All Topics

This cluster focuses on discussions questioning how to measure or quantify various concepts, often intangible qualities like passion or potential, and debating whether unmeasurable things matter or can be accurately assessed.

The cluster centers on the adage 'People don't leave companies, they leave managers,' with discussions sharing experiences of poor management leading to resignations, internal transfers, or being managed out, and advice for handling toxic manager situations.

This cluster debates the efficacy of masks in preventing COVID-19 transmission, with commenters citing studies, reviews, and data to argue both for and against their effectiveness in real-world and clinical settings.

Discussions debate racial disparities in US police killings, arguing whether higher rates for Black people stem from systemic racism or disproportionate involvement in violent crime, often citing adjusted statistics on encounters and fatalities.

The cluster focuses on comparisons between a new open-source workflow automation tool and established services like Zapier, IFTTT, and Microsoft Flow, with users asking about differences, advantages, and replacement potential.

Cluster focuses on debates about using AI, LLMs, and formal tools like Lean/Coq for generating, verifying, and automating mathematical proofs, including challenges, feasibility, and implications for human intuition.

Users share personal stories and fond memories of learning and using Pascal, especially Turbo Pascal and Borland variants, praising its readability, IDE, and ease of use while often comparing it to C and BASIC before transitioning away.

This cluster discusses strategies for scaling web applications and infrastructure to handle sudden traffic spikes, such as those from Hacker News frontpage features, including autoscaling, vertical/horizontal scaling, cloud services like AWS, and challenges with databases and costs.

Debates on high dropout and failure rates in introductory CS and STEM university courses, critiquing 'weed-out' practices, grade inflation pressures, and the need for better aptitude testing before admission.

The cluster centers on debates about the reliability, maintenance problems, shutdowns, and recent challenges of France's nuclear power plants, including corrosion, cooling water shortages, and shifts from exporter to importer of electricity, often compared to Germany's energy policies.

Commenters repeatedly challenge the idea that various concepts, options, or categories discussed are mutually exclusive, arguing they can coexist or overlap. This theme revolves around logical disputes over false dichotomies and non-exclusive classifications.

The cluster focuses on discussions about appropriate investment amounts, valuations, and terms for seed-stage startups, including references to accelerators like YC and 500 Startups, minimum viable funding levels, and comparisons to bootstrapping.

Commenters debate and correct which Central or Eastern European country (Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, etc.) is associated with the article's topic, often confusing Austria with neighbors or Australia.

Cluster focuses on debates about implementing cryptography in JavaScript, including concerns over JS-based crypto libraries like crypto-js, recommendations for WebCrypto API and libsodium, and warnings against rolling your own crypto.

The cluster discusses the original educational and hobbyist mission of the Raspberry Pi, questioning its openness due to Broadcom's proprietary hardware and GPU, and debates its shift towards commercial and business priorities over individual users.

Comments primarily discuss and compare the Python web framework Flask to alternatives like FastAPI, Pyramid, Django, and Bottle, often recommending it for small apps and APIs or questioning its suitability.

The cluster discusses the pros, cons, security vulnerabilities, and feasibility of mail-in voting compared to in-person voting, with examples from US states like California and Washington, and concerns about fraud, coercion, and scalability.

The cluster discusses causes of myopia like excessive near work and indoor activities, its progression mechanisms involving eye growth and peripheral defocus, and prevention strategies such as outdoor time, undercorrection with glasses, and eye habits.

Comments recommend books, tutorials, wikis, and small open-source OS projects like xv6, MINIX, and XINU for learning to write kernels and operating systems from scratch.

Users compare Firefox and Chrome's performance with large numbers of open tabs, highlighting Firefox's superior memory efficiency and stability over Chrome's multi-process model which leads to high resource usage.

Comments predominantly criticize NFTs as scams, absurd, or unnecessary, questioning their value and use cases, with occasional defenses highlighting potential applications.

Commenters discuss concrete's widespread use, environmental impact, reusability, durability issues, and alternatives like Roman concrete in construction contexts.

The cluster discusses how filesystems slow down with directories containing many files, such as slow 'ls' operations even on powerful hardware, across Linux, Windows, and macOS. Users debate causes, optimizations like metadata caching, and comparisons to alternative approaches.

Discussions center on patent encumbrances, licensing complexities, and royalty fees for video codecs like H.264, HEVC, and alternatives such as VP8, VP9, and AV1, including their impact on open source adoption and browser support.

The cluster discusses strategies and challenges for achieving initial user growth, virality, and discoverability for startups and products through social media, word-of-mouth, influencers, media attention, and Hacker News promotion.

Users frequently urge each other to read or recall history, often sarcastically correcting perceived ignorance about historical precedents or facts in response to claims in the article.

Cluster focuses on debates preferring whitelists over blacklists for content blocking, requests to share blocklists, and discussions on terminology changes like blacklist to blocklist and whitelist to allowlist.

The cluster focuses on debates around database sharding for multi-tenant SaaS applications, comparing single large databases, per-tenant schemas or instances, and hybrid approaches for scaling and isolation.

Commenters focus on the peculiar, verbose, or unusual writing style of the featured article, debating its effectiveness, origins, and whether it resembles human academic writing or AI-generated text.

The cluster centers on debates about US drone strikes, particularly criticisms of extrajudicial killings, civilian casualties, targeting US citizens without due process, and their expansion under the Obama administration.

Commenters share personal experiences with learning, forgetting, or abandoning cursive writing, debating its speed, legibility, obsolescence, and replacement by printing or typing in the digital age.

Discussions focus on Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins, IO boards like the Compute Module 4, compatibility with alternatives such as ESP32 and RP2040/Pico, and expansion options for hardware interfacing.

Users recommend and compare ORMs and query builders like jOOQ, sqlc, Drizzle, Kysely, and TypeORM, discussing productivity, ergonomics, tradeoffs with raw SQL, and alternatives.

Discussions revolve around the limitations of current quantum computers due to low qubit counts, the need for thousands of qubits for practical applications, and challenges like error correction and decoherence.

The cluster focuses on security vulnerabilities in modern cars, especially connected and self-driving vehicles, with concerns about remote hacking, CAN bus access, and potential safety threats like brake failure or crashes.

The cluster debates whether governments or private companies are more efficient and effective at providing services, infrastructure, and projects, with arguments on waste, profit motives, transparency, and failure mechanisms.

Discussions debate the merits of CSS Grid and Flexbox for web layouts, comparing them to each other and traditional grid systems like Bootstrap, with opinions on which is superior or sufficient for modern needs.

This cluster features numerous comments announcing that a website or service has recovered from downtime and is back up and running. Users repeatedly note the restoration of access after an outage.

Discussions center on conflicts between startup co-founders, including mismatched contributions, doubts about commitment, advice to communicate openly, part ways, or buy out shares, and personal stories of resolving or dissolving partnerships.

Comments debate and satirize the idea of corporations being treated like people or having their own emergent intelligence and behaviors, often comparing them to organisms or entities independent of their human components.

Comments focus on identifying and listing specific venture capital firms, investors, and funding sources for startups, such as Sequoia, Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, and others, often with links to confirmations.

Discussions analyze the reasons for the failure and decline of once-dominant companies like Kodak, Xerox, IBM, Blackberry, and others, often citing poor management, the innovator's dilemma, and failure to adapt to technological shifts.

Comments discuss the significant and lasting reputational harm to companies from controversial actions, scandals, or poor behavior, emphasizing its impact on business and recovery challenges.

Discussions focus on the financial expenses of hosting and maintaining high-traffic websites like Hacker News, including servers, bandwidth, storage, moderation, and potential funding models such as subscriptions or donations.

The cluster focuses on discussions of premiums, deductibles, out-of-pocket maximums, and total expenses in US health insurance plans, including ACA and employer-sponsored options, with debates on affordability and coverage limits.

Comments debate the safety risks, regulatory gaps, and ethical concerns of deploying partially autonomous vehicles like Tesla's on public roads without adequate testing, certification, or oversight, often comparing to human driver licensing.

The cluster debates the value of deep expertise in narrow areas versus broad competence across multiple technologies and domains in software engineering and IT, highlighting T-shaped skills, the vastness of the field, and the importance of foundational and application knowledge.

This cluster centers on discussions about deriving lessons from personal or others' failures, mistakes, and negative experiences, frequently emphasizing 'learning the hard way' or the value of experience gained through hardship.

Discussions recommend and compare Java web frameworks like Play, Spring Boot, Dropwizard, Ninja, and others for building modern web apps, debating their advantages over traditional JEE and viability of Java for web development.

This cluster centers on debates about using Promises for asynchronous programming in JavaScript, including their limitations, comparisons to async/await, generators, and alternative libraries.

This cluster focuses on discussions about submitting patches to upstream open source projects, reasons why they aren't accepted or upstreamed, maintainer attitudes toward patches, and alternatives like forking.

Users discuss frustrations with pre-installed bloatware and system apps on Android and iOS devices that cannot be fully uninstalled, only disabled, and methods like debloating or rooting to remove them.

Discussions center on comparing a featured cybersecurity tool for vulnerability scanning, threat detection, and management to alternatives like AlienVault, Synack, Tanium, Threatcare, SIEMs, and others such as Wazuh and CrowdStrike.

This cluster discusses regional differences in residential building materials, primarily debating wood framing common in the US/North America against brick, concrete, and masonry prevalent in Europe and elsewhere, covering pros/cons like fire resistance, earthquakes, insulation, durability, and resource availability.

Discussions center on Fedora's strengths and weaknesses as a bleeding-edge Linux distro, including comparisons to stable alternatives like Ubuntu and Debian, hardware support, and suitability for desktops or development.

Comments debate why the US and allies have not invaded North Korea, emphasizing its nuclear weapons, artillery threats to Seoul holding South Korea hostage, and China's role as a buffer.

Discussions center on how interruptions from colleagues, quick questions, and meetings disrupt developers' flow state and productivity, debating strategies to protect focus time versus team collaboration needs.

The cluster discusses Ozempic (semaglutide) and similar GLP-1 drugs like Wegovy and tirzepatide for treating obesity, debating their effectiveness compared to diet/exercise, long-term sustainability, side effects, and whether they solve root causes or enable 'cheating'.

Users discuss various methods like browser extensions, containers, adblockers, and incognito mode to prevent Facebook from tracking their browsing across websites via widgets, like buttons, and pixels.

Discussions revolve around the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard for providing tools, resources, and context to LLMs via servers, including its benefits over direct APIs, implementations by companies like GitHub and Figma, and debates on its necessity and complexity.

This cluster centers on debates about Xerox PARC's pioneering graphical user interfaces like the Alto and Star, and how Steve Jobs and Apple borrowed or stole these ideas for the Macintosh and Lisa.

The cluster centers on debates about whether software should continue supporting older hardware, frustrations with dropping support for devices just a few years old, and accusations of planned obsolescence versus practical reasons like developer resources and security.

This cluster features numerous job listings from cybersecurity companies like Cobalt.io, Sqreen, HackerOne, and others, seeking roles such as security engineers, pentesting experts, backend developers, and DevSecOps positions, often remote or hybrid.

Discussions focus on inquiries about Android libraries, SDK integration, app examples, and support for using the featured technology in Android development.

Discussions center on setting up personal home servers or homelabs using affordable hardware like mini PCs, Raspberry Pis, or old laptops to self-host services such as Nextcloud, Matrix, backups, and more, often as alternatives to cloud services.

Comments discuss multiplayer features in games, including online and local play, social interactions, solo vs group experiences, and desires for multiplayer support.

Users debate the necessity of phone cases for protecting modern smartphones, sharing personal anecdotes about drops, screen cracks, and the increasing durability of devices like recent iPhones without cases.

Comments focus on how distributed systems, clusters, and databases like Redis and Cassandra handle network partitions, node failures, split-brain scenarios, and maintain consistency using Raft, Paxos, quorums, and replication.

This cluster consists of comments criticizing various comparisons as invalid, unfair, or apples-to-oranges, arguing that the entities being compared are too dissimilar for meaningful analysis.

This cluster centers on debates about whether databases and their queries are the primary performance bottlenecks in web applications, contrasting them with issues in code, hardware, or other components.

The cluster centers on debates about the merits and drawbacks of immutability versus mutability in programming languages, including its role as a feature or limitation, implementation details, and comparisons across languages like Go, Rust, and Java.

The cluster discusses questions job candidates should ask prospective employers during interviews, including challenges like limited time, diplomatic phrasing, and insights from both candidate and interviewer perspectives on the hiring process dynamics.

Commenters question, explain, and apologize for perceived offensiveness in statements, often citing cultural differences, unintended insults, or requests for clarification on what's rude.

The cluster focuses on discussions about the strength and impact of network effects in social platforms like Facebook, explaining user lock-in, barriers to switching, and challenges for competitors.

Users discuss personal experiences with frequent hardware failures, repairs, and replacements on MacBook Pro models, including keyboards, screens, logic boards, and batteries, often questioning Apple's build quality and reliability.

The cluster focuses on debates about whether smoking causes cancer, its relative health risks compared to factors like COVID or pollution, and interpretations of studies linking smoking to lung cancer and other diseases.

Comments primarily offer condolences for a significant personal loss, such as the death of a spouse or family member, and share personal stories of experiencing and coping with grief.

Users discuss and debate the speed, responsiveness, and lag of VSCode compared to other editors like Sublime Text, JetBrains IDEs, Neovim, Emacs, and Vim, sharing experiences on startup times, scrolling, and large projects.

This cluster discusses perceptions of cultural homogeneity and diversity in the US versus Europe, including debates on how Americans view their own culture as normal or diverse and Europeans see the US as foreign or incomprehensible.

Comments in this cluster primarily discuss issues with API rate limits and quotas being exceeded due to high traffic, including developer apologies, requests to retry later, and announcements of resolutions or upgrades.

Comments in this cluster focus on identifying and criticizing disingenuous arguing strategies like sealioning, whataboutism, JAQing off, and bad faith rhetoric used to derail conversations.

Discussions compare Mermaid.js with tools like draw.io, PlantUML, asciiflow, and others for text-based diagram creation, often in Markdown, editors, or with AI integration.

Discussions center on Linux kernel booting challenges, bootloaders like GRUB and systemd-boot, initramfs integration, full disk encryption, and dual-boot configurations.

The cluster revolves around heated discussions on whether voters, particularly Trump supporters and Brexit voters, are stupid, irrational, brainwashed, or voting against their own interests by choosing candidates or policies that harm them.

The cluster discusses how tech and crypto billionaires like SBF, Musk, Thiel, and others use massive donations and money to buy political influence, access, and favors from politicians across parties, often framed as corruption or bribery.

The cluster centers on debates about the effectiveness, universality, cultural interpretations, and acceptance of emojis in digital communication, with Hacker News users often criticizing them while defending their value for expressing emotion.

Comments debate agriculture's dominant share (80-90%) of California's water consumption, especially for water-intensive crops like almonds, alfalfa, and rice exported out-of-state, versus minimal urban/residential use during droughts.

Discussions center on various probability distributions like uniform, normal, binomial, and Poisson, debating whether specific scenarios follow uniform distributions or require more nuanced models, including sampling and generalizations.

The cluster centers on skepticism and criticism of Western media's biased coverage of Russia, China, Ukraine, and geopolitical conflicts, often comparing it to state propaganda and highlighting selective reporting or government influence.

This cluster centers on debates comparing Ruby and Python, particularly regarding syntax readability, ergonomics, expressiveness, and influences from languages like Perl and Smalltalk.

Discussions focus on the limitations of clock speed as a measure of CPU performance, comparing historical processors like the 486, Pentium, i860, and others while highlighting factors such as IPC, architecture, and software efficiency.

Commenters repeatedly ask which specific country a post or story refers to, often highlighting US-centrism or demanding geographic context for better understanding.

Comments discuss the feasibility and dangers of diving to extreme ocean depths, including pressure effects, equipment limitations like watches and phones, implosion risks, and alternatives such as submersibles or freediving, often in the context of accessing a deep underwater leak.

Users joke about feeling or getting old, often triggered by references to outdated technology, past events, or nostalgic content that highlights their age.

Discussions center on Google App Engine (GAE), covering user experiences, pros like scalability and free tier, cons such as limitations and compatibility issues, and comparisons to alternatives like Heroku and EC2.

Comments criticize the trillions of dollars spent by the US on wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, highlighting the military-industrial complex profits and arguing that funds should be redirected to beneficial domestic or innovative purposes instead.

The cluster discusses how GPU compute performance is primarily limited by memory bandwidth rather than raw processing power, highlighting issues like slow PCIe transfers from system RAM to VRAM, unified memory trade-offs, and potential direct disk-to-GPU copying solutions.

Cluster focuses on user experiences with eye strain from prolonged computer screen use and various remedies like dark mode, blue light filters, e-ink monitors, ambient lighting, and ergonomic adjustments.

Discussions compare Elixir and Erlang, focusing on advantages like syntax, community, tooling, compatibility with the BEAM VM, and reasons to prefer one over the other for new projects.

The cluster focuses on how cryptocurrency mining drives GPU demand, affects prices and availability, and leads to debates about resale values, market gluts, and potential price drops post-crypto crash.