All Topics

Comments debate the distinction between price and value, emphasizing that prices are set by what customers are willing to pay based on perceived value, not production costs.

Comments debate the rationality and morality of selfishness versus altruism, questioning whether acting in one's self-interest harms society or benefits everyone when practiced rationally.

The cluster debates quantum entanglement, wave function collapse upon observation, spooky action at a distance, and the measurement problem, referencing Bell's theorem, Schrödinger's cat, and whether it allows faster-than-light communication.

Cluster focuses on discussions about fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), including techniques, use cases, tools, alternatives like in-context learning or LoRA, costs, and comparisons to prompting or retraining.

The cluster discusses strategies and tactics for negotiating prices in sales, deals, and services, including anchoring with high initial offers, counteroffers, haggling techniques, and psychological aspects like BATNA.

Users criticize the poor quality, relevance, ranking, and occasional censorship of Hacker News search results, expressing frustration and suggesting improvements like better query handling and diversity.

The cluster centers on debates about whether large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can diagnose medical conditions as effectively as or better than human doctors, featuring personal success stories, skepticism on maturity, and discussions on augmentation or replacement.

Users express anxiety, paranoia, and terror regarding AI developments, capabilities, or implications in the discussion.

The cluster focuses on AI models for voice cloning and speech synthesis from short audio clips, discussing quality, training requirements, comparisons to models like Tacotron2, WaveNet, LibriTTS, and OpenAI, as well as techniques like retrieval-based conversion.

The cluster focuses on reactions to Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub, with users expressing distrust, fears of changes to open source practices, and discussions about potential alternatives or impacts.

Discussions critique flaws in Hacker News' upvote/downvote mechanics, like mob mentality, cascade effects, and karma thresholds, while proposing fixes such as costing downvotes karma or hiding scores.

Commenters recommend science fiction novels, novellas, short stories, and authors whose works share themes or premises with the original post's concept.

Discussions debate whether teachers are underpaid relative to other professions, factoring in salaries, benefits like pensions and vacations, job security, out-of-pocket expenses, and regional or international comparisons.

This cluster consists of comments pointing out misunderstandings, typos, or ambiguities in phrasing, particularly involving double negatives, multiple negations, or words like 'not', 'won't', and 'isn't' that lead to opposite interpretations.

Commenters assert that the linked story or article is a known hoax, providing links to prior Hacker News discussions, Wikipedia, and other sources confirming it was debunked years earlier.

The cluster focuses on discussions of RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization), its role in C++ for automatic resource cleanup via destructors, comparisons to alternatives like try-finally, defer, or finally clauses in other languages such as Rust, Go, Java, and debates on its effectiveness and implementations.

Discussions center on the role of stock options, RSUs, and equity grants in employee compensation at tech companies and startups, including vesting schedules, valuation at vesting, risks versus cash salaries, and negotiation strategies.

The cluster centers on Git's challenges handling large repositories, binary files, and assets, causing performance issues and bloat, with discussions of workarounds like Git LFS and git-annex.

Discussions center on the safety of modern vehicles, improvements in crash safety and standards over time, regulatory requirements, and skepticism about safety ratings and testing practices like those critiqued in danluu.com/car-safety.

The cluster centers on privacy risks in browsers and web services, where mechanisms like resource preloading, IP addresses, fingerprints, and timing attacks enable tracking of visited websites without user consent.

Commenters advocate using Git remotes, bare repositories, or self-hosted servers for syncing code across devices, dismissing alternatives like Dropbox or serverless approaches as unnecessary or inferior.

Users enthusiastically share their scores, compare achievements, and compete for top percentiles and leaderboards in an addictive online game or quiz.

The cluster discusses Ukraine's innovative and effective use of drones, repurposed civilian tech like electric bikes, and air defense systems to strike Russian targets deep behind lines and counter Russian air power in the ongoing war.

This cluster centers on debates about the toxicity, carcinogenicity, and safety of herbicides like glyphosate (Roundup), paraquat, and atrazine, including their presence in food products, dose-dependent effects, and historical comparisons to chemicals like asbestos and DDT.

This cluster focuses on comments asking about existing competitors, requesting names or links to alternatives, and discussing the competitive landscape for the featured product or service.

Cluster centers on debates about generalizations and stereotypes of Indians, including accusations of racism, xenophobia, and defenses from Indian commenters challenging or affirming claims about Indian culture and behavior.

Discussions center on Instacart and similar grocery delivery services like FreshDirect, Amazon Prime Now, and Walmart pickup, comparing their convenience, costs, quality control, and differences from a featured service.

Commenters debate whether users truly own their purchased devices if corporations like Apple control software installation and execution, advocating for full user freedom to run any software. References to free software philosophy and warnings against corporate gatekeeping dominate the discussion.

Commenters debate the value of credit card rewards, cashback, and perks compared to alternative payment methods, noting how rewards are funded by merchant fees passed onto all customers.

Users reveal they worked at the same company or similar ones as others in the thread, sharing personal experiences and connecting over past employment.

The cluster focuses on debates about what constitutes sexual harassment, its prevalence and severity in workplaces, accusations, policies, and consequences for perpetrators in professional contexts like tech companies.

Comments discuss the FAA's regulatory role, competence, and failures, particularly in Boeing 737 MAX certification, self-certification allowances, and recent aviation incidents or system issues.

The cluster debates the misconception that Google's services like Gmail, Search, and Drive are free, emphasizing that users pay through data sharing, privacy loss, and ad exposure which Google monetizes.

Commenters repeatedly cite Ireland as a counterexample or exception to various claims about policies, status, or situations, often clarifying distinctions between the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, the UK, and Europe.

The cluster centers on debates comparing Markdown to alternatives like AsciiDoc for documentation and writing, discussing their respective strengths, weaknesses, and suitability for various use cases such as plain text editing, complex documents, and version control.

Comments discuss how company decisions like risky projects or potential shutdowns would harm shareholders through stock price drops, prompting sales or backlash to protect their interests.

This cluster focuses on how working from home eliminates daily commutes, saving users significant time, money, and stress, with many sharing personal calculations of hours reclaimed annually and preferring remote work over office setups primarily for this reason.

The cluster discusses skepticism and justification around Facebook's high valuations (e.g., $33B, $100B+), referencing articles questioning its worth, IPO performance, investments, and acquisitions like Instagram.

Comments debate whether certain government actions constitute bailouts similar to past bank rescues like 2008 TARP, questioning taxpayer costs, repayment, and alternatives like nationalization.

The cluster centers on the financial struggles of airlines, including razor-thin margins, chronic unprofitability, pilot shortages, pricing competition, and debates over pay raises, subsidies, and market dynamics.

Discussions focus on the legality of actions against tech companies, potential lawsuits by users or regulators, risks of corporate legal retaliation, and enforceability of laws like CFAA.

The cluster centers on discussions about the pros and cons of owning dogs, including benefits like exercise from walking and companionship versus drawbacks such as noise, hygiene, allergies, and lifestyle incompatibility in apartments or work-from-home setups.

The cluster focuses on discussions about the challenges, preferences, and limitations of editing or changing existing codebases, particularly regarding AI tools' abilities to make targeted modifications without rewriting everything.

Comments discuss the philosophical nature of 'evil', emphasizing its subjectivity, relativity, and how individuals rarely see themselves as evil while labeling others.

Hacker News users repeatedly question, mock, and dispute whether the original post author or commenters are actual lawyers, often tying it to the validity of their legal opinions or advice shared on the platform.

Users share personal methods for maintaining daily journals, scratchpads, and work notes using simple plain text files, vim, markdown, git repos, and other lightweight tools.

The cluster focuses on comparisons between the US private healthcare system and universal or socialized healthcare in countries like Canada, UK, and Europe, debating issues such as wait times, access to care, quality, rationing, and private options.

Users recommend switching from Google Search to alternatives like DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Brave Search, praising better results, privacy, fewer ads, and seamless transitions.

Discussions center on debating what constitutes cheating, its morality, justifications, and impacts in contexts like competitions, exams, sports, and programming challenges.

Users enthusiastically recommend the Tree Style Tabs extension for Firefox as a superior solution for managing large numbers of tabs via a vertical sidebar tree structure, often comparing it favorably to features in Arc or Chrome.

Users discuss and recommend paying for YouTube Premium as a preferable alternative to ad blockers, emphasizing its ad-free experience, value for heavy users, and support for content creators.

Users estimate, debate, and share specific dollar amounts for the costs of a service or product, ranging from monthly fees like $100/mo to large sums like $30k or more.

The cluster centers on discussions about pointers in the C programming language, including their challenges, pointer arithmetic, differences from references and arrays, learning tips, and practical usage.

This cluster centers on debates about the uniqueness and strength of free speech protections in the US compared to other countries, particularly European nations with restrictions on hate speech and expression.

Discussions center on Goodreads limitations and recommendations for alternative book tracking, recommendation, and discovery sites like TheStoryGraph, Zeneca, and HN-specific tools. Users seek curated lists from respected sources, better personalization, and faster platforms avoiding mainstream popular books.

Discussions center on websites and apps accessing or interfering with the user's clipboard without permission, raising privacy and security concerns, and advocating for explicit permissions, safer alternatives, or workarounds like extensions.

Discussions recommend DNS providers like DNSimple, Cloudflare, and AWS Route53 that support ALIAS records, CNAME flattening, or similar features to handle root/naked domains with dynamic cloud IPs without standard CNAME limitations.

Comments debate how wage increases, new jobs, or population growth drive up rent prices due to limited housing supply, often negating affordability benefits for renters and locals.

This cluster features comments where authors of Hacker News submissions introduce themselves and invite questions from the community about their projects, articles, or posts.

Users recommend and discuss large high-resolution monitors (32-55 inches, 4K, ultrawide) as bezel-free alternatives to multiple smaller screens for enhanced productivity in coding and software development.

This cluster focuses on the risks, costs, and handling of chargebacks for merchants in online payments, including penalties from processors like Stripe and PayPal, fraud concerns, and strategies to mitigate them.

Commenters highlight that the submitted article is outdated, frequently pointing out its publication date from years ago and expressing surprise at its recency assumption. Discussions focus on the age of the content rather than its topic.

Discussions revolve around perceptions of Google's hiring practices, engineer quality, company culture, and attractiveness as an employer compared to startups and other tech giants.

The cluster centers on debates about disliking small talk and superficial chit-chat, preferring genuine conversations about personal interests, ideas, activities, and meaningful topics over weather, weekends, or trivial matters.

This cluster focuses on advice for adults, particularly tech professionals, to build friendships by joining meetups, hobby groups, sports teams, classes, volunteering, and other in-person social activities via platforms like meetup.com.

Users express disappointment and surprise over the lack of SSL/TLS or HTTPS support on a website or service, often questioning why secure connections aren't implemented in modern times.

Commenters debate and calculate the statistical odds of a specific unlikely event occurring, often challenging perceptions of rarity by considering multiple trials or base rates.

Users recommend and discuss online platforms like LeetCode, Project Euler, HackerRank, and Advent of Code for practicing algorithmic and programming problems to build coding skills.

Discussions center on whether the shift from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to agriculture improved or worsened human quality of life, often citing evidence of better health, leisure, and nutrition for foragers versus harder lives and population growth for farmers, with frequent references to Sapiens by Harari.

The cluster discusses reasons why people are leaving major urban areas like SF and NYC, including high housing costs, job opportunities elsewhere, family life stages, and preferences for suburbs or cheaper cities over rural areas.

Discussions center on Rust's type system, its strengths like static typing, ownership, and expressiveness, often comparing it to languages such as Haskell, OCaml, C++, C#, and TypeScript.

Commenters express frustration and surprise at how many people fail to grasp or intuitively understand a key concept or idea from the article.

Users propose and debate features like user blocking, report buttons, time delays for new accounts, and hiding low-quality comments to combat trolls, spam, and bad commenters on Hacker News.

Commenters debate whether compact or mini vehicles like kei trucks qualify as 'real' trucks compared to full-size American pickups, discussing usability, safety, size, and definitions.

Comments describe how taking walks, showers, or other mindless breaks allows the subconscious to solve difficult programming problems and generate ideas after stepping away from focused work.

Users praise and recommend a specific programming book discovered via HN, sharing how it helped beginners and experienced programmers learn skills like code reading and functional programming.

Users criticize posts and companies for prioritizing salesmanship, hype, and pushing unnecessary or inferior products over genuine value, often accusing them of dishonesty or fraud.

Cluster focuses on complaints that ebooks are priced similarly or higher than physical books despite lower production and distribution costs, with debates on publisher strategies, piracy, and optimal pricing for sales.

Discussions focus on solving housing shortages by reforming zoning laws to allow mid-rise apartments, row houses, and denser construction instead of restricting to single-family homes or luxury high-rises.

Discussions focus on aviation safety protocols requiring two people in the cockpit at all times, especially when a pilot leaves for breaks, passenger unawareness of cockpit issues, and related incidents like door failures and turbulence.

Users speculate that a reported security incident, backdoor, or sabotage event is a false flag operation or psychological operation by governments or nation-states to distract, sow distrust, or manipulate perceptions.

Comments discuss the capabilities, history, reliability, high availability, and ongoing relevance of IBM mainframes, often comparing them to modern x86 servers, cloud infrastructure, and questioning their use versus emulators.

The cluster debates the merits of threaded comment systems versus flat or linear discussion formats in online platforms like Hacker News, Reddit, Slack, and forums, highlighting issues with context, navigation, and conversation flow.

Commenters debate the portrayal and intent behind simplistic, flawed, or villainous characters in a specific story, distinguishing them as narrative devices or archetypes rather than realistic people.

The cluster focuses on speculation about the reasons behind OpenAI's board firing Sam Altman, including disagreements on mission, management style, communication issues, and involvement of key figures like Ilya Sutskever and Mira Murati, along with the ensuing employee backlash and board reversal.

Comments recommend using soap and water, along with vinegar, baking soda, or bleach, to effectively clean items like bottles, toothbrushes, glasses, and sponges, often as simpler and safer alternatives to specialized products.

The cluster centers on criticism of companies and individuals profiting from open source projects or shared resources without contributing back or prioritizing user benefits over financial gain.

Comments emphasize dramatic global improvements in poverty, life expectancy, health, education, and peace, countering pessimistic views by citing data sources like Our World in Data and historical comparisons.

The cluster focuses on discussions of bugs and defects in Intel and AMD CPUs, such as errata, microcode issues, and hardware faults causing crashes or segfaults, often debating if they are hardware problems versus software bugs and sharing workarounds like BIOS tweaks or replacements.

The cluster discusses whether Facebook sells user data directly or uses it to sell targeted ads, emphasizing the distinction between selling raw data and ad targeting services.

The cluster centers on discussions about electricity billing structures, such as per-kWh charges versus flat fees, who pays for power consumption, and how pricing dynamics influence usage preferences for appliances or services.

Comments debate how controversy and negative press generate media attention and buzz, often invoking the adage that there's no such thing as bad publicity.

The cluster focuses on speculations and hypothetical scenarios about Bitcoin's potential failure, death, or value plummeting to zero, including security breaks, massive sell-offs like Satoshi's coins, regulatory crackdowns, and market crashes.

The cluster discusses public distrust in scientists, scientific institutions, and the 'trust the science' slogan, often attributing it to COVID-era missteps, perceived biases, and confusion between science and scientism.

Debates on whether companies should adjust salaries for remote workers based on location, cost of living, and global competition, including fairness concerns and risks of offshoring.

The cluster focuses on NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem dominance in GPU computing, particularly for AI/ML workloads, and AMD's challenges in developing competitive alternatives like ROCm, HIP, OpenCL, and Vulkan.

This cluster debates the value and difficulty of good writing skills, especially in tech contexts, contrasting it with programming, discussing poor writing's impact on readability and perception, and emphasizing clarity and editing over sloppy presentation.

Discussions debate the feasibility of renewable energy sources like solar and wind powering large-scale infrastructure such as computer networks, data centers, and global energy needs, contrasting current growth trends with fossil fuels and nuclear options.

Users discuss differences in results between speed tests like fast.com and speedtest.net, suspecting ISP throttling or whitelisting that inflates speeds on certain sites.

This cluster consists of comments where users repeatedly request photos, pictures, or images from the original post author, often expressing enthusiasm for seeing visual examples of the discussed topic.