All Topics

The cluster focuses on recognizing and admitting ignorance, emphasizing phrases like 'you don't know what you don't know,' the Dunning-Kruger effect, and the value of humility over overconfidence in knowledge, particularly in professional contexts.

Discussions focus on various fees charged by banks, including overdraft, ATM, monthly maintenance, and NSF fees, with users comparing banks that charge versus those offering free services and sharing experiences across countries like the US, UK, and others.

Discussions focus on methods for distributing and installing native iOS apps outside the Apple App Store, including requirements for developer accounts, code signing, and tools like AltStore.

Discussions revolve around Donald Trump's immigration policies, including travel bans, visa restrictions, and accusations of xenophobia or racism, often comparing to previous administrations and debating their relevance to tech and HN.

The cluster focuses on frustrations with police failing to investigate or respond effectively to reports of property crimes like theft, vandalism, and break-ins, even when evidence is provided, leading to discussions on vigilantism and underreporting.

The cluster focuses on AI-powered tools and platforms like Learnbase and ChatGPT for personalized education, structured learning paths, resource recommendations, and accelerating skill acquisition.

This cluster debates the use of ticket and issue tracking systems like Jira in software development for managing bugs, features, tasks, and tech debt, questioning whether to create tickets for everything or handle minor issues immediately, and addressing problems like stagnation and prioritization.

Cluster discusses the current state of the tech job market, including personal experiences with hiring, interviews, recruiter outreach, layoffs, and debates on whether conditions are poor, normal, or improving.

Comments debate the root causes of widespread depression, anxiety, apathy, and disillusionment among younger generations, attributing it to economic pressures like housing costs and low wages, social isolation, technology addiction, and lack of purpose in contemporary society.

The cluster focuses on claims that the DNC rigged primaries against Bernie Sanders to favor establishment candidates like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, arguing Sanders would have defeated Trump. Discussions blame DNC corruption and interference for Democratic losses.

Comments debate the security isolation provided by virtual machines, questioning their effectiveness against host OS compromises, VM escapes, hypervisor vulnerabilities, and side-channel attacks.

Discussions focus on the distinction between peaceful protests and riots, particularly in contexts like BLM movements, with debates on causes, condoning violence, looting, and political biases in media portrayal.

Commenters emphasize health as the top priority over money, economy, or other concerns, often framing issues as health problems and arguing that everything else is secondary.

The cluster discusses how people and governments justify atrocities, tyranny, and oppression under the guise of the 'greater good' or punishing 'bad ones', often warning against unwavering beliefs and mental gymnastics that enable such actions.

The cluster centers on debates about why younger generations (millennials, Gen Z) are reluctant to take low-status, grueling entry-level jobs, with older commenters criticizing entitlement and work ethic while younger ones cite economic hardships like debt, housing costs, and job market changes.

Users discuss and share links to esoteric programming languages such as Brainfuck, INTERCAL, Piet, Befunge, and Malbolge, often joking about their minimalism, difficulty, or similarity to a featured language.

Discussions focus on the affordability, availability, and adoption of 10GbE and higher-speed Ethernet hardware like switches, NICs, and cables, with users recommending cheap options such as MikroTik and Mellanox gear while debating why it's not more widely used.

Comments debate the viability of hydrogen as a clean fuel source, criticizing that most production relies on fossil fuels with high CO2 emissions and that electrolysis methods are inefficient and uneconomical compared to direct electricity use.

This cluster centers on discussions of pair programming experiences, including its benefits for learning, debugging, and complex tasks, as well as criticisms regarding its stressfulness, ineffectiveness for certain scenarios, and dependency on team dynamics.

Discussions revolve around whether vibrant online communities like old forums and BBS still exist, with users pointing to niche groups on Discord, Reddit, Facebook, Twitch, and specialized forums as modern equivalents, while lamenting the loss of personal connections on larger sites like HN.

The cluster focuses on Microsoft's strategies in the 1990s browser wars, including crushing Netscape with IE to protect its Windows monopoly, subsequent IE stagnation (e.g., IE6), antitrust consequences, and comparisons to modern browsers like Firefox and Chrome.

Discussions center on personal experiences with psychedelics like LSD, mushrooms, and ayahuasca, including benefits for mind expansion and therapy, risks such as bad trips or psychosis, and advice on dosage, set, setting, and harm reduction.

Commenters debate the challenges of selling customizable software to enterprises versus off-the-shelf SaaS solutions, highlighting customer demands for unique features, high costs, and the preference for standardization in common business functions.

Users advocate for tea over coffee, recommend loose-leaf varieties like Longjing and black tea, critique tea preparation methods, and suggest tea adaptations of the coffee product discussed in the article.

The cluster focuses on JavaScript's object model quirks, including prototype chain issues, property access pitfalls, and solutions like ES6 Proxies and Crockford objects.

The cluster centers on debates about whether a system, tool, or application can effectively run on one powerful server versus needing to scale across multiple machines or a distributed cluster.

The cluster focuses on discussions about PostgreSQL's replication features, including synchronous replication, WAL shipping, logical replication, master-master setups, and tools like Bucardo, BDR, and repmgr, often comparing them to MySQL or questioning their suitability for high availability and scaling.

This cluster focuses on discussions praising AWK's utility for text processing, one-liners, and Unix pipelines, with recommendations to learn it, comparisons to Perl/Python/JS, and shares of resources despite its age.

The cluster focuses on discussions about tokenization in large language models (LLMs), including why LLMs use subword tokens instead of characters, the implications for performance and training, and comparisons between different tokenization approaches.

Comments primarily suggest or remind users to use Hacker News's built-in poll feature (newpoll) for opinion gathering instead of regular posts or questions, including links and mentions of karma thresholds.

This cluster centers on debates about extending human lifespan or achieving immortality through anti-aging research, weighing benefits like improved quality of life against concerns such as population growth, societal stagnation, and inequality.

The cluster discusses challenges in the restaurant industry like high costs, slim margins, and scalability issues, focusing on ghost kitchens, cloud kitchens, and delivery-only models as potential solutions or business opportunities.

The cluster discusses challenges in international money transfers due to banking restrictions, capital controls, embargoes, and limited access in developing countries, highlighting alternatives like crypto (e.g., USDC), Western Union, and PayPal to bypass these issues.

The cluster focuses on comparisons between WebView implementations in Android (Chromium/Chrome-based) and iOS (WebKit/UIWebView) apps and browsers, debating rendering engines, consistency, and implications for mobile web development.

Comments focus on the high prices of domain names, including registration, renewal fees, premium domains, and variations across TLDs and registrars like Namecheap and GoDaddy.

Discussions focus on the availability, quality, and impact of mods in video games, including how mods address shortcomings, active modding communities, and official mod support.

The cluster centers on discussions about the heavier weight of electric vehicles compared to ICE counterparts, mainly due to batteries, and its impacts on efficiency, safety, road wear, range, and infrastructure.

Comments focus on the pressures of AAA game development, including crunch time, management decisions to ship unfinished buggy products on schedule, and specific cases like Cyberpunk 2077's troubled launch and delisting from PlayStation.

The cluster discusses concerns and speculation about a platform or service experiencing or risking significant user drop-off, exodus, or shrinkage due to recent changes, with debates on impacts to retention, engagement, and business viability.

The cluster debates the nature, frequency, explainability, and acceptability of mistakes made by AI compared to humans, questioning whether AI can surpass human reliability and how to handle AI errors.

Discussions revolve around allegations of sexism and misogyny in the tech industry, including incidents like the PyCon dongle joke, Github employee exits, and reactions to women reporting harassment or inappropriate behavior at conferences and companies.

The cluster centers on discussions about the XMPP messaging protocol's history, reasons for its decline despite early adoption by Google and Facebook, issues like inconsistent extensions, federation challenges, and spam, alongside arguments for its ongoing relevance and potential revival.

The cluster revolves around debates on the ages of ancient human artifacts and structures, such as Gobekli Tepe, wooden tools, and potential evidence of early civilizations, questioning established timelines of human prehistory and technological development.

Discussions focus on alternatives to Mapbox for map tiles, vector tiles, basemaps, and OSM rendering, including options like Maplibre, PMTiles, Tegola, MapTiler, and self-hosting solutions.

The cluster discusses AI's potential to replace human labor entirely, leading to mass unemployment, wealth concentration among AI owners, and the need for new economic models like UBI or societal restructuring.

Discussions center on the proper implementation of random shuffling algorithms like Fisher-Yates, critiquing biased or insufficiently random methods in software features such as lists, tests, or playlists. Commenters debate the importance of true randomness, potential loss of entropy, and alternatives like seeded shuffles.

Commenters acknowledge, often with surprise or concession, that a referenced group, company, or team ('they') is competent, effective, or succeeding well at their task.

Discussions debate the definition, forms, and effectiveness of communication, often referencing xkcd comic 1028, questioning whether actions like coin flips, notes, or non-verbal signals qualify as true communication.

Comments contrast the high costs and accessibility issues of US higher education with free or low-cost university systems in Europe (e.g., Germany, Scandinavia), noting trade-offs like stricter admissions and vocational tracks.

The cluster centers on debates about whether willpower is a limited resource like a muscle, the challenges of self-discipline, and strategies like environmental changes to avoid relying on it for resisting temptations such as dieting or procrastination.

Cluster focuses on privacy concerns with built-in laptop webcams and recommendations for physical solutions like tape covers, shutters, or disabling hardware to prevent unauthorized spying or access.

The cluster focuses on cultural contrasts in communication styles, especially American tendencies toward overt politeness, small talk, and friendliness perceived as insincere or intrusive by Europeans and others, versus more direct approaches elsewhere.

Comments recommend methods like usertesting.com, user interviews, MomTest, and direct feedback for validating app usability and ideas through real user interactions.

Discussions center on electric scooters (e-scooters) as urban transportation alternatives to cars, e-bikes, and walking, covering pros like convenience and fun, cons like safety and stability, and comparisons to rentals vs. ownership.

Discussions focus on the challenges, regulations, and mechanisms for selling shares in private companies, including employee liquidity, secondary markets, vesting restrictions, and SEC disclosure requirements.

The cluster centers on debates about whether language features like reflection, code generation, and optimizations occur at compile time (avoiding runtime costs) or runtime, referencing languages such as Python, Zig, Java, and others.

The cluster focuses on discussions about affordable alternatives to the Bloomberg Terminal, such as Quantale.io and OpenBB, including data sources, APIs, comparisons to FactSet and Quandl, and accessibility for non-professionals.

Commenters debate data visualizations and trends, frequently attributing counterintuitive results to Simpson's paradox, regression to the mean, single data points, small samples, outliers, and other statistical artifacts rather than genuine effects.

The cluster discusses frustrations with accessing live sports broadcasts due to blackouts, regional restrictions, fragmented streaming services across leagues like NFL, NHL, MLB, and the dominance of cable TV deals that hinder cord-cutting.

Cluster focuses on discussions about 'right to repair' laws and movement, including their relevance to electronics repair, potential loopholes, state bills, and debates on definitions like DIY vs. third-party repairs for devices such as phones, PCs, and cars.

The cluster focuses on debates and suggestions about using custom domains versus subdomains for web services and apps, including support requests, best practices like wildcard subdomains, and alternatives such as redirects or separate DNS providers.

Discussions center on the importance of enabling all compiler warnings (e.g., -Wall, -Wextra, -Weverything), treating them as errors with -Werror, and best practices for handling them in C/C++ codebases to prevent bugs.

Discussions emphasize that social, societal, or human issues cannot be resolved through technological solutions alone, criticizing attempts to apply tech fixes to inherently non-technical problems.

Discussions center on strategies and hacks to avoid detection by police or surveillance systems, such as using burner phones, disguises, alibis, detector devices, and plausible deniability in clandestine or illegal activities.

Comments debate the value, implementation quality, and challenges of responsive web design, including criticisms of poor mobile adaptation and defenses of its practicality.

Debate on the necessity of owning a personal car versus using alternatives like renting vehicles for rare needs, biking, public transit, or ride-sharing for daily commutes and errands.

Discussions explore why there are fewer independent or bootstrapped software startups than expected given the ease of development, abundance of programmers, and low barriers, often citing big tech dominance, market saturation, historical uniqueness of past eras, and competition from incumbents.

The cluster discusses debates around responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities, focusing on timelines like 90-day windows, patch release delays, notification to vendors, and whether disclosures were timely or irresponsible.

Comments discuss the United States' national debt levels, debt-to-GDP ratios, their sustainability, historical contexts like WW2, and comparisons via sites like usdebtclock.org.

Discussions highlight WhatsApp's dominance as the primary messaging app in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and other regions outside the US, contrasting it with iMessage and SMS usage primarily in the US.

The cluster debates concerns that TikTok enables the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to spy on users, spread propaganda, and manipulate public opinion in the US, especially among youth, while comparing it to US social media and questioning if it's genuine security fears or protectionism.

Discussions focus on crowd behavior issues on escalators and similar spaces like baggage claims, including poor queuing, blocking exits, standing too close, and difficulties moving or leaving due to congestion.

The cluster focuses on discussions about the necessity, effectiveness, wording, enforcement, and controversies surrounding Codes of Conduct (CoCs) in open source projects and tech communities.

Discussions revolve around the importance of building and sharing working prototypes for ideas, gathering feedback, and distinguishing prototypes from production code.

Commenters debate the historical origins, first uses, and popularization of the term 'open source', citing ngrams, pre-1998 references like 1996 press releases, 1987 documents, and earlier instances while discussing its association with the OSI in 1998.

This cluster centers on debates about whether people are primarily driven by financial incentives in their work and careers, or by other factors such as passion, purpose, achievement, and social good.

Discussions center on how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are now primarily mined using specialized ASICs rather than GPUs or CPUs, which are no longer competitive or profitable. Comments also touch on ASIC-resistant algorithms in coins like Ethereum that favor GPU mining.

Commenters express frustration that most people do not care about or are indifferent to the issues discussed in the parent thread, often noting this as a worrying or sad reality.

Cluster focuses on debates comparing VLC media player to alternatives like mpv and MPC-HC, discussing bloat, features, performance, and versatility.

Comments discuss the effectiveness of speed reading techniques, their impact on comprehension and retention, personal experiences, and alternatives like visual processing or tools such as Spritz and Bionic Reading.

Cluster discusses Valkey as an open-source fork of Redis, comparisons to Redis Labs, concerns over Redis's changes under VMWare, and debates on contributing to Redis versus alternatives.

Users share personal accounts of intense, negative, or lasting effects from psychedelics like LSD, mushrooms, psilocybin, and potent weed, often comparing them to the original post's hallucinatory or dissociative experience.

This cluster revolves around users accusing others on Hacker News of promoting white supremacist, nationalist, or racist views, often in response to specific comments or linked content.

Users frequently self-identify as programmers, software developers, or engineers, often responding to questions about their roles and debating nuances between these titles. Discussions include humor, humility, and preferences for specific labels like developer over engineer.

Commenters challenge claims about practices causing company failures by citing numerous successful companies like Uber, Google, and Facebook that don't follow them, while debating metrics of success such as revenue, market cap, and luck.

Discussions revolve around the necessity, benefits, and alternatives to using classes in programming, often criticizing overuse in favor of functions, structs, closures, or namespaces.

Discussions heavily recommend 'Peopleware' by DeMarco and Lister along with other books on software engineering management, team productivity, and people-focused project practices.

Commenters debate average commute lengths, the luxury of short commutes like 10-30 minutes, and strategies such as living near work or using public transit, contrasting experiences in cities like SF, Boston, and Paris.

Discussions center on SpaceX's market dominance in reusable rocket launches and lower costs compared to competitors like Blue Origin, Boeing, ULA, and Rocket Lab, debating monopoly risks, government contracts, and the lack of viable alternatives.

Comments focus on the LK-99 material's potential as a room-temperature superconductor, debating its validity, testing for superconductivity, and implications if confirmed.

Comments discuss the widespread use of Java 8 in enterprises and projects, reluctance to upgrade to newer versions like 11, 17, or 21, and experiences with migration challenges or smoothness post-Java 8.

Comments recommend books, online courses like Andrew Ng's Coursera, and resources such as the Deep Learning Book for learning machine learning and deep learning.

Discussions center on compatibility, support, issues, and alternatives for various gaming controllers like Steam Controller, Switch Pro, Bluetooth, and console controllers with specific platforms or devices.

Commenters propose or debate using accelerometers, IMUs, and motion sensors as simple solutions for motion detection, interactions like secret knocks, or features in devices and apps, often questioning why more complex sensors are needed.

This cluster features repeated recommendations of books like 'The Pragmatic Programmer', 'A Philosophy of Software Design' by John Ousterhout, and 'Clean Code' by Robert C. Martin for improving software design, coding practices, and engineering principles.

Comments focus on common misunderstandings of p-values and statistical significance, such as confusing the probability of no real effect with the probability of observing the data under the null hypothesis, and critiques of the arbitrary 0.05 threshold.

The cluster focuses on the rampant presence of bot accounts on social platforms like Twitter, debates over fighting versus monetizing bots, and strategies for detection and mitigation including API fees and captchas.

The cluster centers on discussions of how startup employees' stock options and equity are devalued or lost during acquisitions, firings before vesting, down rounds, or when founders cash out, often contrasting with executive gains.

Software engineers discuss the dilemma of switching from individual contributor coding roles to management for career progression, sharing concerns about losing technical skills, personal experiences of regret or returning to coding, and alternatives like principal engineer tracks.

This cluster consists of comments recommending Douglas Hofstadter's books such as Gödel, Escher, Bach and I Am a Strange Loop, often in the context of discussions on AI consciousness, self-reference, and intelligence.