfunction, offering advice on communicating issues to managers, building consensus, or leaving for a better job.

The cluster centers on discussions about businesses responding to costs, regulations, or other pressures by increasing prices, with commenters questioning why prices aren't raised or noting that hikes would pass costs to consumers.

This cluster centers on discussions about the viability, efficiency, pros, cons, and suitability of remote work compared to office-based work, including challenges for certain roles and companies.

Comments compare a new tool to established browser automation libraries like Selenium, Puppeteer, PhantomJS, and Playwright for testing, scraping, and automation tasks.

Commenters debate and criticize oxymoronic, euphemistic, semantically dubious, or poorly chosen phrases and wordings in the article, highlighting doublespeak, clichés, and contradictions.

Discussions focus on New York City's unique garbage disposal practices, such as leaving trash bags on sidewalks for pickup due to no alleys or public bins, contrasted with other cities' use of dumpsters, wheelie bins, and organized collection services.

Discussions revolve around speculation that Facebook might acquire the featured startup or technology, with concerns about competition, integration, or killing rivals, referencing past buys like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus.

Comments discuss Apple's business practices, including vendor lock-in, ecosystem moat-building, and incentives to limit interoperability and user choice in favor of retaining control and upselling their products.

The cluster centers on debates about what defines a true 'community,' especially in online spaces like Hacker News, questioning reliance on transient users, the need for interaction, and whether it's monolithic or valuable.

Comments discuss outages in cloud providers like AWS and GCP, single points of failure, and the need for multi-region redundancy and fault-tolerant architectures to mitigate downtime.

Cluster centers on debates about psychedelics' therapeutic benefits for perspective shifts and mental health versus risks like psychosis and personality changes, including personal experiences and calls for caution.

Comments debate the convenience and time required for charging electric vehicles like Teslas compared to refueling gas cars, highlighting benefits of home charging, supercharger speeds for road trips, and overall time savings.

Commenters debate the sufficiency and use of cryptographic signatures for verifying authenticity, integrity, and preventing forgery in various contexts like messages, software, or statements.

Comments discuss flaws in current mobile app permission systems (Android/iOS), such as install-time requests leading to blind acceptance, and advocate for granular, on-demand permissions to enhance user privacy and control.

The cluster discusses government-provided social or public housing as a potential solution to affordable housing shortages, citing examples from Singapore, Hong Kong, Vienna, and the UK, while debating its merits against market approaches and potential drawbacks.

Comments focus on reminiscing about floppy disks and drives from the 1980s and 1990s, joking about the impracticality of using them for large modern datasets, and noting their use in legacy systems like San Francisco's train control.

The cluster debates the regressive effects of consumption, sales, and flat taxes on lower-income groups versus the fairness of progressive income taxation based on ability to pay and marginal utility.

Commenters assert that the phenomenon or issue discussed in the thread is surprisingly frequent or commonplace, often countering assumptions of rarity.

This cluster centers on debates about prioritizing life outside of work over excessive dedication to jobs, criticizing workaholism and advocating for balance between professional and personal fulfillment.

Users in this cluster repeatedly request or suggest adding screenshots to Hacker News posts about software projects, websites, apps, or demos to better visualize and evaluate the content.

Users discuss and share archive links to unusual, removed, or temporary content appearing on apple.com, including jokes, ex-employee posts, and speculation about Apple's motives or marketing tactics.

Comments primarily express frustration with missing, non-loading, poorly scaled, or unclear graphs in linked articles, often requesting screenshots, context, better labels, or additional visualizations.

Discussions revolve around questioning, defining, and critiquing 'skills' in the context of LLMs and AI agents, often portraying them as workarounds for lacking true intelligence or probing what specific skills are meant.

Comments repeatedly observe that there is significant money to be made or that someone is profiting from the post's topic, often with surprise, sarcasm, or inevitability.

Discussions compare a new video conferencing tool's features to established platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, debating if Zoom already supports similar functionalities such as audio-only modes, security, and waiting rooms.

Comments debate the definition and characteristics of 'the left' in politics, distinguishing between true leftists, liberals, identity politics advocates, and addressing fallacies like 'no true leftist' in response to criticisms of certain organizations or actions.

The cluster centers on heated debates about AI on Hacker News, including downvotes for criticism or support, accusations of bias, hype backlash, and the community's divided stances between AI enthusiasts and skeptics.

Cluster focuses on advocacy for universal UTF-8 adoption as the default text encoding, frustrations with legacy systems like Windows using UTF-16, and discussions on backwards compatibility and Unicode handling.

Users recommend and compare real-time strategy (RTS) games like StarCraft, Supreme Commander, and Total Annihilation with turn-based and grand strategy titles such as Civilization, Europa Universalis IV, Crusader Kings, and Total War, discussing mechanics like unit management, AI, and replayability.

This cluster discusses the philosophical nature of rights, emphasizing their inalienable and universal application to all people regardless of personal disagreements, moral judgments, or popularity, while criticizing selective denial or erosion of rights.

The cluster centers on discussions and corrections about how orbits work, including orbital velocity, trajectories, stability, atmospheric drag, and gravitational effects around Earth and other bodies.

Comments debate the authenticity of a specific video demonstration, questioning if it's faked, edited, or merely a tech demo not yet shipping to customers, with frequent references to a YouTube clip.

Comments primarily from developers, maintainers, and teams inviting users to contact them via Discord, GitHub, email, Gitter, or other channels for questions, support, or issues related to their projects.

Users criticize posts and comments on Hacker News as thinly veiled advertisements, spam, or shameless self-promotion for products and companies. Discussions debate the appropriateness of promotional content disguised as genuine discussions.

Cluster focuses on debates comparing Web Components to React and other JS frameworks, discussing their advantages like universality and browser-native support, shortcomings such as API usability and Shadow DOM issues, and why they haven't replaced frameworks.

Discussions center on the unreliability, biases, and limitations of Wikipedia as a source, emphasizing its editable nature, political slants, and the need to consult original sources or edit histories.

Users repeatedly criticize the excessive length of articles linked on Hacker News, demanding TL;DR summaries, bullet points, or more concise writing to respect readers' time.

Comments warn against relying solely on cloud storage providers like Google for backups, emphasizing the need for local, controlled copies due to risks of data loss, service shutdowns, access revocation, and lack of trust.

Comments reminisce about and compare modern or described system behaviors to features, stability issues, and experiences from Windows 95, 98, 3.x, and related early OSes like OS/2.

Comments primarily consisting of links to archived versions of articles using services like archive.ph, archive.is, and others, shared to bypass paywalls, referrer blocks, or content removal.

Comments criticize tipping as a mechanism allowing employers to underpay service and delivery workers, advocating for its elimination in favor of higher base wages and transparent pricing.

Cluster focuses on advice for individuals with non-traditional backgrounds trying to enter or pivot within the tech industry, recommending alternative roles like tech sales, project management, sales engineering, DevOps, and customer-facing positions over pure software development.

Comments expressing regret over promising projects, companies, or ideas that were ruined, backfired spectacularly, or ended in disaster, often citing past examples like 'this is why we can't have nice things.'

The cluster focuses on experiences, recommendations, and tips for setting up and running personal email servers using tools like Postfix, Dovecot, Mail-in-a-Box, SPF, DKIM, and others, including debates on feasibility, challenges like spam filtering, and alternatives to self-hosting.

The cluster focuses on comments questioning or debating why a company or group ('they') is not taking a specific action, emphasizing unwillingness or lack of interest over inability.

Commenters push back against US-specific generalizations, questioning if discussed issues occur globally or differ by country, and reminding that the world extends beyond the US.

The cluster focuses on users expressing interest in, inquiring about, and discussing support for running Large Language Models (LLMs) locally on personal hardware rather than using cloud-based services like OpenAI or ChatGPT, often citing privacy, cost, and capability reasons.

Commenters discuss feeling bored, unfulfilled, and lacking passion in software development roles, often sharing experiences of mundane work and advice like switching to more interesting domains, pursuing side projects, or finding fulfillment outside employment.

Commenters overwhelmingly speculate that the featured Hacker News story or product is an intentional marketing stunt, ploy, or PR campaign designed to generate viral buzz and publicity. Discussions highlight how effectively it drew attention despite skepticism about its substance.

Hacker News users share and promote links to their personal blogs, often focusing on tech, programming, web development, open source, and personal projects.

Discussions focus on variations in slang terms and word usage between British, American, Australian, and other English dialects, debating origins, commonality, connotations, and regional specificity.

The cluster centers on repeated references to the 'Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names' article, discussing common misconceptions and challenges programmers face when handling human names and naming things in software.

Commenters repeatedly question whether presented economic or financial data accounts for inflation and demand adjustments to provide accurate real-term context.

Commenters speculate on whether sensitive information was accidentally leaked, purposefully released, or exaggerated as clickbait, discussing potential consequences for leakers and motives behind the disclosure.

Comments primarily assert or question the ease or simplicity of a task, technique, or process discussed in the parent post, often countering perceptions of high difficulty.

Commenters debate and clarify the distinction between wealth (net worth and assets) and income (salary or earnings), emphasizing that being wealthy means living off assets rather than high income.

The cluster centers on debates about parking availability, free parking policies, street parking challenges, and the excessive urban space allocated to car parking over other uses.

Users frequently recommend and share links to services like archive.is, archive.ph, Internet Archive, and tools such as ArchiveBox for preserving or accessing snapshots of web pages, especially when originals are paywalled or unavailable.

Users compare and recommend Linux desktop environments like XFCE, KDE, and Cinnamon over GNOME and Unity, praising lightness, customizability, and performance on older hardware.

Discussions center on the effectiveness of vitamin supplements and multivitamins, debating their benefits primarily for those with deficiencies versus potential harm or lack of value for the general population, often contrasting with whole food sources.

Discussions center on global and US suicide rate trends, debates over increases or decreases, international comparisons (e.g., US vs. Japan), and requests for citations from sources like Our World in Data and Wikipedia.

Comments discuss the historical origins, derivations, and etymologies of various English words, often debating false etymologies, sharing facts, and linking to resources like etymonline and Wikipedia.

Discussions center on strategies for effectively solving problems, including deeply understanding the issue, breaking it down, relating to simpler or past problems, explaining it verbally or in writing, and referencing methods like Feynman's algorithm or Polya's steps.

The cluster centers on discussions of basic economic principles where commenters debate how shifts in supply and demand cause prices to rise or fall, often in contexts like limited resources or increasing market demand.

Discussions critique idealized Western perceptions of Japanese society, highlighting realities like strong social conformity, homogeneity, shame culture, and potential toxicities compared to individualistic Western norms like the US. Debates contrast HN's frequent praise of Japan with experiences of foreigners and locals emphasizing its unique, often challenging cultural differences.

Comments in this cluster repeatedly affirm that there is no problem, issue, or harm in a discussed action, statement, or situation, often dismissing concerns or criticisms raised elsewhere.

Users reflect on losing interest in gaming as adults, citing wasted time, lack of patience, and preference for more productive activities over sinking hundreds of hours into games.

Discussions revolve around comparisons of ARM and x86 CPU architectures, focusing on ARM's advantages in power efficiency and performance per watt, Intel's struggles to compete, and the potential shift away from x86 in laptops, desktops, servers, and mobile devices.

Commenters repeatedly agree that they all had the same initial thought, misinterpretation, or reaction upon first seeing the article or thread's headline.

The cluster focuses on discussions about whether startups and high-growth companies should prioritize immediate profitability or reinvest revenues for expansion, with debates on sustainability, business models, and examples like OpenAI and Twilio.

This cluster features numerous humorous comments referencing coffee drinking, coffee machines, productivity boosts from coffee, and coffee-related quips, often in response to a tech or work-related HN post.

The cluster discusses frustrations with non-technical HR and recruiters filtering candidates based on exact technology matches in resumes, rather than general programming skills, quick learning, or fundamentals. Debates contrast stack-specific requirements in job postings with preferences for adaptable problem-solvers among technical hiring managers.

Users repeatedly ask for links, names, universities, or platforms like Coursera/edX for specific online courses mentioned in discussions.

Discussions center on Stripe integrations, alternatives, comparisons to Stripe products, compatibility questions, and whether the featured service uses or resembles Stripe's APIs or offerings.

Users share and recommend links to long-form articles, particularly from The New Yorker and NYT, discussing the 'decline effect' where initial scientific findings weaken or fail to replicate over time.

The cluster focuses on discussions about what constitutes a proper debate in online comment threads, the value of good-faith argumentation, and criticisms of stifling or avoiding debate.

Commenters repeatedly urge the original poster or others to provide answers to posed questions, often expressing frustration that more questions are generated instead of responses, in the context of AI tools like ChatGPT.

Comments debate whether private platforms like Hacker News, Twitter, and Facebook must allow unrestricted free speech or can moderate and ban content such as hate speech, often citing XKCD 1357 on freedom from consequences.

This cluster centers on discussions about the Django web framework, including recommendations, usage experiences, questions on its suitability, and comparisons for various projects.

The cluster centers on debates criticizing the reliability and quality of nutrition science, pointing to weak observational studies, lack of clinical trials, contradictory advice, and political influences.

The cluster focuses on debates about software licenses, their relationship to copyright, permissions granted to users versus owners, and whether licenses can restrict certain uses or bind the copyright holder.

The cluster debates the public availability of personal information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, and related records, questioning if it's already public record or a significant privacy violation when aggregated and shared.

The cluster focuses on discussions about whether AGI is imminent, featuring predictions, skepticism, evidence from recent AI advancements, and debates on timelines ranging from soon to decades away.

Comments debate whether developers should provide distro-specific packages like RPMs or DEBs, or rely on distribution maintainers for open source software, highlighting packaging complexities and alternatives like Flatpak or shell scripts.

Commenters debate the quality, number, innovation, and relevance of startups in relation to an article's topic, often noting that many startups are unremarkable, overhyped, or exemplify the discussed traits.

The cluster focuses on a NASA space mission or hardware, with comments expressing surprise at its use in space, enthusiasm for visuals ('space hardware porn'), questions about the ISS mission, and comparisons to SpaceX alternatives.

Users share links to YouTube comedy sketches, parodies, and skits from shows like Monty Python, Mitchell & Webb, Mr. Show, and others that relate to or satirize the main topic of the discussion.

Comments focus on WordPress as an existing solution, plugin integrations, self-hosting, and comparisons to a new tool or service, with users questioning its necessity or suggesting WP enhancements.

The cluster focuses on disputes over the precise use, evolution, and misuse of language, including resistance to redefining terms, avoiding loaded words, and preserving original meanings to prevent confusion or derails.

The cluster centers on developers' frustrations with Android app development, including poor API design, OS fragmentation, toolchain instability, and comparisons to the smoother iOS experience.

Discussions center on the need for government-backed national ID systems, especially in the US, comparing fragmented current identifiers like SSNs and driver's licenses to unified digital IDs in countries like Estonia and Colombia, while debating privacy, surveillance, fraud prevention, and political resistance.

Users report connectivity problems accessing a service and speculate on causes like cable cuts, BGP issues, ISP routing, backbone providers (e.g., Hurricane Electric, Cogent), and hardware failures. Discussions focus on troubleshooting network infrastructure faults rather than local setups.

Discussions center on software version numbering practices, including complaints about rapid increments, semantic versioning, vanity numbering, and comparisons across projects like Chrome, Firefox, and others.

The cluster discusses the struggles of physical retail stores against online shopping giants like Amazon, including showrooming where customers browse in-store but buy online, leading to closures of bookstores, electronics shops, and others.