All Topics

Comments primarily criticize SEO practices for prioritizing appearance over quality, ruining web content, and emerging as a problem for AI search engines, with some defending legitimate strategies.

The cluster debates the myth of unskilled labor, the value and obsolescence of skills in the job market, and the challenges for workers without specialized, marketable skills like those in tech.

Commenters debate the justification, proportionality, and legality of responding to verbal insults, scams, annoyances, or non-physical provocations with physical violence like punching. Analogies to assault scenarios highlight tensions between enduring harm and escalating to force.

Users react to the cost of a product, service, or feature in the thread, often humorously noting temptations to spend, regrets over past payments, or relief at potential savings.

This cluster discusses the widespread use of stolen credit cards for fraud, including card testing, bulk purchases from dark web markets, and challenges in detecting such activity on online services.

The cluster centers on criticisms of Google's Chrome and Chromium practices, including blocking ad blockers and privacy tools, degrading non-Chrome browsers, fingerprinting users, and monopolistic control over the web.

The cluster centers on debates about maintaining grass lawns, including criticism of mowing as wasteful, advocacy for no-mow alternatives to boost biodiversity, neighbor complaints, and municipal regulations versus defenses of traditional lawns for recreation and aesthetics.

This cluster consists of comments harshly dismissing and insulting other Hacker News comments as nonsense, ignorant, ridiculous, pointless, or worthless.

The cluster centers on debates about the value of spending billions on large-scale scientific projects like the LHC or fusion research, questioning if it's wasteful or beneficial compared to alternatives like education, smaller experiments, or other priorities.

The cluster discusses a company's botched public relations response to a controversy, particularly criticism over not releasing a talk and the resulting backlash on their reputation.

The cluster revolves around debates on the intuitiveness, distinguishability, and design quality of icons in user interfaces, with widespread criticism of modern icons being too abstract, uniform, or meaningless.

Comments discuss how gzip and other compression techniques reduce issues like data bloat from encodings such as base64, particularly in web serving and storage scenarios.

Discussions center on command-line interface (CLI) tools, including their desirability, development, comparisons to GUIs, and resources for building them.

The cluster centers on debates about animal cruelty, rights, and suffering, especially in factory farms, often drawing parallels to human mistreatment and questioning anthropocentric views.

The cluster discusses frustration with the ineffectiveness of individual actions like voting and protesting to influence politicians and society, advocating for organization, direct action, mass movements, and political engagement as better paths to real change.

Comments discuss the locations of offices for major tech companies like Google, Uber, Slack, and Microsoft, emphasizing distributed presence in Bay Area cities (Mountain View, Sunnyvale, SF), Seattle, NYC, London, and elsewhere, often countering ideas of centralization.

Users discuss interactive sheet music editors, request features like notation export, MIDI output, and piano support, and recommend alternatives such as Soundslice, MuseScore, LilyPond, and ABC notation.

The cluster centers on sharing and discussing bit manipulation techniques, bitwise operations for performance optimization, and resources like the Stanford 'Bit Twiddling Hacks' page and 'Hacker's Delight' book.

The cluster discusses restrictions on who can vote, including debates on citizenship, residency, education, age, and other eligibility criteria, with arguments for and against expanding or limiting voting rights.

Commenters repeatedly note that the article, service, or phenomenon is specific to or characteristic of San Francisco, urge title changes to reflect this, or ask about SF equivalents, while some clarify it's about places like Pittsburgh.

The cluster discusses norms around submitting personal blogs to Hacker News, including debates on ownership, commenting on blogs vs HN, content casualness, and respecting blog owners' preferences.

Discussions debate whether employer-paid payroll taxes and benefits are effectively borne by employees through lower wages or provide tax advantages over direct salary, including comparisons between employee and employer tax responsibilities.

Discussions focus on the security, convenience, backup strategies, and management challenges of passkeys and device-bound cryptographic keys.

Comments in this cluster repeatedly question or dismiss a story, article, or event as mere publicity rather than genuine news, accusing it of being a calculated PR campaign or stunt.

Users criticize Hacker News submission titles for being misleading, clickbaity, vague, or inaccurate, often suggesting changes or more descriptive alternatives.

This cluster centers on debates comparing Go's runtime speed, compilation times, garbage collection, and optimizations to languages like Java, C, C++, Rust, and C#, with opinions ranging from Go being competitive to significantly slower.

Discussions focus on differences between weekends and weekdays in activity levels, work patterns, or data visualizations, including global variations in workweeks and preferences for scheduling events.

Commenters repeatedly compare the discussed project or phenomenon to Minecraft, highlighting similarities in voxel-based building, sandbox gameplay, or real-world analogies, and questioning differences or connections.

The cluster discusses how most popular programming languages today are over 10 years old, their persistence and continued relevance despite age, and debates on whether newer languages like Rust and Go will endure or if the pace of language evolution is slowing.

Hacker News users share personal anecdotes praising former computer science professors for their engaging teaching styles, intellectual energy, and lasting impact on students' learning and problem-solving skills.

Hacker News users debate a wealthy individual's opinion that extreme riches are unnecessary or even detrimental, sparking discussions on hypocrisy, envy, and the value of money beyond a certain point.

The cluster centers on perceptions and stereotypes of people in the tech industry, including views from insiders and outsiders about social awkwardness, close-mindedness, homogeneity, and distinctions between 'tech bros' and genuine technologists.

Comments sharing alternative news sources like BBC articles or links to prior Hacker News discussions for the same stories to highlight duplicates or provide accessible versions.

The cluster discusses the availability, cleanliness, privacy, and necessity of public toilets, including challenges for homeless people, international comparisons, and ideas for better public restroom infrastructure.

The cluster centers on debates about why a prominent leader or public figure faced professional ouster or career setback, with most attributing it to his political opinions, ambitions, public relations issues, or controversial stances rather than other factors.

Discussions focus on the thermal plausibility of high temperatures like 300°C in an experimental apparatus or process, debating material limits, boiling points, superheating, and Celsius vs. Fahrenheit scales.

This cluster centers on discussions of how governments, companies, media, and AI are used to deliberately manipulate public opinions, behaviors, and perceptions through propaganda, marketing, PR, and psychological techniques.

Discussions revolve around the role, competence, and oversight of regulators, frequently questioning 'who regulates the regulators' and debating their ability to prevent industry misconduct versus potential corruption or capture by regulated entities.

Discussions center on China's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, including strict lockdowns, low reported cases, initial information suppression, and debates over the accuracy and effectiveness of their measures compared to other countries.

This cluster consists of comments humorously speculating, dismissing, or debating whether an unexplained event or phenomenon involves extraterrestrial aliens, often with memes like 'it's never aliens.'

Discussions center on recent airliner incidents involving detached components like engine cowlings, wings, or panels, with speculation on causes including maintenance errors, design flaws from winglets or engines, and manufacturing issues.

The cluster discusses Reddit's ongoing lack of profitability, difficulties in monetizing its user base primarily through advertising, and various suggestions for revenue strategies like ad integration in third-party apps.

The cluster focuses on the potential disruption of the trucking industry by autonomous trucks, debating job losses for drivers, efficiency gains from 24/7 operation on highways, technological feasibility, and economic impacts.

Discussions center on challenges and alternatives to email-based password resets, including how to handle account recovery without email or phone access, and comparisons to standard recovery methods like security questions.

The cluster focuses on users recommending, discussing, and sharing experiences with various board games such as Carcassonne, Dominion, Gloomhaven, and others, often in the context of casual play, learning rules, or comparisons to digital games.

Discussions revolve around whether Google has a monopoly in search and advertising markets, its dominant behaviors, and antitrust concerns.

The cluster revolves around repeated assertions that legality does not equate to morality, with commenters emphasizing the distinction between what is legally permissible and what is ethically or morally right.

The cluster focuses on discussions critiquing recipes for lacking ingredients lists, poor organization of steps, and missing instructions, with users suggesting substitutions, sharing alternatives, and debating baking techniques.

Commenters agree that a described behavior, practice, or phenomenon is extremely common, widespread, or experienced by most people.

The cluster centers on heated discussions about wealth inequality, redistribution, neoliberalism, and trickle-down economics, often debating whether arguments are driven by political biases or empirical evidence.

Comments discuss preferences for working for oneself through startups, freelancing, or self-employment over traditional jobs, emphasizing benefits like autonomy, ownership, fulfillment, and escaping 'wage slavery'.

The cluster debates the historical rise of Microsoft in the PC operating system market, focusing on IBM's non-exclusive licensing of DOS, business strategies that crushed competitors like OS/2, Apple, and BeOS, and counterfactual scenarios without Microsoft.

Comments debate whether Bitcoin is deflationary due to its fixed 21 million supply cap and lost coins, discussing implications like hoarding incentives versus spending, and comparisons to inflationary fiat currencies.

Discussions question the necessity and justification of large engineering teams in tech companies, frequently citing lean successes like WhatsApp and Instagram that scaled to massive user bases with very small teams of 10-50 engineers.

Comments focus on disputes over the meaning and validity of 'understanding' in arguments, often countering dismissals with phrases like 'just because you don't understand doesn't mean...' or questioning definitions of comprehension.

This cluster debates why low-income people often eat unhealthy junk food, focusing on arguments that it's cheaper per calorie, requires less prep time, and is more accessible due to food deserts and subsidies, versus counterclaims that basic healthy staples like rice and beans are affordable.

The cluster centers on debates about the role of nuclear weapons in deterring wars, their risks compared to emerging technologies like AI, and arguments for or against proliferation and disarmament.

Users discuss and recommend search solutions like Algolia and open-source alternatives such as Meilisearch, Typesense, and Usearch for implementing fast, efficient search in websites or applications.

This cluster features repetitive, low-effort comments expressing generic interest, fascination, or curiosity about the parent post or topic without substantive discussion.

Comments highlight how variable weather conditions like rain, wind, clouds, and forecasts limit or undermine the reliability and performance of the discussed topic, often as a counterpoint to idealized sunny scenarios.

The cluster centers on discussions about the Ruby programming language, including debates over its ergonomics and delight versus criticisms of performance, declining popularity, and maintainability issues.

The cluster discusses whether work-from-home (WFH) arrangements improve or reduce employee productivity compared to in-office work, citing personal anecdotes, studies, company reports, and management perspectives.

The cluster centers on debates about 'classless CSS' approaches that avoid semantic or utility classes in favor of element selectors or inline styles, weighing their practicality, benefits, and drawbacks against traditional class-based methods like BEM or CSS modules.

Discussions debate the role of luck versus hard work, skill, and preparation in achieving success, with many arguing that effort increases opportunities for luck while others emphasize luck's underrated influence.

The cluster focuses on debates about the similarities, differences, policies, voter demographics, and ideological alignments between the US Democratic and Republican parties.

Discussions focus on the high costs of managed database services like PlanetScale, AWS RDS, CockroachDB, and Postgres offerings, with comparisons to alternatives such as DynamoDB, self-hosting, or other providers like MotherDuck and Digital Ocean.

Comments debate Tesla's profitability, heavy losses per vehicle, reliance on government subsidies and regulatory credits sold to other automakers, substantial debt, and risks of bankruptcy or acquisition.

The cluster focuses on Tesla's subscription-based features like FSD and acceleration boosts, software downgrades on used cars for cheaper plans, perceived bait-and-switch tactics, and related pricing strategies to upsell new purchases.

Commenters draw parallels between the discussed technology and classic science fiction movies and books featuring supercomputers, rogue AIs, and dystopian futures, such as Colossus, Terminator, HAL, and The Matrix.

Users report varying performance of a GPU-intensive web demo in Firefox, often experiencing lag, low FPS, and choppiness compared to Chrome, with troubleshooting focused on hardware acceleration, drivers, and OS-specific issues.

This cluster centers on debates about whether corporations are people, particularly regarding legal personhood, rights, responsibilities, and references to concepts like Citizens United.

Users share personal anecdotes about dysfunctional workplaces, including incompetent coworkers, bizarre management practices, and absurd situations they encountered at past or current jobs.

Discussions center on bootstrapping startups without external funding, including using personal savings, time investment, runway management, and comparisons to raising venture capital or seed money.

Discussions center on the need for redundancy, failover systems, multiple servers, and multi-provider setups to mitigate outages from hardware failures, datacenter issues, or maintenance.

The cluster focuses on discussions about achieving distributed consensus in blockchains, including Nakamoto Consensus, proof-of-work alternatives, the Byzantine Generals problem, and requirements for trustless, permissionless systems without majority attacks.

Commenters debate whether a visual pattern resembles a tessellation, frequently referencing Penrose tilings, hexagonal grids, rectangles, and other geometric shapes that fit together without gaps.

Commenters discuss light pollution from artificial sources like streetlights and city lights, its negative effects on sleep, melatonin, and the natural night sky, often contrasting it with natural sunlight availability and viewing conditions.

Discussions center on why US police routinely carry firearms due to widespread civilian and criminal gun ownership, contrasting with countries like the UK where police often do not carry guns and policing is less aggressive.

Comments enthusiastically praise a startup founder's journey, product, and achievements, offering congratulations, inspiration, and best wishes while encouraging the startup ecosystem.

Users debate the speed, convenience, comfort, and practicality of public transportation compared to driving cars, often contrasting experiences in dense European cities like London and Paris with those in US cities.

The cluster revolves around debates on why corporations are taxed on profits separately from individuals taxed on income, questions of double taxation when profits are distributed as dividends or capital gains, and arguments for taxing only individual recipients instead of corporate entities.

Commenters question, criticize, or reference Mozilla's current projects, features, or stance on the article's topic, often expressing skepticism about their activity and direction amid mentions of Firefox, MDN, and other initiatives.

The cluster focuses on discussions about ventilation, airflow management, fans, vents, and heat exchange in rooms, buildings, or devices, including suggestions for improvements like bigger fans or positive pressure to enhance efficiency and air quality.

The cluster centers on debates about the true meaning of ownership, particularly whether purchasing devices like smartphones grants full control or if manufacturer restrictions (e.g., from Apple) undermine actual ownership.

Discussions focus on various RAID levels like RAID 5, 6, 10, RAIDZ, and alternatives such as ZFS or Btrfs, debating their reliability, fault tolerance, rebuild risks, performance, and the necessity of backups.

This cluster revolves around debates distinguishing personal beliefs from objective facts, evidence, and truth, repeatedly emphasizing that believing something does not make it true or constitute proof.

Discussions center on the syntax, limitations, and benefits of lambda functions versus full anonymous functions across languages like Python, JavaScript, and Haskell, with frequent criticism of Python's single-expression lambda restriction.

Debate on the relative costs and viability of nuclear power compared to solar and wind renewables, emphasizing the role of storage for intermittency and baseload reliability.

Cluster focuses on PostgreSQL's query planner reliability, frustrations with unexpected plan changes, lack of hints, and tools like EXPLAIN ANALYZE for optimization.

Users share personal experiences switching from QWERTY to layouts like Dvorak and Colemak, discussing learning curves, typing speed improvements, ergonomic benefits, muscle memory challenges, and practical inconveniences on shared devices.

Comments primarily recommend k3s and similar distributions like microk8s, minikube, and k3d as simpler, resource-efficient alternatives to full Kubernetes for hobbyist projects, single-node setups, and learning purposes.

Discussions center on puns, homophones, portmanteaus, etymologies, and katakana loanwords in Japanese, especially coincidences with English and uses in tech naming by programmers.

The cluster focuses on discussions about the processes, difficulties, pitfalls, and experiences of migrating software systems, data, users, or infrastructure to new platforms or technologies.

Discussions comparing or suggesting Leap Motion as a hand-tracking or gesture-based input alternative to keyboards, mice, or new devices like Myo, often referencing its use for touchless interfaces in AR/VR or screens.

The cluster focuses on debates about Greece's sovereign debt crisis, including EU bailouts, arguments over responsibility between Greece, Germany, France, and EU institutions, austerity measures, tax evasion, and economic reforms.

This cluster debates the advantages and disadvantages of using OS threads versus multiple processes for handling concurrency in servers and applications, particularly regarding scalability, memory usage, performance, and suitability for I/O-bound workloads.

The cluster discusses whether public schools indoctrinate children with political ideologies like 'woke' views or LGBTQ topics instead of focusing on core subjects, debating parents' rights versus the state's role in education.

Discussions center on alternatives to centralized content moderation on social media platforms, advocating for user-controlled, pluggable, or outsourced moderation tools like adblock-style filters and Mastodon-like instances.

Comments debate the role of parents' money in children's success, education, and opportunities, questioning fairness, accomplishments, and financial responsibilities between generations.

This cluster revolves around debates comparing induction cooktops to gas stoves, highlighting pros like efficiency, safety, precise control, and easy cleaning versus cons like limited techniques or reliability concerns.