All Topics

The cluster focuses on discussions debating whether Amazon qualifies as a monopoly, its e-commerce market share, anti-competitive practices, and antitrust actions like the FTC lawsuit.

Users share and debate statistics on web browser market shares from sources like StatCounter, NetMarketShare, and personal analytics, often noting Chrome's dominance, Firefox's low share, and variations by audience or region.

Comments emphasize the history of slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, lynchings, and civil rights struggles in the US to counter arguments downplaying past systemic racism against Black Americans.

Discussions center on Apple's Secure Enclave hardware component, its role in protecting encryption keys from extraction by Apple, the OS, or authorities, and debates about its security effectiveness against backdoors or warrants.

Discussions debate the racial and ethnic composition of tech companies and CS fields, noting overrepresentation of Asians and Indians, underrepresentation of Blacks and Hispanics compared to US population, and whether disparities stem from discrimination, pipelines, or qualifications.

The cluster centers on discussions about JSON Schema for data validation, typing, cross-language use, and comparisons to alternative schema formats or tools.

Discussions focus on the feasibility, power output, energy harvesting potential, and applications of nuclear or betavoltaic batteries for low-power devices like IoT, with skepticism about scalability for meaningful energy production.

This cluster centers on discussions about the desirability, feasibility, risks, and philosophical implications of human immortality or radically extended lifespans, including fears of eternal suffering, cosmic inevitability, and personal motivations.

Users discuss theme features, selection, customization, and quality in a classless CSS project or site, including requests for more themes, screenshots, custom CSS, and feedback on specific themes used.

Discussions center on ASCII art creation, animation, rendering tools, and terminal graphics, with users sharing links to projects like ascii.io, animasci.com, and generators for images and screencasts.

The cluster focuses on discussions about the retroactive application of laws, ex-post facto prohibitions, and whether past actions can be prosecuted under new legislation. Commenters debate the impossibility or rarity of retroactive laws and implications for current practices becoming illegal in the future.

This cluster focuses on challenges, best practices, and strategies for effectively onboarding new hires, particularly engineers, in tech companies, including documentation, mentoring, setting expectations, and handling remote or small-team scenarios.

Discussions focus on the poor quality, aggressive behavior, ratings, profitability challenges, and problematic policies of ride-sharing drivers, often contrasting them with riders or passengers.

The cluster centers on discussions of WebGL's performance, browser compatibility, limitations compared to native OpenGL, WebGPU, and WebAssembly, and its viability for 3D graphics and games in browsers.

Comments debate the bike-friendliness, public transit quality, and car dominance in Paris, often contrasting it with other cities or general urban transport claims.

The cluster discusses security risks of USB devices, focusing on BadUSB attacks where malicious USBs impersonate keyboards or HID devices to inject malware and keystrokes. Commenters warn against plugging in untrusted USBs and highlight firmware exploits and attack vectors.

The cluster discusses challenges of heat transfer and dissipation in the vacuum of space, emphasizing thermal radiation as the primary mechanism since conduction and convection are impossible, and noting its relative inefficiency.

Comments frequently reference the September 11, 2001 attacks, comparing current events to 9/11, discussing its aftermath, unintended consequences, and changes in the world pre- and post-9/11.

Discussions center on the growing political division, tribalism, and toxicity in American discourse, often comparing current levels to historical periods like the 1990s or Civil War era and attributing it to media, social media, and figures like Trump.

Users share experiences of Stripe freezing accounts, holding funds, poor support, and unresolved issues, often recommending complaints to regulators or switching providers.

The cluster debates the climate effects of methane emissions compared to CO2, focusing on methane's higher potency as a greenhouse gas and whether burning it to produce CO2 is environmentally beneficial.

The cluster debates the long-term decline in US crime rates over decades, supported by FBI, Pew, and Wikipedia data, while addressing recent post-pandemic spikes and theories like lead exposure from gasoline.

The cluster discusses how voters, including high-income groups like HN users, often vote against their own economic interests, prioritizing principles, ideology, community benefits, or other factors over personal financial gain.

Cluster focuses on frustrations with YouTube's algorithm prioritizing long, padded videos for watch time and monetization over short, concise content, alongside mixed reactions to the push for YouTube Shorts.

Comments express enthusiasm for the creativity, whimsy, fun, and experimental potential of novel tech projects and ideas, often praising the joy of making something new.

The cluster discusses the relationship between non-profit and for-profit entities, focusing on OpenAI's model where the nonprofit owns and controls the for-profit subsidiary, clarifying that nonprofits can generate and retain profits without distributing them to shareholders.

The cluster debates employee compensation risks during company financial distress, including unpaid wages, severance, pay cuts, and bankruptcy scenarios where workers may not get paid despite company failures.

The cluster discusses the capabilities, advantages, challenges, and tools for Foreign Function Interface (FFI) between Rust and C, including ABI stability, binding generation, and integration with existing C/C++ codebases.

This cluster discusses how Google and other search engines crawl websites, whether they index all crawled content, and related issues like robots.txt, noindex tags, SEO implications, and challenges for third-party crawlers.

Discussions focus on the differences between OpenJDK and Oracle JDK, including licensing, support, and recommendations to use OpenJDK or alternatives like AdoptOpenJDK to avoid Oracle's commercial restrictions and litigiousness.

Comments repeatedly reference Japan as a counterexample or successful case to claims in the parent discussion, often about societal norms, policies, or cultural practices, with some questioning its relevance.

Commenters repeatedly emphasize that technical decisions in software, architectures, platforms, and designs involve inevitable tradeoffs rather than absolute better or worse options, depending on context and application.

Discussions focus on the challenges of gaining access to exclusive, invite-only online tech communities like alternatives to Hacker News, with users sharing frustrations, requesting invites, and suggesting new group formations or invite circles.

Comments discuss the proprietary nature, software reliability issues like JavaScript and firmware problems, regulatory challenges, and risks associated with medical devices, including potential life-threatening failures.

Discussions center on ships at risk of sinking due to damage, storms, or towing, debates over salvage operations, retrieving lost containers from the ocean, and occasional metaphorical uses for failing organizations.

Discussions center on the judiciary's power to check executive and legislative branches, debates over supreme court authority, separation of powers, and constitutional roles in various countries.

Discussions focus on using bacteria, algae, and microorganisms to produce food or carbohydrates from CO2, water, electricity, and nutrients as more efficient alternatives to plant photosynthesis. Topics include efficiency comparisons, companies like Solar Foods, and applications for sustainability or space.

This cluster debates the role of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, including their impact on virus transmission, children's education and wellbeing, and comparisons of policies across regions like the US, UK, and Israel.

Commenters criticize a scientific study's validity, highlighting uncontrolled confounding variables, lack of randomization, and the distinction between correlation and causation in observational research.

The cluster focuses on the high financial and computational costs of training large AI models like GPT-3 and GPT-4, with debates on exact figures, feasibility for hobbyists versus corporations, and trends in decreasing expenses.

Discussions center on using HTTP Accept headers, Content-Type, and content negotiation to serve different formats or versions of content, rather than relying on URL paths or other non-standard methods, often critiquing unusual HTTP use cases.

The cluster centers on operating system memory management, particularly using huge pages to mitigate frequent page faults, TLB flushes, and inefficiencies in large allocations, with discussions on Linux kernel behaviors like lazy allocation and page zeroing.

Discussions defend Elon Musk's role as a visionary innovator behind Tesla, SpaceX, and reusable rockets, countering skepticism by comparing him to Steve Jobs and other pioneers who succeeded despite doubt.

The cluster focuses on discussions about the Elixir programming language, including learning resources, Phoenix framework recommendations, production readiness, books, and real-world usage examples.

Comments discuss how large companies like Google and Apple build extensive patent portfolios primarily for defense, enabling countersuits and mutually assured destruction to deter patent aggression from competitors or trolls.

Cluster centers on discussions comparing other systems or features to Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), debating Linux kernel integration, subsystems, and compatibility layers within Windows.

Comments debate the low cost of domain registrations enabling squatting and hoarding, proposals to raise prices to deter squatters, and the value of premium domains for businesses and individuals.

Discussions center on the Soviet Union's space achievements, risky launch practices, technological innovations like Buran and Soyuz, and comparisons to US programs such as the Space Shuttle and Apollo.

Discussions center on decentralized military doctrines like Auftragstaktik and mission command, contrasting rigid hierarchies with empowered lower-level initiative, often analogized to corporate and software development organizations.

Discussions center on truthy and falsy values in programming languages like Python, Ruby, JS, and Lua, debating their convenience versus risks of confusion compared to strict booleans.

The cluster discusses Bitcoin's 1MB block size limit, debates on increasing it for higher transaction throughput versus alternatives like Lightning Network to maintain decentralization and scalability without on-chain growth.

The cluster centers on debates about whether modern video games are primarily limited by CPU or GPU performance, with most comments arguing games are GPU-bound except for specific genres like strategy games.

Discussions center on the resurgence of vinyl records, debating their appeal through nostalgia, ritualistic playback, physical ownership, and unique sound characteristics like pops and warmth, versus the superior fidelity and convenience of digital formats.

The cluster focuses on advice for technically skilled developers to advance their careers by improving self-promotion, communication, interpersonal skills, and making their value visible to managers and peers, rather than relying solely on technical ability.

Discussions focus on risks faced by reservist soldiers in conflict zones, including being unarmed, operating behind enemy lines, and justifications for military actions in contexts like Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Israel-Hamas.

The cluster discusses why Apple has not acquired TSMC, focusing on Apple's reliance on TSMC for advanced chip manufacturing, exclusive supply deals, vertical integration limits, and potential antitrust issues.

The cluster focuses on the awe and fascination with an unexpected scientific discovery, debating its value as a breakthrough despite lacking immediate practical applications and emphasizing serendipity and the potential for future impacts from basic research.

Users discuss and compete on the shortest code snippets for reversing strings or similar manipulations, often mocking LLMs for generating verbose solutions while sharing golfed versions and jokes.

Comments discuss the scarcity, quality, and size limitations of training data as the primary bottleneck for machine learning models, often more critical than compute power.

Debates on the environmental, ecological, and safety consequences of hydroelectric dams, including ecosystem disruption, wildlife impacts, flood control benefits, and risks of structural failures.

Users debate the sufficiency of 8GB and 16GB RAM in recent MacBook Air and Pro models, expressing frustration over maximum limits compared to older machines and competitors like ThinkPads, while some find current amounts adequate for their workloads.

Users reminisce about classic video games from the 80s and 90s, like Doom, Half-Life, Elite, and Knight Lore, highlighting their revolutionary graphics, gameplay innovations, and mind-blowing impact on hardware like 3D cards.

The cluster centers on debates about the roles and value of sysadmins versus developers, including whether devs need sysadmin skills, if sysadmins are obsolete due to cloud/DevOps, and the challenges of ops work.

This cluster centers on debates about whether AI and LLMs can achieve true creativity or merely remix and regurgitate human-generated data, contrasting it with human originality and intention.

This cluster centers on Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance, with commenters debating whether a tolerant society must be intolerant of intolerance to preserve itself, often linking to Wikipedia and applying it to social, political, and online moderation contexts.

Cluster centers on reminiscences of classic Palm PDAs like the Pilot, phones such as the Pre and Treo, and OSes including PalmOS and webOS, frequently referencing a new compact Palm Phone.

The cluster discusses criticisms of globalization, portraying it as zero-sum unlike capitalism, failing to deliver widespread benefits, and fueling populism, nationalism, and protectionism in places like the US, UK, Russia, and China.

Discussions explore whether humans are inherently social and cooperative superorganisms like ants, or more individualistic and tribal with competitive instincts, using evolutionary biology and animal comparisons such as chimps, bonobos, and wolves.

Comments link unusual extreme weather events, such as polar vortex disruptions, jet stream changes, cold snaps, and heatwaves, to global warming and climate change impacts.

Discussions center on comparing open-source monitoring and observability stacks like Prometheus, Grafana, InfluxDB, VictoriaMetrics, and Telegraf, with users asking about integrations, advantages, alternatives, and production use cases.

Comments heavily advocating for rsync as the superior, free, and time-tested tool for file synchronization, often questioning or dismissing alternatives like new services or tools.

This cluster revolves around debates on what defines an entrepreneur, including gatekeeping arguments, traits of entrepreneurship, and distinctions between 'real' entrepreneurs, successful ones, and others.

The cluster debates whether China's economic success and poverty reduction result from communist central planning, capitalist market reforms, or a hybrid system, frequently contrasting it with the Soviet Union's failures.

The cluster centers on debates about whether the universe is fundamentally computable, simulable by Turing machines, or itself a massive computation, drawing from physics, philosophy, and computer science perspectives like Scott Aaronson and Constructor Theory.

Comments debate the security risks of self-custodying Bitcoin compared to banks or cash, focusing on user responsibility, theft vulnerabilities, lack of insurance, and best practices like hardware wallets.

Discussions center on the declining enrollment in humanities and liberal arts programs compared to booming business and STEM fields, debating the merits of broad liberal arts education for well-roundedness and critical thinking versus practical, job-oriented degrees.

Commenters identify the discussed practice, product, or scenario as characteristic of Sweden or other Scandinavian countries like Finland and Norway, often contrasting it with the US or elsewhere.

Commenters recommend and compare OpenAPI (Swagger) specifications and tools like swagger-codegen, openapi-generator, and Fern for API documentation, client/server code generation, and as alternatives to the discussed tool.

Discussions analogizing a technical or infrastructural problem to plumbing and pipes, debating simplicity, materials like plastic PEX versus metal or lead, and related real-world plumbing issues.

Discussions focus on skepticism toward inefficient charities with high overhead, recommendations for evaluators like GiveWell and Charity Navigator, and suggestions for high-impact direct aid options to maximize donation value.

Users discuss and complain about significantly higher prices for products and services in the EU compared to the US, sharing specific regional prices and speculating on reasons like VAT, currency conversion, and local adjustments.

Commenters liken a technical discovery or project to digital or virtual archaeology, debating its legitimacy compared to real archaeological practices, with references to artifacts, digs, and future excavations.

Comments discuss the difficulties, methods, and outcomes of overthrowing dictators via military coups, insurrections, protests, or regime changes, referencing examples from countries like Venezuela, Brazil, Turkey, and Russia.

The cluster centers on users frequently comparing a featured backend or database service to Supabase, recommending it as an alternative, or discussing its features like Postgres hosting and uptime.

Users compare a new voice assistant feature (likely Siri or similar) to Google Assistant's existing capabilities, frequently noting that Google already offers similar or better functionality like voice commands and smart home control.

Discussions center on cryptographic signing (GPG, PGP) for verifying software packages in package managers and repositories like Linux distros, npm, and others, debating trust, mirror security, and comparisons to checksums.

The cluster discusses Google's scanning and analysis of Gmail emails for advertising and other purposes, privacy implications for both Gmail users and non-users emailing them, and debates over Google's policies and promises not to use email content for ads.

The cluster discusses skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) in multiplayer games, debating its benefits for fair matches and 50% win rates versus drawbacks like long queues, smurfing, player frustration, and small player bases.

Comments discuss the reliability, precision, and limitations of IP-based geolocation services, including providers like MaxMind and Google, as well as issues with VPNs and inaccuracies at city or country levels.

The cluster discusses the transition from DSLRs to mirrorless cameras, highlighting Nikon and Canon's delayed adoption, advantages of mirrorless like EVFs and video, and the decline of traditional SLRs.

Cluster focuses on discussions attributing various health issues to stress, including its physical and emotional impacts, comparisons to other risk factors like smoking, and advice for management.

The cluster discusses how the US Congress has abdicated its responsibilities, ceded power to the executive branch, and failed to act as a check on presidential overreach through inaction, gridlock, and delegation of authority.

This cluster debates the current sales, market share, and adoption rates of electric vehicles versus traditional cars, highlighting regional differences, manufacturer strategies, and growth challenges.

Discussions center on Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems and their subsequent actions harming open source projects like Java, MySQL, ZFS, OpenSolaris, and OpenOffice, including fears of closing source code, licensing issues, and litigation against users.

The cluster focuses on discussions attributing specific behaviors, personalities, and response styles in large language models to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), distinguishing it from base model pre-training.

Users compare their personal and service-related monthly internet bandwidth consumption, debate data caps from ISPs and hosting providers, and discuss costs or overages for high usage.

Discussions center on performance benchmarks for web servers and frameworks, including requests for load testing results, throughput, latency, RPS metrics, and critiques of benchmarking tools and methodologies like wrk and HTTP/1.0.

Commenters repeatedly reference Volkswagen's emissions cheating scandal (Dieselgate) to draw parallels with the main article's topic, often equating it to a similar level of corporate misconduct or engineering deceit.

The cluster discusses the confusing and ambiguous variable declaration syntax in C and C++, such as 'declaration follows usage,' pointer notation, and parsing issues like the most vexing parse, often comparing it to clearer alternatives in languages like Rust, Go, and others.

Comments primarily recommend and discuss distributed file systems and object stores like Ceph, GlusterFS, Lustre, and alternatives for scalable cluster storage solutions.