All Topics

Cluster centers on personal stories, advice, and discussions about ending romantic relationships, including emotional pain, reasons for breakups, and recommendations to move on.

Discussions focus on the nature, inevitability, and challenges of maintaining legacy code, with debates on whether all code becomes legacy and experiences working with old codebases.

Comments recommending the Matrix protocol as a federated, E2EE-encrypted alternative to the discussed messaging solution, questioning the need for new protocols and highlighting Matrix's strengths like decentralization and open-source implementations.

The cluster focuses on discussions about generating 3D models, point clouds, or scenes from photos or videos using new tools, often comparing them to traditional photogrammetry software like Meshroom, RealityCapture, and AliceVision.

This cluster focuses on instructions and tips for properly replying to comments on Hacker News, including using the reply link, handling temporarily hidden buttons due to anti-flamewar measures, and the importance of threaded conversations.

This cluster features recommendations for moving to low-cost-of-living countries like Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and others, emphasizing good internet, expat communities, safety, and quality of life for remote workers escaping expensive Western cities.

The cluster focuses on debates about countable and uncountable infinite sets, Cantor's diagonal argument proving the reals are uncountable, and cardinality comparisons between natural numbers, rationals, and reals.

Comments focus on humorous corrections and debates over mix-ups between seconds, milliseconds, microseconds, nanoseconds, and other sub-second units in performance timings, benchmarks, or rates.

Discussions center on the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, the sufficiency of 44.1kHz sample rates for human hearing versus higher rates like 192kHz, and issues like aliasing, anti-aliasing filters, and oversampling.

Cluster centers on debates about the funding behind news organizations, think tanks, and nonprofits linked to the article, frequently citing donors like George Soros, Koch brothers, Gates Foundation, and others to question bias or credibility.

The cluster discusses the limitations of hierarchical folder structures for file organization and debates alternatives like tagging systems, search, and metadata, with users sharing personal strategies and frustrations.

Comments focus on GitHub Actions as a CI/CD tool, discussing its features, reliability, comparisons to alternatives like Jenkins and GitLab CI, and integration with workflows.

Commenters debate whether source-to-source translation tools should be called transpilers or simply compilers, arguing that transpilation is a subset of compilation and dismissing 'transpiler' as unnecessary jargon.

Discussions center on reducing parking spaces in dense cities to discourage personal car ownership and traffic, exploring alternatives like autonomous vehicles, ride-sharing, public transit, and urban planning reforms.

Users recommend various wiki tools like Wiki.js, DokuWiki, Zim, Gollum, and GitHub/Bitbucket wikis, often preferring lightweight, git-backed, or self-hosted alternatives to Confluence for internal documentation, team collaboration, and personal notes.

This cluster centers on discussions of artificial or constructed languages (conlangs) like Esperanto, Lojban, Ithkuil, Interlingua, and Toki Pona, with users sharing resources, personal experiences, comparisons, and links to related materials.

Discussions focus on the setup, usefulness, limitations, and issues with email authentication protocols SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for preventing spoofing, improving deliverability, and combating spam.

The cluster debates the nature of US-Europe relations, questioning if the US is a protector, vassal-master, or outright enemy, amid discussions of NATO dependence, military power dynamics, and European desires for independence.

Cluster focuses on debates about the genetic heritability of IQ, its correlations with parental income, wealth, success, and educational outcomes, often citing twin/adoption studies and Wikipedia.

Comments discuss how excessively high display brightness, especially in light mode indoors, causes eye discomfort and recommend lowering brightness, using dark mode, or tools like ColorVeil for relief.

This cluster revolves around discussions of political assassinations, including historical CIA attempts on leaders like Castro, speculations on government involvement in recent deaths, and debates over media coverage and implications.

Comments discuss the potential for protests, revolts, or uprisings by angry citizens dissatisfied with government policies, elites, and economic conditions, fearing it could lead to widespread unrest or revolution.

Users discuss a featured game and repeatedly request or inquire about iOS, Android, or mobile versions, or suggest similar existing mobile games.

The cluster focuses on debates about the legality of using force or weapons in self-defense scenarios, including stand-your-ground laws, castle doctrine, proportionality, and comparisons across countries like the US and Germany.

The cluster discusses challenges with C++ header files causing long compile times due to repetitive parsing of implementations in headers, the popularity of header-only libraries, and mitigations like precompiled headers and modules.

Commenters highlight Tokyo's efficient subway, rail system, low car usage, and high urban density as superior alternatives to criticized Western transport systems, often urging others to learn from Japan.

Comments discuss the humble beginnings of a specific startup or project, often describing it as starting as a personal side project, hackathon build, internal tool, or inspired by Hacker News/Reddit feedback before gaining traction.

Discussions center on using AI and LLMs to play, simulate, generate, or develop games, including demos of AI handling existing or imaginary games and debates on its utility for game development.

Comments revolve around the PinePhone Linux smartphone, including its usability, hardware issues, software support, comparisons to devices like Librem 5, and viability as an alternative to mainstream phones.

The cluster focuses on conflicts between landlords and tenants, particularly around lease violations, liability in shared spaces, cleaning responsibilities, and debates over whose fault issues like subletting or property damage are.

Comments focus on inquiring about GraphQL compatibility, integration, and support for a specific tool or library, with comparisons to REST and suggestions for GraphQL usage.

Discussions center on the historical realities of feudalism, serfdom, lords' control, and peasants' conditions, frequently comparing it to modern capitalism, work, or society to debate freedom, mobility, and exploitation.

Discussions debate whether to squash commits before or during pull request merges to maintain clean linear history, versus preserving granular commits for easier debugging, bisecting, and blame.

The cluster focuses on discussions about battery life in hardware devices, particularly tradeoffs between performance, efficiency, and power consumption in processors and components.

Comments argue that a particular issue or article is more political than technological, debating its relevance to Hacker News and whether politics and tech can be separated in discussions.

The cluster discusses the AI singularity, predicting the end or transformation of humanity into a post-human era where AI surpasses and potentially replaces biological life.

The cluster focuses on Google's actions in Chrome that hinder ad blockers, seen as intentional efforts to protect their advertising revenue by making ad blocking more difficult and discouraging its use.

Commenters dispute and cite statistics on the percentage of the population belonging to specific demographics, affected by conditions, or exhibiting certain behaviors, often arguing whether these figures are significant or negligible.

The cluster focuses on the Atari 2600's unique graphics hardware lacking a framebuffer, requiring real-time 'racing the beam' techniques to manipulate registers for scanlines, sprites, and tiles during display. Discussions also compare it to other retro consoles like C64, Amiga, and NES, highlighting similar hardware limitations and programming tricks.

Comments primarily recommend Graphviz as a reliable, established tool for graph visualization, often comparing it to newer alternatives mentioned in the article and sharing related resources.

Comments debate the viability of electric airplanes, focusing on battery energy density limitations compared to jet fuel and potential alternatives like hydrogen or fuel cells for short-haul flights.

Comments discuss how people afford expensive homes through mortgages, loans, and down payments rather than full cash purchases, often questioning financial advice that ignores financing options.

The cluster discusses SIM swapping vulnerabilities, how attackers exploit mobile carriers to hijack phone numbers, related security measures like SIM PINs and IMEI tracking, and provider protections such as those from Google Fi and T-Mobile.

Comments debate the exact figure, significance, and distinctions between median US household and individual incomes, often correcting misconceptions with data sources and highlighting contrasts to tech salaries.

The cluster discusses issues with spaces and other special characters like newlines, colons, and Unicode in filenames across Windows and Unix systems, debating whether software should handle them robustly or users should avoid them to prevent tool failures.

The cluster focuses on debates about directly invoking system calls versus using libc wrappers in languages like Go and Rust, including discussions on syscall stability across Linux, BSDs, and macOS.

The cluster debates the safety and risks of keeping money in traditional banks versus alternatives like fintech or crypto services, focusing on FDIC insurance, fractional reserve banking, bank runs, and government protections.

Discussions focus on the feasibility, costs, and benefits of building or using rail infrastructure, including comparisons to roads, existing tracks, maintenance challenges, and US-specific hurdles versus other countries.

The cluster focuses on debates about the purpose, necessity, and effectiveness of signatures on documents, including their role in proving identity or consent and comparisons between handwritten and digital signing methods.

The cluster focuses on bash and other shells' command history features, including searching with Ctrl+R, tools like fzf, mcfly, and atuin for enhanced navigation, and debates on default behaviors versus custom enhancements.

This cluster focuses on reliability problems with Western Digital hard drives, especially undisclosed SMR technology in CMR-labeled products causing failures and lawsuits, with users comparing WD to HGST, Seagate, Toshiba, and others using Backblaze stats and personal experiences.

Users question, speculate, and debate the reasons why a particular service, company, or product is shutting down or has been shut down.

The cluster focuses on criticisms of mass-produced American bread for being highly processed, sugary, and low-quality compared to European, artisanal, or whole-grain alternatives, with discussions on nutrition, wheat varieties, and health impacts.

The cluster debates whether private businesses and tech companies have the legal right to refuse service to customers, focusing on limits imposed by anti-discrimination laws for protected classes like race and sexual orientation, often citing the gay wedding cake baker case as an analogy.

The cluster centers on the challenges and requirements for opening bank accounts without local residency, particularly US accounts for non-residents and similar issues in the UK, EU, and other countries due to AML, KYC, proof of address, and tax regulations like FATCA.

Cluster centers on jokes and references to AI chatbots acting as virtual girlfriends or companions, with many commenters suggesting users get real girlfriends instead.

The cluster discusses shared L3 cache sizes and architectures in high-core-count CPUs, including comparisons between AMD and Intel chips, NUMA-like behaviors, and performance implications of limited cache per core.

Comments discuss similarities between European languages like English, German, Russian, and others due to their shared Proto-Indo-European roots, Germanic or Romance branches, and occasional mentions of non-Indo-European languages like Finnish.

Discussions center on whether base storage options like 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB are adequate for users' needs, including everyday use, development, media, and gaming, often comparing to higher tiers or cloud alternatives.

The cluster debates whether the United States is a democracy, a constitutional republic, or a democratic republic, focusing on distinctions between direct democracy, representative democracy, and republican government structures.

Users recount personal meetings and interactions with the post's subject or author at various conferences, hackathons, meetups, and tech events.

The cluster debates whether human energy use is constrained by the sun's energy input to Earth, with most arguing that current consumption is a minuscule fraction of available solar energy, enabling vast growth via renewables, nuclear, and future tech like Dyson swarms.

The cluster discusses the dangers of angry internet mobs on social media platforms like Twitter, which pile on individuals for opinions or remarks, leading to firings, doxxing, death threats, and other real-world consequences.

Discussions center on US SEC accredited investor rules limiting startup and private investments to high-net-worth individuals, including definitions, regulatory rationale for investor protection, and debates on fairness and accessibility.

Debate on whether commercial banks create money out of thin air through lending and loans, challenging myths about fractional reserve banking and citing Bank of England explanations.

This cluster revolves around advice and complaints on formatting code blocks, quotes, and text in Hacker News comments, including proper indentation with spaces, lack of support for fenced code blocks, use of > for quotes, and readability issues like horizontal scrolling on mobile.

Discussions center on restaurants facing rising costs like labor wages, rent, and supplies, debating whether to raise menu prices amid low margins and competition from tech company cafeterias providing free employee meals.

The cluster centers on criticisms of Heroku's high costs compared to cheaper alternatives like AWS, DigitalOcean, and EC2, with debates on its value for hobby projects versus production apps.

The cluster discusses how cloud providers like DigitalOcean, Linode, and others allocate CPU and RAM resources to virtual machines, focusing on shared vCPUs, dedicated RAM, overcommitment, and performance implications compared to dedicated instances.

Discussions center on customs procedures, import taxes, duties, and risks of evasion or seizure when shipping cheap goods internationally from foreign sites.

Comments discuss alternatives to cloud providers like AWS, such as renting dedicated bare-metal servers from Hetzner or OVH, or colocating owned hardware, highlighting cost savings, greater control, and reliability compared to cloud hosting.

The cluster discusses frustrations with declarative configuration formats like YAML and advocates for programmable alternatives such as Dhall, CUE, Jsonnet, Nix, or general-purpose languages to handle complex config needs.

Discussions revolve around the challenges, processes, contributors, maintainers, and unique aspects of developing and contributing to the Linux kernel, including its complexity and Linus Torvalds' involvement.

The cluster discusses the strengths, weaknesses, ambiguities, and proposed reforms of mathematical notation, particularly its complexity for engineers and non-experts versus its efficiency for experts.

Commenters repeatedly raise concerns about flooding impacts on infrastructure, structures, or technologies discussed in the parent post, citing real-world examples like California floods and European events to question resilience.

Discussions center on the Five Eyes intelligence alliance and how nations, including allies like the US, UK, Germany, and France, routinely spy on each other despite intelligence-sharing agreements.

The cluster centers on debates about the merits of optimism versus pessimism, with commenters arguing that optimists drive progress and innovation while pessimists sound smarter but may hinder action.

Discussions center on the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and chloroquine for treating or preventing COVID-19, with debates over clinical trials showing no benefit, proponents citing early studies or combinations like zinc and azithromycin, and calls for more evidence.

Discussions focus on long-term support (LTS) durations for operating systems, especially Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Red Hat, and CentOS, debating end-of-life (EOL) policies, security updates, and how long vendors should support older versions.

Comments humorously claim that the post's subject—an outdated website or technology—belongs in a museum, often quoting Indiana Jones or similar jokes about its archaic nature.

The cluster discusses blame for bank failures like SVB, debates over government bailouts versus letting banks fail, and who should bear the costs—taxpayers, depositors, or banks themselves—often referencing the 2008 financial crisis.

The cluster centers on discussions about the worth, relevance, costs, and criticisms of the Olympic Games, including debates on hosting, political aspects, economic impacts, and whether they should continue.

Commenters argue over the interpretation, aptness, and literal vs. figurative use of metaphors in the discussion, often accusing others of misunderstanding or misusing them.

Discussions center on how foreign car brands like Toyota, BMW, and Mercedes manufacture vehicles in the US, and why certain models popular in other markets like Europe or Japan are not available for sale in the United States.

The cluster focuses on comparisons between the discussed product and Notion, with users asking about differences, similarities, and alternatives, often recommending Notion or seeking open-source options.

Commenters discuss using Google Voice for phone verification, SMS, and calls as a solution or workaround, noting its benefits like free service and transcription, limitations such as rejection by banks and services as VoIP, and concerns over potential discontinuation.

Comments revolve around humorous puns, jokes, and references to the letter 'G', including 4chan's /g/ technology board, GIF pronunciation debates, and various G-themed terms like GNU, GG, and G Suite.

Discussions center on executives and employees taking pay cuts as an alternative to layoffs, debating their fairness, effectiveness in cost-saving, and impacts on retention versus severance costs.

Comments focus on the effectiveness of aerial bombing campaigns during World War II, including their impact on German military production, city bombings, and strategic outcomes.

The cluster debates whether people should be allowed to own houses they do not live in full-time, the role of landlords and renting, and policies restricting multiple property ownership to promote broader homeownership.

Cluster centers on browser compatibility problems with Web Audio API, including sound not playing in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, autoplay restrictions, and workarounds like enabling flags.

This cluster centers on debates about sea level rise, including its causes like ice melt and thermal expansion, predicted amounts over various timelines, measurement accuracy, and regional impacts.

Discussions center on the Plan 9 operating system from Bell Labs, including explanations of its concepts, user experiences, comparisons to Unix/Linux, and its features like 9P protocol and filesystem model.

Users recommend various websites, newsletters, digests, and Hacker News alternatives like hckrnews.com and hackernewsletter.com for curated tech news and reading.

This cluster features users expressing enthusiasm by signing up for early access, waitlist, or beta of a new product, service, or project promoted in the Hacker News post.

The cluster focuses on discussions about Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) requirements, questioning their necessity, legality, and application to banks, crypto exchanges, and related services.

Discussions focus on the ignition behaviors, combustion characteristics, and safety myths of various fuels including diesel, jet fuel, hydrogen, liquid oxygen, and hypergolic propellants, with anecdotes like matches in fuel cans or cigars in puddles.

Comments debate the inherent risks and failure rates of rocket launches, comparing SpaceX's rapid development and explosions to NASA's historical programs like the Space Shuttle and Apollo, and the acceptability of such risks for human spaceflight.

Comments discuss proportional representation, mixed-member proportional systems, and other electoral reforms as solutions to gerrymandering, two-party dominance, and underrepresentation in first-past-the-post systems.

The cluster discusses flaws in Boeing's 737 MAX MCAS system, especially reliance on single AoA sensors without redundancy or failure detection, contributing to crashes, alongside issues in software design, pilot training, and certification.