All Topics

Users scrutinize the background, affiliations, and reputation of the article's author, often dismissing contributors from outlets like Forbes or BuzzFeed while recommending respected journalists such as Matt Levine.

Cluster discusses gases like helium, hydrogen, nitrogen, and argon used in hard disk drives, debating safety, flammability, scarcity of helium, and viability of alternatives.

Users discuss and complain about the lack, misuse, or stylistic choices in punctuation, such as periods, spaces after sentences, quotation marks placement, and grammar in Hacker News comments and posts.

This cluster discusses the widespread lack of SQL proficiency among developers, including web devs and analysts, often due to reliance on ORMs or infrequent use, with surprise, calls for better training, and emphasis on SQL's importance.

The cluster centers on debates about whether reference counting constitutes garbage collection, its performance costs like overhead from increments/decrements and handling cycles, and comparisons to tracing GC in languages such as Rust, Swift, and Python.

Discussions debate the effectiveness and limitations of federation for decentralized social media and communication platforms, highlighting issues like reversion to centralization, spam, admin control, and poor interoperability compared to email or the web.

Users inquire about and share experiences with multi-monitor setups in various desktop environments and software, focusing on compatibility, issues, workarounds, and alternatives like Gnome-shell or KDE Plasma.

The cluster focuses on discussions about the UK's exit from the EU (Brexit), including rejected deals like Norway-style arrangements, Article 50 processes, negotiation challenges, and the UK's status outside the EU.

The cluster discusses genetic evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern Homo sapiens, noting that non-African humans carry Neanderthal DNA and debating whether Neanderthals are truly extinct or blended into our ancestry.

Discussions center on whether specific security vulnerabilities, particularly Shellshock in Bash (e.g., CVE-2014-6271), have been patched in Linux distributions like Debian and Ubuntu, with users sharing advisories, version checks, and timeline confusions.

The cluster centers on debates about why groceries, especially produce and fresh vegetables, are more expensive in the US compared to Europe and other countries, with discussions on regional variations, specific food prices like meat, chicken, and eggs, and factors influencing costs.

Discussions center on the value and market for hand-crafted, high-quality goods made by skilled artisans versus machine-made or mass-produced alternatives, often drawing parallels to software development and the appreciation of craftsmanship in Hacker News culture.

Comments focus on ways to find, discover, and curate interesting open-source projects, particularly on GitHub, with recommendations for 'Awesome' lists, aggregators, and browsing platforms.

The cluster centers on debates about the legal definition, benefits, and government recognition of marriage, particularly same-sex unions versus civil unions, religious influences, and calls to reform or abolish state-sanctioned marriage.

The cluster focuses on debates about the high costs of running AI models, current lack of profitability for AI companies due to investor subsidies, and whether AI can achieve sustainable economics compared to human labor.

The cluster focuses on arguments for and against the death penalty, particularly the irreversibility of executing innocent people compared to life imprisonment, deterrence effectiveness, and moral concerns.

Users express excitement over a retro-style plasma or CRT-like visual effect, discussing recreations using CSS blend modes, shaders, blurs, scanlines, and related techniques for web apps.

Comments debate the maturity of adults, frequently criticizing them for behaving like children and questioning expectations of adult responsibility versus infantilization.

This cluster centers on discussions recommending dynamic DNS (DDNS) services as a solution for handling changing IP addresses on residential internet connections, especially for remote access to home servers or services. Commenters debate its effectiveness versus static IPs and share experiences with IP changes and DDNS clients.

The cluster centers on comparisons between R and Python for statistical analysis, data science, and related tasks, with many comments emphasizing R's superior ecosystem, packages, and suitability for statistics over Python's offerings like Pandas.

Discussions center on the distinction between hardcore 'true gamers' or enthusiasts and casual gamers or general people who play video games, including debates on stereotypes, gatekeeping, and differing views within gaming communities.

Cluster focuses on discussions recommending, comparing, and inquiring about proof assistants and theorem provers like Coq, Lean, Isabelle, Agda, and others for formal verification and mathematical proofs.

Comments discuss strategies for monetizing websites and products through affiliate programs like Amazon Affiliates, Viglink, and Skimlinks, including revenue potential, implementation tips, and alternatives.

The cluster revolves around debates over the meaning of 'liberal,' distinguishing classical liberalism from modern American progressivism, libertarianism, and leftism, often highlighting US-specific linguistic shifts.

This cluster consists of comments where users share direct links to full scientific papers, primarily from Nature journals, in response to HN posts about related news articles or summaries.

The cluster debates the metabolic differences between fructose (in fruits and HFCS) and sucrose (table sugar), focusing on fructose's liver processing, fiber's role in whole fruits, and relative health impacts versus processed sugars.

Comments discuss using apt and apt-get for automatic package updates and upgrades on Ubuntu/Debian systems, often advocating for it over alternatives like snaps and highlighting its features and limitations.

Comments debate whether high prices for branded clothing reflect superior quality or are driven by marketing, branding, and excessive markups, contrasting fast fashion, luxury brands, and value options like Uniqlo.

Users report discomfort, strain, and aesthetic unpleasantness from a specific visual design, animation, or effect in the post, often describing it as hard on the eyes or distracting.

This cluster consists of comments where users repeatedly ask for numerical data, statistics, sources, or evidence to back up claims or assertions made in discussions. It reflects skepticism and a desire for substantiation across various topics.

Discussions center on targeted advertising practices, particularly on Facebook, including how ad targeting works, its precision to individuals or demographics, privacy concerns, and alternatives like contextual targeting.

Discussions center on the use of informal, colloquial, or sarcastic language in Hacker News comments versus a more formal or serious tone, with emphasis on challenges in conveying intent, sarcasm, and nuance through text.

This cluster discusses branch prediction in modern CPUs, its effectiveness against performance issues, optimizations, and comparisons to branch-free code or other techniques.

Users recommend and discuss online dictionaries like Wiktionary, Webster 1913, Oxford APIs, Urban Dictionary, and tools for word lookups, translations, etymologies, and features such as auto-highlighting and multilingual support.

The cluster focuses on the unique difficulties of locating or building projects in the ocean or sea, including surrounding water, lack of land, harsh conditions like winds and currents, and contrasts with land-based alternatives.

The cluster focuses on Hacker News users questioning the popularity of category theory, seeking explanations of its relevance to programming (especially functional languages like Haskell), and requesting beginner-friendly resources such as 'Category Theory for Programmers'.

The cluster debates the effectiveness of Python's type hints and static typing tools like mypy in large projects, weighing benefits for code maintainability and safety against criticisms of dynamic typing limitations compared to languages like Go, Rust, and TypeScript.

Discussions focus on the suitability of Apache Cassandra for high-scale workloads, its limitations, and comparisons to ScyllaDB as a performant alternative, along with mentions of DynamoDB, Postgres, and other databases.

Discussions center on risks of malicious backdoors and vulnerabilities stealthily introduced into open source projects via trusted contributors or commits, referencing the XZ incident, hypocrite commits research, and Linux kernel review processes.

Comments discuss and compare systemd's journald with traditional tools like rsyslog and syslog-ng for logging, focusing on binary vs. text formats, centralization, performance, and ease of access.

Discussions center on the ease, costs, and trade-offs of forming an LLC versus a C-Corp for startups and small businesses, including state-specific fees, paperwork requirements, and recommendations for early-stage founders.

Commenters liken the article's subject to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, SCP Foundation stories, and similar cosmic horror or anomalous entities, emphasizing its eerie and otherworldly qualities.

Discussions focus on issues with rasterized graphics such as antialiasing blurriness, single-pixel gaps, inconsistent scaling on high-DPI displays, and pixel perfection problems, often contrasting with vector rendering in contexts like fonts, graphs, and pixel art.

The cluster discusses the economic consequences of the UK's Brexit from the EU, including loss of single market access, reduced growth, trade challenges, and comparisons of UK vs. EU economic performance.

The cluster discusses rigorous development processes, certifications like DO-178B, and high reliability practices for software in aviation, automotive, medical devices, railways, and other mission-critical systems, contrasting them with standard software engineering.

Comments urging Hacker News users to contact their congressional representatives, senators, and other elected officials by phone, email, or letter to influence legislation on various issues.

Commenters debate the effectiveness, limitations, and applications of radar technology for object detection, often comparing it to lidar and questioning why it's not used more in scenarios like stealth evasion or collision avoidance.

The cluster discusses whether reducing energy consumption through efficiency, lifestyle changes, or de-growth is a viable climate solution, versus prioritizing abundant clean energy production and electrification.

Comments recommend and compare PCB/EDA software like KiCad, Eagle, Horizon EDA, LibrePCB, EasyEDA, and Altium, discussing UI, ease of use, libraries, and suitability for hobbyists and professionals.

This cluster revolves around debates on the differences between employees and contractors, including legal classifications, benefits, equity, hiring practices, and misclassification risks in tech and business contexts.

The cluster discusses technical challenges in VR/AR headsets, such as insufficient resolution, limited field of view, static focal planes, and the need for foveated rendering, eye tracking, and higher pixel densities to reduce the screendoor effect and enable comfortable text reading or desktop use.

Comments debate the randomness, biases, and probability of coin flips, including streaks, same-side tendencies, and methods for fair outcomes from biased coins, often using coin tosses as analogies for chance events.

The cluster centers on debates about concert ticket scalping, where scalpers and bots buy low-priced tickets from artists and venues to resell at much higher prices on secondary markets, with heavy criticism of Ticketmaster's role in enabling this and discussions on dynamic pricing as a solution.

Users discuss whether the featured project is a fork of another, identify specific forks and their lineages (e.g., charybdis from ircd-ratbox), and reference historical forking examples like io.js from Node.js or Pale Moon from Firefox.

Discussions center on law enforcement's use of surveillance tools like Flock ALPR, Ring cameras, ShotSpotter, facial recognition, and other tech for tracking citizens, with concerns about privacy invasion, dragnet surveillance, and potential abuse.

Comments focus on sum types (algebraic data types like unions, enums, or discriminated unions), their advantages, implementations in languages such as Rust, Haskell, and TypeScript, and debates over their absence or equivalents in other languages.

The cluster focuses on discussions of the NSA's alleged history of weakening or backdooring cryptographic standards, particularly Dual_EC_DRBG, DES, and elliptic curves, with references to past scandals and skepticism toward government-influenced crypto.

Discussions center on the advantages of ASP.NET MVC over traditional WebForms, praising its modernity, performance, Razor templating, and C# integration, while contrasting it with frameworks like Rails.

Commenters discuss algorithms and strategies for solving the Rubik's Cube, debating brute-force approaches, constraint programming, state/move counts, and computational limits, with digressions to similar puzzles like N-Queens.

Commenters repeatedly suggest that the discussed story, event, or topic would make an excellent movie, expressing hopes for a film, book, or screenplay adaptation.

Comments discuss risks of storing sensitive data on third-party servers, cloud services, or others' computers, including exfiltration, leaks, theft, and loss of control, often advocating for local self-hosted storage instead.

The cluster discusses the high hardware and compute requirements for training and running LLMs and other AI models like Stable Diffusion, along with predictions on future optimizations, hardware advancements, and potential physical limits slowing progress.

Commenters mourn a recently deceased prominent physicist and debate their ranking among history's greatest scientists like Newton, Einstein, Euler, and Feynman, with suggestions for HN honors like a black bar.

Commenters debate how prison records hinder ex-convicts from finding jobs, leading to higher recidivism rates, and advocate for rehabilitation, second chances, and societal reintegration to break the cycle of reoffending.

Discussions center on Apple's on-device and iCloud-based photo scanning, analysis, and organization features in the Photos app across iOS, macOS, and iPadOS, including privacy concerns, syncing behaviors, and comparisons to Google Photos.

Commenters share personal anecdotes about working with, knowing, or having family ties to historical figures and projects from early computing eras, including Xerox PARC, Apple, and Silicon Valley startups.

Discussions criticize software or tools for lacking proper support for non-Latin scripts, Unicode characters, and internationalization, highlighting challenges for users of languages like Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, and others beyond ASCII English.

Discussions center on comparing new tools or services to Heroku, announcing availability on Heroku with changelog links, and recommending Heroku for easy deployments.

Discussions focus on the primary sources of plastic pollution in the oceans, emphasizing that ~90% comes from poor waste management in a few rivers in Asia and Africa rather than consumption in developed countries. Commenters debate the effectiveness of Western plastic bans and highlight global disparities in waste handling.

Comments debate the practicality of using cars in New York City, citing heavy traffic, parking difficulties, narrow streets, and the prevalence of alternatives like walking, biking, subways, and taxis. There's contention over whether NYC is car-centric or effectively car-discouraging.

Discussions center on the transferability of H-1B visas to new employers, job switching processes, grace periods after layoffs, and impacts on green card applications for immigrants.

Comments debate the extent of limited or restricted access to data, features, or tools, questioning who has authorization, why access is denied to the public or end users, and the implications of permissions granted to specific parties.

Comments using NBA players, basketball skills, and league references as metaphors to debate innate talent versus practice or training in a likely tech or performance context on Hacker News.

The cluster centers on debates about the value, costs, and best practices of logging in software systems, including its reliability for troubleshooting, alternatives like telemetry and metrics, storage expenses, and retention policies.

The cluster debates the ambiguity, terseness, and context-dependence of traditional mathematical notation compared to the explicitness and readability of programming code, with programmers criticizing it and mathematicians defending its purpose.

Comments debate the challenges of living, farming, and developing in desert regions like the Sahara or US Southwest, criticizing it as unsustainable due to water scarcity, desertification, and climate issues.

The cluster focuses on critiques of the US judicial and legal system's inefficiencies, inconsistencies, brutality, and unique features like juries in civil cases and punitive damages, often comparing it to systems in other countries.

This cluster centers on the decline of the newspaper and journalism industry, driven by falling print and online ad revenues, the disruptive impact of the internet, and debates over pivoting to subscriptions and digital models.

Comments discuss law enforcement's access to and potential misuse of location tracking data from devices like AirTags, raising concerns about illegal surveillance, privacy violations, and policy non-compliance.

Discussions focus on the use and limitations of checksums and hashes to verify file integrity during downloads, including concerns about compromised checksums and the need for cryptographic signatures.

The cluster focuses on discussions about the costs of running and using large language models, including API pricing from OpenAI and other providers, comparisons between models like GPT-3, GPT-4, and cheaper alternatives, and debates on self-hosting versus cloud inference expenses.

This cluster centers on discussions comparing the reliability of car brands, particularly praising Japanese manufacturers like Toyota and Honda for durability while criticizing German brands like BMW and Mercedes, and American cars for poor quality.

The cluster centers on discussions about boycotting companies due to their actions, stances, or ethics, debating the effectiveness of individual consumer choices like 'voting with your wallet' and whether such actions lead to meaningful change.

Comments discuss how non-technical executives and managers in large enterprises make misguided technology choices, favoring big vendors, hype, or inertia over engineering advice and merit, leading to suboptimal tools and systems.

The cluster discusses Go's concurrency model, focusing on goroutines as green threads managed by the runtime, their efficiency compared to OS threads, misconceptions about single-threading, and comparisons to Node.js or other languages.

Cluster debates workplace policies on sick days versus PTO, incentives for working while sick, cultural differences in sick leave usage, and the importance of staying home to prevent spreading illness.

The cluster focuses on comparisons between lower tech salaries in Canadian cities like Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal versus higher US salaries in hubs like Seattle and Silicon Valley, discussing brain drain, high housing costs, and reasons developers move south.

Comments debate Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, Israel's and US opposition including strikes and sabotage, hypocrisy claims regarding Israel's nukes, and arguments for Iran needing nukes for deterrence against aggression.

Comments discuss the origins and controversies surrounding the name 'JavaScript', its lack of relation to Java despite the name, and comparisons to ECMAScript as the formal standard.

Discussions center on AI model 'hallucinations,' debating if they resemble human perceptual errors like dreaming, sleep paralysis, or illusions, with examples and analogies.

Comments discuss how mRNA vaccines instruct cells to produce spike proteins to elicit immune responses, comparing this to natural viral infections and debating differences in immunity duration and breadth.

Discussions center on how biases in AI and machine learning models, particularly LLMs, originate from biased training data reflecting human and societal prejudices, with debates on whether models inherently amplify or merely inherit these biases.

Comments debate the meaning, direction, and inherent value of 'progress', questioning whether it is always positive, linear, or universally agreed upon.

The cluster focuses on debates about modern car interior controls, including the absence of traditional turn signal stalks, steering wheel buttons, speedometer visibility, HUD displays, and other ergonomic features like wiper and gearshift mechanisms.

The cluster centers on philosophical discussions of qualia as subjective conscious experiences, including debates on whether machines, animals, or others possess them, philosophical zombies, and the hard problem of consciousness.

Cluster focuses on debates comparing Python and Ruby programming languages, highlighting Python's versatility in AI/data science/web dev versus Ruby's niche in Rails/web development, popularity, communities, and recommendations for learning.

This cluster centers on criticisms of private equity firms for practices like leveraged buyouts, loading companies with debt, cost-cutting, and prioritizing short-term profits over long-term sustainability, often harming employees, customers, and society, with some defenses of PE's role in turning around failing businesses.

Users share personal anecdotes about long-term stomach, intestine, and digestion problems, including gut microbiome imbalances, fiber intolerance, and remedies like probiotics, Metamucil, and diet changes.

Discussions center on CSS preprocessors like Sass, LESS, and SCSS as solutions to CSS shortcomings, including comparisons to modern CSS, Tailwind, PostCSS, and debates on their necessity.

Discussions center on public transportation challenges and options like BART, Caltrain, MUNI, and alternatives for commuting between San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Oakland, and other Bay Area locations without a car.