All Topics

Users debate the merits of autosave features versus explicit save buttons in applications, discussing reliability, UI clarity, user trust, and experiences with tools like Excalidraw and Google Docs.

The cluster discusses privacy concerns with credit card companies, banks, and payment processors tracking, selling, or sharing users' transaction data, often comparing it to the anonymity of cash payments.

Discussions question why processed and ultra-processed foods are considered unhealthy, debating definitions of processing, its inherent effects, and distinctions from minimally processed options.

Comments argue that the official unemployment rate is misleading as it excludes discouraged workers, labor force dropouts, underemployed people, and others not actively job-seeking, advocating for better metrics like labor force participation rate and U-6.

The cluster focuses on comparisons of high tax rates in European countries versus the US, including discussions of marginal and effective rates, hidden taxes like VAT and social security, take-home pay, and the value of public services received.

The cluster focuses on repeated advice to never speak to police without a lawyer present, even if innocent, due to risks of self-incrimination, with frequent links to explanatory YouTube videos.

The cluster focuses on the universal approximation theorem and neural networks' theoretical ability to approximate any function, including nonlinear, arithmetic, or algorithmic ones, while debating practical limitations and efficiency.

Comments in this cluster strongly denounce a Hacker News submission or similar content as garbage, trash, rubbish, crap, or other derogatory terms, often questioning its suitability for the site.

Commenters debate criticisms of countries' governance, policies, or problems by comparing them to other nations, often using 'whataboutism' to deflect, relativize, or justify issues rather than addressing them directly.

Debate on whether everyone should learn basic programming skills like reading or math for modern life, automation, and problem-solving, or if it's an unnecessary specialized vocational skill.

Users suggest that the post or question is better suited for Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange rather than Hacker News, emphasizing their Q&A format for technical inquiries.

Discussions center on the difficulties of English pronunciation due to irregular spelling, homophones, multiple vowel sounds, and lack of phonetic consistency, often compared to more phonetic languages like Farsi, Spanish, or tonal languages.

Comments focus on the remarkable intelligence, camouflage abilities, and behaviors of octopuses and cephalopods like cuttlefish, often referencing documentaries such as My Octopus Teacher and books like Other Minds.

Discussions center on the underrepresentation of women in tech and programming roles, debating causes such as interest levels, discrimination, hiring standards, and efforts to achieve gender balance in companies.

This cluster revolves around debates on whether federal law always trumps state law in the US, states' ability to ignore or refuse enforcement of federal laws, and examples like sanctuary cities, cannabis, and gun regulations. Discussions frequently reference the Supremacy Clause, anti-commandeering, and federal preemption.

Users criticize Oculus VR headsets for requiring a Facebook account due to Meta's ownership, expressing concerns over privacy, vendor lock-in, and control, while advocating boycotts and alternatives like Valve Index.

This cluster debates the trade-offs between building custom internal software/tools versus buying or using existing SaaS, open source, or third-party solutions, emphasizing costs, maintenance, opportunity cost, and competitive advantage.

Comments discuss and debate estimated driving durations for various trips, comparing Google Maps times, personal experiences, traffic impacts, and feasibility versus flying.

Comments debate whether global oil production has peaked, the rising costs of extraction from remaining reserves, and the economic shift toward alternative energy sources amid declining easy-access oil.

Users compare and recommend image search engines like Yandex, Google, Bing, and others, discussing their effectiveness, reverse search features, and common complaints about censorship or poor results.

The cluster discusses challenges with IPv6 adoption and support in cloud providers like AWS, Azure, GCP, and DigitalOcean, including complaints about incomplete implementations, NAT workarounds, VPN tunnels, and firewall compatibility.

The cluster centers on the depletion of wild fish stocks due to overfishing and debates fish farming/aquaculture as a sustainable alternative, while highlighting its environmental drawbacks like reliance on wild feed, disease spread, and ecosystem damage.

Discussions revolve around the pros and cons of modern 'new math' or Common Core methods for teaching arithmetic like multiplication and division, debating whether they foster deeper understanding or confuse students and parents compared to traditional algorithms.

Debate on the 'Useless Use of Cat' (UUOC) in Unix shell pipelines, weighing readability and left-to-right data flow benefits against the inefficiency of spawning extra processes compared to input redirection or direct file arguments.

Commenters reminisce about the inadequacy of early search engines like AltaVista, Yahoo, and Excite compared to Google's revolutionary impact on web search, often debating whether Google was truly innovative or just iterative.

The cluster debates the economic viability, market demand, technical feasibility, and regulatory challenges of new supersonic commercial aircraft like Boom's Overture, frequently comparing them to the Concorde and questioning demand beyond niche long-haul business travel.

Discussions focus on alternatives to standard LCD displays, including transparent LCDs, LED matrices, digital signage, e-ink, and low-power options for embedded projects, hardware hacks, and signage, with recommendations on sources and products.

Comments in this cluster primarily dismiss statements, claims, or posts as unsubstantiated speculation, rumors, or conjecture lacking evidence.

Users discuss the lack of pre-built binaries, Homebrew, or MacPorts packages for a software tool on macOS, expressing frustration with building from source or requiring Xcode.

Discussions center on opinions about working at Facebook, including skepticism toward FB employees' comments on HN, debates on the company's appeal as an employer amid ethical concerns, and defenses from current or former staff.

Users debate the failures, poor governance, and unlivable conditions of American cities, often comparing them to global counterparts and arguing against generalizations or cherry-picking examples.

Users repeatedly criticize Hacker News for featuring Daily Mail articles on the front page, labeling it a unreliable tabloid and demanding links from more reputable sources like the New York Times or Guardian.

Discussions compare current or recent protests to historical events like Tiananmen Square, Kent State shootings, BLM/George Floyd protests, and Capitol Hill occupation, focusing on police responses, violence levels, peacefulness, and escalation risks.

This cluster revolves around heated discussions on whether a specific idea, product, or concept adds practical value, the subjectivity of value, and distinctions between perceived value, usefulness, and measurable utility.

Discussions center on whether a featured data structure or system is a tree, DAG, or graph, with many commenters arguing it's reinventing trees or advocating for traditional tree structures over more complex alternatives.

Commenters share advice and personal experiences for a student wanting to leave college due to boredom and cost, debating whether to stick it out, take a gap year, enjoy the social aspects, or pursue work immediately.

Discussions center on debating the results, reliability, and implications of public opinion polls regarding controversial political and social issues like surveillance, policy support, and government actions.

Comments debate the mismatch between school start/end times and parents' work schedules, including early dismissals creating childcare issues, early starts causing sleep deprivation in kids, and proposals to adjust hours for better alignment.

The cluster discusses comparisons between human and AI (neural net) capabilities in image recognition, particularly in tricky scenarios like optical illusions, adversarial examples, and camouflaged objects, debating limitations in abstraction, context, and generalization.

Commenters frequently recommend philosophical texts and thinkers like Nietzsche, Foucault, Tocqueville, Adorno, and Bertrand Russell, drawing parallels to themes of enlightenment, society, modernity, and sociopolitical critiques discussed in the article.

The cluster focuses on historical discussions about whether invading or attacking armies suffer more casualties than defenders, exploring factors like logistics, terrain, sieges, mobility of forces like the Mongols, and examples from WW2, Civil War, and medieval warfare.

Commenters debate whether observed growth patterns are truly exponential, linear, or part of an S-curve, questioning assumptions of unbounded exponential growth and extrapolation risks.

The cluster focuses on debates about age of consent laws, the definition of minors, and conflicts with ages of criminal culpability, particularly around 16-18 year olds in various jurisdictions, including legal vs. ethical concerns in specific cases.

Discussions focus on the validity, explicitness, and informed nature of consent in tech contexts like data usage, terms of service, tracking, and user agreements. Debates question whether implied or buried consent suffices or if explicit, freely given consent is required.

This cluster centers on the debate over whether taxation constitutes theft or robbery due to its coercive enforcement, contrasted with views of it as a necessary societal obligation or payment for public services.

Cluster focuses on the benefits and challenges of owning fewer possessions, decluttering life, and reducing the burden of unnecessary stuff, often referencing moves, hoarding tendencies, and Paul Graham's essay on stuff.

Comments in this cluster repeatedly emphasize finding a balance between extremes, making compromises, or acknowledging trade-offs rather than choosing one side absolutly in various debates.

The cluster centers on debates about GNU Makefiles, including their syntax limitations, best practices, potential improvements to Make itself, and reactions to opinionated approaches or perceived reinventions.

Comments primarily reference Fred Brooks' 'No Silver Bullet' essay and 'The Mythical Man-Month' book, recommending these classics for insights on software engineering productivity, project management, and the absence of magic solutions.

Discussions center on how US visa policies, work restrictions, and immigration rules impact the attraction and retention of international students in American universities, emphasizing their financial benefits to schools and talent contributions to the economy.

Comments in this cluster frequently attribute geopolitical conflicts, economic policies, and global events to oil reserves, prices, industry interests, and dependency.

Discussions revolve around the debate between skeuomorphic and flat UI design trends, with many users expressing nostalgia for skeuomorphism, criticism of flat design's usability and aesthetics, and hopes for its revival.

Discussions focus on grocery stores' low profit margins, local monopolies, competition levels, food deserts, and socioeconomic impacts, often contrasting with other business models like SaaS.

This cluster discusses the trade-offs of Bitcoin's irreversible transactions, which protect sellers from fraudulent chargebacks but leave buyers vulnerable to scams, versus credit cards' consumer protections and reversibility.

The cluster focuses on BIOS/UEFI firmware updates, microcode patches, proprietary BIOS limitations, and open-source replacements like Coreboot and Libreboot, particularly for Lenovo ThinkPads and enabling hardware features.

This cluster focuses on debates about the high prices of tech conferences, their value for money, experiences with overpriced or scammy events, and whether attendees or speakers should pay out-of-pocket versus alternatives like meetups.

The cluster revolves around discussions of trade-offs between intense work commitments, career ambitions, and spending time with family, especially children, with many commenters prioritizing family and sharing personal shifts in life priorities.

Commenters criticize the outdated MP3 format for its flaws and poor quality, advocating for lossless options like FLAC or modern lossy codecs such as Opus and Vorbis.

Comments frequently compare a blogging platform or site to Tumblr, citing its technical problems like downtime, consent pages, and reliability issues, while discussing its user base, history, and suitability as a Tumblr clone or alternative.

The cluster discusses satellite-based SOS features and devices like Apple's emergency satellite connectivity and Garmin inReach for situations without cell service, such as natural disasters, hiking, or remote emergencies, comparing them to traditional phone alerts and radios.

Comments criticize organizations or authorities for being aware of problems for years but failing to act proactively, only responding after public attention or uproar, with debates on accountability and the need for earlier intervention.

Users discuss personal typing habits like touch typing versus hunt-and-peck, experiences switching keyboard layouts such as QWERTY to Dvorak or Colemak, and advice for improving speed and accuracy without looking at the keyboard.

Cluster debates operating system handling of RAM and virtual memory, including why OS uses nearly all available RAM for caching and page cache, virtual vs physical memory distinctions, and whether applications should manage memory instead of the kernel.

This cluster centers on critiques of capitalism, particularly Marxist views that owners of the means of production extract surplus value from workers' labor, denying them the full fruits of their work.

The cluster focuses on discussions about implementing and evaluating stack-based virtual machines, bytecode interpreters, and their alternatives like JIT compilers, with references to historical efforts and projects such as JVM, LuaJIT, and MiniVM.

Discussions focus on Hamas's legitimacy as Gaza's elected government, public support among Palestinians, its terrorist actions and goals, and distinctions from the broader Palestinian population amid the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Discussions center on open-sourcing video game code versus assets, with examples like Doom, calls for more releases, and debates on feasibility, licensing, and requiring original game purchases for assets.

Discussions debate the economic and biological feasibility of vertical, indoor, and hydroponic farming, focusing on high energy costs for artificial lighting versus natural sunlight and land efficiency.

Users debate preferences for Kindle e-readers versus alternatives like Kobo or physical books, focusing on convenience, Amazon's ecosystem lock-in, pricing, and ownership concerns.

The cluster focuses on comparisons of state income taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes across US states, particularly highlighting California's high rates versus no-income-tax states like Texas, Nevada, and Washington, and their impacts on salary, cost of living, and migration decisions.

This cluster centers on debates about Fox News's credibility, bias, agenda-driven reporting, and the inappropriateness of linking its articles on Hacker News, with some defenses of its reputation.

The cluster focuses on debates criticizing armchair or internet-based diagnoses of mental health conditions, particularly from brief online posts like those on Hacker News, and skepticism toward the scientific validity and application of psychiatric diagnoses like those in the DSM.

Commenters draw parallels between the article's technology or concept and various Star Trek episodes, technologies like replicators and tricorders, and plots. The cluster centers on humorous or nostalgic comparisons to the sci-fi franchise.

The cluster focuses on discussions about ARM CPU cores like Cortex-A53, A72, X4, Neoverse, and custom designs such as Qualcomm Falkor or Ampere, including comparisons to x86, performance in mobile/server SoCs, big.LITTLE architectures, and product segmentation.

Users debate the merits of physical buttons and knobs versus touchscreens for car controls like climate, audio, and infotainment, emphasizing safety, distraction risks, and preferences for tactile feedback while driving.

The cluster focuses on discussions attributing internet outages and network disruptions to BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) misconfigurations, hijackings, and routing problems, with users sharing explanations, examples, and speculation.

This cluster focuses on strategies, tools, and services for generating business leads, particularly through cold emailing, LinkedIn outreach, scrapers, and SaaS products like prospekt.ai and jummbo.ai targeted at startups and B2B sales.

The cluster centers on discussions about tax cuts, particularly criticisms of those benefiting the wealthy and corporations, their economic impacts like trickle-down effects, and the need to offset them with spending reductions in US politics.

The cluster discusses homelessness rates, visibility, and causes across US cities like Seattle, NYC, and California, comparing them to other regions and countries, and debating factors such as weather, politics, policy, and statistics.

Discussions center on the lack of walkable neighborhoods in US suburbs and cities, desires for more pedestrian-friendly urban design, and comparisons to walkable European cities.

The cluster debates whether a specific characteristic of software or tech jobs—such as interchangeability or lifestyle dictation—applies uniquely to them or to most other professions like doctors, lawyers, teachers, and engineers.

The cluster discusses legal and business challenges in movie distribution, contrasting physical media rentals under the first sale doctrine with restrictive digital streaming licenses, content availability issues, and studio control over releases to combat piracy.

Users debate the merits of Infrastructure as Code tools like CloudFormation, Terraform, CDK, and Pulumi for AWS infrastructure management, sharing pros, cons, and personal experiences.

Commenters debate using abusive relationship metaphors for tech platforms, jobs, or other situations, discussing abuse dynamics, victim justification, and whether it trivializes real domestic or emotional abuse.

The cluster discusses the trade-offs and strategies between acquiring new users and retaining existing ones in products and startups, highlighting that retention is often cheaper and more sustainable than aggressive acquisition.

The cluster discusses debates on poaching of elephants and rhinos, trophy hunting auctions, farming animal parts like tusks and horns, and whether these strategies aid conservation or harm wildlife populations.

The cluster centers on criticism of proprietary operating systems restricting hardware to a single OS, enabling surveillance and control, contrasted with advocacy for open-source alternatives like Linux that offer freedom and transparency.

The cluster centers on debates about the fairness of affirmative action and discrimination favoring historically disadvantaged minorities or groups, contrasting group equity with individual merit and fairness.

The cluster centers on debates about the invalidity of using personal anecdotes or small non-representative samples to challenge or refute broader population-level statistical claims and generalizations.

Comments debate whether a scrotal injection procedure (vasectomy alternative) qualifies as surgery, discussing its invasiveness, reversibility, side effects, scarring, and comparisons to traditional vasectomy.

The cluster focuses on the difficulties and frustrations of compiling and building software from source, particularly C/C++ projects, highlighting issues with dependencies, cross-compilation, toolchains like GCC and glibc, and comparisons to easier languages like Go.

The cluster discusses book sales statistics, the hit-driven nature of the publishing industry where most books sell few copies, and how bestseller lists prioritize marketing and popularity over quality.

The cluster discusses the importance and practice of maintaining separate pseudonymous online identities or personas to compartmentalize different aspects of life, such as professional, personal, or controversial activities, often in contrast to systems enforcing single real-name or linked identities.

The cluster discusses strategies for funding and sustaining open source projects, including crowdfunding via Kickstarter or Patreon, attracting contributors on GitHub, bounties, and corporate sponsorships.

Comments debate the shift from buying to renting hardware and services, arguing that many purchases are effectively long-term rentals due to subscriptions or limited functionality, and suggesting rentals for occasional use.

Comments debate the purpose, performance, value, and societal role of hedge funds, frequently criticizing their high fees, underperformance, and questionable contributions.

The cluster focuses on discussions about US export control regulations, particularly ITAR, restrictions on technology like cryptography, chips, and dual-use hardware to countries such as China.

This cluster consists of comments that are predominantly expressions of laughter (e.g., 'haha', 'HAHAHA') reacting to humorous content or jokes in the discussion.

Comments debate the lack of regulation in cryptocurrency leading to scams, fraud, and market instability like FTX, contrasting it with regulated traditional banking and arguing that crypto reveals why financial regulations are necessary.

The cluster focuses on discussions about Google's alleged censorship practices in search results, content moderation, and removal requests, including political bias, DMCA takedowns, and the 'right to be forgotten'. Debates question whether these actions constitute censorship or necessary filtering.