All Topics

This cluster centers on opinions about CoffeeScript, including its value as syntactic sugar over JavaScript, criticisms of readability and necessity, and debates on whether to use it.

Comments discuss negotiation strategies, bargaining tactics, and the fluid nature of business deals where terms can change until final signing, often viewing announcements as positioning rather than commitments.

This cluster revolves around comparisons between XML and JSON data formats, debating their respective strengths like schemas and self-documentation versus simplicity and verbosity, and discussing appropriate use cases.

Discussions revolve around experiences, recommendations, pros/cons, and alternatives for various web hosting providers like GoDaddy, Linode, NearlyFreeSpeech, and HostGator.

The cluster focuses on stereotypes, behaviors, and opinions about Linux users, fanboys, zealots, and Linus Torvalds, often with humor, criticism, or irony highlighting community culture.

Discussions center on whether Apple has officially announced certain features or products, distinguishing rumors and leaks from confirmed statements, while noting Apple's secrecy and pre-release practices.

The cluster debates the effects of US tariffs, especially on Chinese imports, including whether they raise consumer prices, encourage domestic manufacturing, or ultimately harm the economy through reduced competition and retaliation.

The cluster discusses the divergence between rising worker productivity and stagnant or disproportionately low wage growth since the 1970s, often referencing EPI charts and questioning why productivity gains benefit capitalists more than workers.

The cluster centers on discussions about the challenges and frustrations of paying rent, with commenters frequently noting high costs, rising rents, and how rent undermines alternative ideas or lifestyles. Many highlight rent as a persistent financial burden compared to other options like ownership or rent control.

The cluster centers on users advocating for physical buttons, knobs, and tactile controls over touchscreens and virtual interfaces in devices like phones, appliances, and controllers, often lamenting their removal for cost or design reasons.

Users discuss the capabilities, limitations, and desired features of Amazon Kindle e-readers, frequently referencing models like the Oasis and comparing them to other devices or apps.

The cluster centers on discussions of price discrimination as a business pricing strategy, including explanations, examples like coupons or dynamic pricing, links to economics resources, and debates on its morality, legality, and effectiveness.

Users discuss, question, and complain about posts and comments being flagged on Hacker News, often puzzled by the reasons or deeming it unfair or excessive.

This cluster centers on discussions of jury nullification, including its purpose as a feature of jury trials, why judges often prevent jurors from learning about it, and its practical role in delivering verdicts beyond strict legal interpretation.

Cluster focuses on Apple's restrictions preventing iOS apps from making network connections or 'phoning home' without special permissions, contrasted with Apple's own extensive device telemetry, raising privacy concerns and demands for user controls like Little Snitch on iOS.

Discussions center on the unreliability of human memory, including false memories, reconstructive processes, deficient autobiographical memory, and personal experiences with recall and forgetting.

The cluster focuses on personal stories and debates about the joys, challenges, and life changes brought by having and raising children, often contrasting perspectives of parents and non-parents.

The cluster discusses DDoS attacks on websites and the importance of protection services like Cloudflare for mitigation, including strategies, limitations, and alternatives for handling such attacks.

This cluster features repeated recommendations for users to find and contribute to open source projects they like, such as by submitting PRs, fixing bugs, or improving features in projects they use.

Discussions center on the high costs of US university tuition, room, board, books, and total attendance expenses, often comparing them to lower costs abroad or debating affordability and value.

Comments primarily request simple, non-technical explanations (e.g., ELI5 or layman's terms) for complex technical concepts in articles, while appreciating clear simplifications and critiquing overly technical writing.

Users report being unable to access a website or service from outside the US, especially Europe, due to geo-restrictions, with VPNs bypassing the blocks.

The cluster centers on debates about the risks and ethics of sharing or exposing personal and sensitive information publicly, with commenters expressing strong worries about privacy leaks and data misuse.

This cluster centers on humorous jabs, criticisms, and discussions about using PHP for a website or project, often highlighting irony or surprise at the language choice in 2021.

The cluster focuses on discussions of a SpaceX Starship rocket test or launch that encountered failures such as engine issues, separation problems, explosions, or anomalies shortly after liftoff or during static tests.

Commenters repeatedly suggest gym memberships, bodyweight workouts, home exercises, and other fitness routines as alternatives to the discussed product, often using puns like 'How’s that working out for you?'

Discussions debating the effectiveness, benefits, and drawbacks of Test-Driven Development (TDD) in software design, distinguishing it from general unit testing and sharing personal experiences.

Commenters debate whether personal relationships, particularly romantic ones, must provide utility or productivity to be worthwhile, or if they hold intrinsic value beyond transactional benefits.

Discussions center on skepticism toward the accuracy, reliability, and sourcing of numerical claims in the linked article, often describing them as misleading estimates, unaudited figures, or fabrications rather than precise counts.

The cluster discusses how incentive structures in large tech companies like FAANG prioritize promotions through big projects, headcount growth, and politics over efficiency, value creation, or product improvements, leading to demotivation and suboptimal behaviors among employees.

Discussions center on the superiority of bidets, especially Japanese washlets, over toilet paper for hygiene, cleanliness, and reducing paper usage, with users sharing experiences and recommendations.

Discussions center on the pros, cons, and strategic issues of ranked choice voting (RCV/IRV), often comparing it to alternatives like approval voting, score voting, STAR, and referencing Arrow's impossibility theorem.

Discussions center on the feasibility of generating and detecting ultrasonic or infrasonic sounds with phone speakers and other hardware, potential health risks from inaudible audio, and countermeasures like interference or detectors.

This cluster consists of comments debating the meaning, subjectivity, and metrics of 'success', often challenging claims about successful people, ventures, or strategies by questioning what constitutes success.

Comments in this cluster overwhelmingly criticize the aesthetics, layout, usability, and overall poor implementation of a specific website, calling it ugly, unreadable, chaotic, and a usability nightmare.

The cluster focuses on comparisons of tech salaries in high-cost cities like SF, NYC, and Seattle versus lower-cost areas, debating whether elevated pay offsets astronomical housing and living expenses.

Users discuss, complain about, defend, and question the moderation practices, policies, and actions of moderators on Hacker News, including concerns over censorship, content removal, and calls for moderator intervention.

Comments debate the causes of underperformance in schools among low-income students, emphasizing family involvement, home environment, and parental values over school funding or resources alone.

Comments debate the loss of US manufacturing jobs due to offshoring, automation, and wage differences, challenging myths about declining output and discussing economic implications like national security and productivity.

This cluster focuses on criticisms of Linux desktop environments' UI/UX, stability, fragmentation, and usability, often comparing them unfavorably to Windows and macOS while debating why Linux struggles on the desktop.

The cluster focuses on debates about the SEC's oversight, enforcement actions, and regulatory stance on cryptocurrencies, ICOs, and related securities violations, including criticisms of their effectiveness and biases.

Users identify the article as a classic 'submarine article'—an HN trope for speculative, low-quality posts proposing naive submarine designs—while debating submarine technology, military applications, and related trivia.

Users recommend, request downloads, and share tools and links for coding and programming fonts, including sites like programmingfonts.org, Google Fonts alternatives, and webfont resources.

Users request and share methods to bypass paywalls on news articles, including incognito mode, archive sites like archive.is, and browser extensions such as Bypass Paywalls.

Comments humorously obsess over and riff on the number 'three', often in response to a parent comment listing three items, predictions, or examples, turning it into a running meme with puns and repetitions.

Cluster focuses on experiences and advice regarding quitting a job before securing a new one, highlighting struggles in the tough job market, employment gaps, and lengthy job searches post-layoff or resignation.

Comments focus on humorous variations, outputs, and modifications of the Unix 'yes' command, such as 'yup', 'yep', 'yeah', 'yeet', and ASCII art.

Comments debate the merits and drawbacks of homeschooling, including socialization issues, academic success, parental motivations, and personal experiences compared to public schooling.

Discussions debate the pros and cons of Go's explicit error handling via return values, criticizing its verbosity and repetitiveness while defenders praise its reliability and explicitness compared to exceptions in other languages.

The cluster centers on discussions of brutalist architecture's aesthetics, debating whether it is beautiful, ugly, oppressive, or preferable to modern glass buildings and other styles.

This cluster centers on debates about whether AI-generated images qualify as true art and if using AI tools makes users artists, often comparing AI to traditional tools like cameras or Photoshop while discussing skill, expression, and originality.

This cluster centers on discussions about train travel in Europe, particularly criticizing the frequent delays, unreliability, and infrastructure issues of Germany's Deutsche Bahn, often contrasted with better experiences in other countries like Switzerland or Spain.

The cluster focuses on discussions about the nature of gravity, including whether it is a force or spacetime curvature, its equivalence to acceleration per general relativity, and conceptual explanations for laypeople.

This cluster centers on discussions about working from home (WFH), including its benefits, downsides, distinctions from remote work, applicability to various jobs, and comparisons to office work.

The cluster debates the merits of open source versus proprietary software for businesses, emphasizing open source's advantages in maintenance, support flexibility, and avoiding vendor lock-in compared to proprietary risks like abandonment and lack of warranties.

The cluster focuses on debates about credit card security, including comparisons between magnetic stripe, chip-and-PIN (EMV), fraud liability, detection systems, and why credit cards remain prevalent despite vulnerabilities.

The cluster focuses on Apple's and other US tech companies' strategies to route European profits through Ireland for low taxes, including the EU's ruling requiring Apple to pay billions in back taxes to Ireland amid debates on legality and tax competition.

The cluster centers on debates about making higher education free or subsidized, including arguments over who should pay (taxes, future earnings, or individuals), societal benefits versus costs, and criticisms of student loans and tuition pricing.

Users clarify, debate, and provide definitions for slang terms, idioms, euphemisms, and unusual word usages from the original post or comments, often with links to dictionaries.

This cluster centers on discussions questioning, defending, or analyzing the profitability of businesses, products, or strategies, often debating profit margins, incentives, and paths to financial viability.

The cluster centers on debates about responsible disclosure practices for security vulnerabilities, including its ethics, necessity, definitions, and whether public announcements before patches aid or harm security.

Discussions center on whether tools, code, or projects are ready or safe for production environments, including questions about testing in prod, deployment risks, and distinctions between dev/test and production setups.

Discussions focus on the historical US policy of Selective Availability that intentionally degraded civilian GPS accuracy, its discontinuation in 2000, and comparisons to other GNSS systems like GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou as backups or alternatives.

Commenters challenge the recency or ongoing relevance of discussed phenomena by referencing occurrences or norms from the 1980s, 1990s, or 10-30 years ago, emphasizing changes over time.

The cluster centers on debates about whether plant-based diets provide sufficient complete proteins, essential amino acids, and nutrients compared to animal products, with proponents citing vegan athletes and health markers while critics highlight bioavailability and supplementation needs.

Users describe negative experiences with clunky UIs, slow and buggy dashboards, inconsistent features, poor support, and slow improvements in a SaaS developer tool, often preferring alternatives.

Comments reminisce about the early days of the internet (especially the 90s and before), highlighting how it was less commercial, ad-free, and focused on information exchange compared to today.

Users reminisce about beloved classic video games like Space Quest, Ultima, Wizardry, Mass Effect, and others, recommending similar titles and lamenting the lack of modern equivalents with strong stories and gameplay.

The cluster focuses on debates comparing LED and incandescent light bulbs, discussing their lifespan, efficiency, reliability, heat management, power supply issues, color rendering, and personal experiences with failures or successes.

Comments debate Spotify's business model, profitability challenges, payments to labels and artists, and its competition with piracy versus benefits for musicians.

Users question, clarify, and debate the expiration dates, time limits, and durations of deals, trials, promotions, or access periods in the discussion.

Discussions focus on why TikTok outperforms platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, highlighting its superior recommendation algorithm, addictive short-video format, and effective content discovery for creators and users.

The cluster discusses the relative ease of experienced programmers learning new programming languages (syntax, idioms, tooling) compared to beginners learning their first language and core programming concepts.

Commenters frequently attribute problems, delays, or unpopular decisions in the discussed topic to political influences, motivations, or climates rather than technical or merit-based reasons.

The cluster discusses the longstanding tradeoff between security and usability/convenience, where users often prioritize ease of use over robust security measures, leading to compromises and bypasses in practice.

Users share positive experiences, recommendations, and comparisons of FastMail as an email service alternative to Gmail and ProtonMail, with discussions on features, pricing, privacy, and support.

Users share personal stories of switching to Linux on desktops and laptops from Windows or macOS, praising its reliability, ease of use, and superiority after years of hesitation or past trials.

Comments debate the effectiveness of UEFI Secure Boot in preventing boot-time attacks and malware, its compatibility with non-Windows OS like Linux via custom keys, and misconceptions about it enforcing vendor lock-in.

Users reminisce about childhood and early gaming experiences with classic PC and console games from the 80s-90s, often played on old hardware in computer labs, LAN parties, or friends' houses.

Users reminisce about Windows XP and 7 as the peak of the OS experience, praising their stability and usability while criticizing later versions like Vista, 8, 10, and 11 as declines in quality.

This cluster centers on debates about whether governments adhere to or respect laws, with many commenters expressing doubt that legality constrains government actions and suggesting impunity or routine lawbreaking.

Cluster discusses pros, cons, and recommendations for self-hosting email servers (e.g., Mail-in-a-Box, Postfix) versus using third-party providers like Fastmail, Protonmail, or Migadu with custom domains.

Discussions center on the widespread use of facial recognition technology in surveillance, policing, and public spaces, including privacy concerns, dystopian risks, accuracy issues leading to wrongful arrests, and debates over its societal benefits versus threats to liberty.

Users complain about small font sizes on websites like HN, especially on high-resolution displays, and debate solutions like browser zoom, default font adjustments, or site changes for improved readability and accessibility.

The cluster discusses how cellular networks, carriers, Stingrays, and protocols like SS7 enable pervasive tracking of mobile phones via cell towers, IMEI, and location triangulation, even without SIM cards or data usage.

This cluster focuses on discussions of cryptographic techniques for secure key exchange, particularly Diffie-Hellman and public key methods, to enable encrypted communication over untrusted channels while addressing man-in-the-middle attacks and forward secrecy.

The cluster focuses on criticisms of Elon Musk's acquisition and management of Twitter, including claims of introducing chaos, breaking free speech promises, suppressing criticism, and turning it into a biased or Parler-like platform.

The cluster discusses the prioritization of pedestrian safety over car occupants, highlighting how vehicles kill pedestrians, the dangers of speeding and large vehicles, and measures like speed bumps or design changes to protect walkers.

The cluster focuses on debates about the adequacy, importance, and differences in pilot training compared to drivers, particularly in aviation safety contexts like Boeing 737 MAX incidents and contrasts with autonomous systems.

The cluster centers on discussions about URL shortening services, including criticisms for obscuring destination links, recommendations for or against their use in Hacker News comments, and concerns over security and necessity.

This cluster centers on discussions distinguishing the unique behaviors, mindsets, and roles of startup founders from employees, often defending founders' unconventional or passionate approaches against criticism.

Users react to a tech project's creepy yet adorable mascot or character by comparing it to cartoon figures like BonziBuddy, Dobby, Winnie the Pooh, Gremlins, and others such as Golang and Flutter mascots.

Discussions center on JSON's key shortcomings like lack of comments, multi-line strings, and parsing issues, with advocacy for extensions like JSON5 and debates on its specifications.

The cluster centers on discussions questioning the responsibilities and typical duties of CEOs, debating whether specific actions like hands-on work or decisions are part of a CEO's job or if they should delegate such tasks.

Discussions revolve around comparing Redis to alternatives like memcached, MySQL, Postgres, and SQLite, debating its advantages, use cases, persistence, clustering, and suitability as a database or cache.

Commenters question, affirm, or argue about the significance of specific details, facts, or considerations in discussions, often distinguishing important points from nitpicks.

Discussions compare Swift and Rust programming languages, debating their safety, performance, syntax, features, and suitability as C/C++ alternatives for systems programming.

Discussions focus on user feedback, praise, and suggestions for improving the UI, UX, design, and features of a newly launched mobile or web app, often with responses from the developer. Common themes include making interfaces prettier, more intuitive, responsive, and adding elements like login, videos, or iOS support.

Comments express frustration that corporate executives behind major frauds and scams face no personal jail time, only company fines, referencing cases like Wells Fargo, the 2008 financial crisis, and Enron.

This cluster consists of comments heavily using fire, burning, flames, and related idioms like 'playing with fire,' 'dumpster fire,' and 'where there's smoke there's fire' to express risk, disaster, or sarcasm about the discussed topic.