All Topics

Users frequently ask and speculate about the total size, compressed and uncompressed, of a large dataset shared in the thread, with estimates varying from megabytes to terabytes.

Users complain about confusing navigation, lack of obvious controls, fast auto-advance, and poor discoverability of a slideshow or carousel interface on a website, often mistaking it for a broken page.

Discussions center on whether companies or individuals gain tax benefits from business losses, write-offs, or destroying assets like IP, with debates clarifying that deductions only offset taxes at the marginal rate without eliminating net losses.

This cluster centers on discussions of Subresource Integrity (SRI), a web security feature for verifying the integrity of third-party resources like scripts from CDNs to prevent tampering or compromise. Commenters frequently cite SRI as an existing solution to the parent post's proposed idea for hashing and protecting remote assets.

The cluster focuses on debates about ABI stability in C++, including its challenges, lack of standardization, impacts on libraries like libstdc++, and comparisons to C, Rust, and other languages or platforms.

Discussions revolve around the use, morality, history, and effectiveness of capital punishment and executions, including arguments for executing criminals, concerns about wrongful executions, and comparisons to historical or modern practices.

Users joke and express alarm about their systems or cloud instances being hacked, referencing rootkits, backdoors, tainted machines, and drastic measures like pulling plugs or wiping systems in response to a security incident.

This cluster centers on accusations and discussions of 'virtue signaling,' where commenters criticize behaviors, statements, or actions as performative moral displays rather than genuine convictions.

The cluster revolves around debates on RCS as an upgrade to SMS, Apple's refusal to support it, Google's proprietary extensions and promotion via Google Messages, and comparisons to iMessage's features and ecosystem lock-in.

Discussions center on whether increased clouds or water vapor from a device would cool Earth by boosting albedo and reflecting sunlight, or warm it via enhanced greenhouse effects and reduced heat escape.

The cluster debates whether blockchain can effectively record, prove, or transfer ownership of real-world physical assets like property and land titles, questioning its limitations compared to legal systems and centralized records.

The cluster discusses the challenges of converting massive illiquid stock holdings by founders and billionaires into cash without crashing market prices, often citing examples like Elon Musk's Tesla/Twitter shares, Bezos's Amazon stock, and strategies like gradual sales or loans against collateral.

The cluster discusses the security risks, best practices, and drawbacks of using environment variables in programming, including mutability issues with setenv/getenv, recommendations for read-only access or config files, and debates on their appropriateness versus alternatives.

Comments debate Bitcoin's high electricity usage for mining and transactions compared to traditional banking systems, credit cards, VISA, countries, and other infrastructures, arguing over whether it's wasteful or more efficient overall.

The cluster discusses criticisms of UK police practices, including overzealous surveillance, arrests for offensive speech or social media posts, disdain for crime victims, and neglect of serious crimes in favor of minor offenses.

The cluster discusses the fairness of transgender women (biological males) competing in women's sports categories, emphasizing biological advantages from male puberty and testosterone, and debating the purpose of sex-segregated competitions.

Discussions center on policies, experiences, and debates about banning or restricting mobile phones in schools, including enforcement challenges, benefits for student focus and social interaction, and international examples.

The cluster discusses how true multitasking is a myth and humans instead engage in costly task or context switching, particularly impacting productivity in knowledge work and programming. Commenters share experiences on the cognitive toll of interruptions and advocate for single-tasking to improve focus and output.

Discussions focus on the rusting and corrosion of metals like steel and stainless steel, particularly in wet, salty, marine, or humid environments, debating resistance levels and influencing factors.

The cluster focuses on commenters identifying a described system as a classic PID controller from control theory, requesting explanations, resources, and examples of control systems like autopilots or dams.

Users recommend print-on-demand services like Spreadshirt and Teespring, and discuss ideas for turning project designs or concepts into t-shirts and other merchandise.

Users nominate historical and contemporary figures such as Linus Torvalds, Elon Musk, Paul Graham, and scientists like Einstein as examples of influential thinkers, polymaths, or high-achievers fitting a list or criterion from the parent post.

The cluster centers on discussions about the polio vaccine's success in nearly eradicating polio, its efficacy and rare risks like vaccine-derived cases, and rebuttals to anti-vaxxer arguments often comparing it to COVID vaccines.

This cluster primarily consists of job postings from high-frequency trading (HFT), proprietary trading, and quantitative finance firms like Queueco, Jane Street, and Hudson River Trading, seeking engineers for low-latency infrastructure, machine learning, and trading systems.

Users discuss and advocate for traditional physical whiteboards over digital alternatives for collaboration, sketching diagrams, coding interviews, and teaching, often comparing them favorably to chalkboards or software tools.

Comments focus on the accessibility of Microsoft Windows source code through leaks, Shared Source programs, government and enterprise access, and whether this equates to it being open source.

Discussions revolve around recommendations, comparisons, and features of plotting libraries like Plotly, ggplot2, plotnine, gnuplot, and Python alternatives, focusing on quality, interactivity, and versatility for data visualization.

Users argue over the appropriate use of past, present, or future tense in Hacker News titles and comments, debating whether events are ongoing or historical. Discussions extend to English grammar nuances like perfect aspects and conjugations.

Cluster focuses on Firefox's automatic update mechanisms, including how to disable them, issues with updates overwriting settings, package manager alternatives, and comparisons to other browsers.

This cluster centers on Hacker News discussions about numerous Wordle-inspired games, clones, alternatives, parodies, and variants, including critiques, recommendations, and shares of similar puzzles.

The cluster focuses on Google's Google Fiber initiative, debating its true purpose as a catalyst to force competitors to offer faster, cheaper internet rather than a genuine ISP venture, along with its slow progress, challenges, and market impact.

Discussions revolve around NumPy's strengths, limitations, compatibility issues like with PyPy, and emerging competitors or alternatives for numerical and array programming in Python.

The cluster focuses on recommendations for books, tutorials, and guides to learn Haskell, with frequent mentions of 'Learn You a Haskell', 'Haskell Programming from First Principles', and other resources.

Comments heavily feature variations, puns, and jokes on the proverb 'you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs,' riffing on egg-cracking, omelettes, and related wordplay in response to an underlying discussion of tradeoffs or sacrifices.

The cluster discusses how US abortion restrictions lead to women being prosecuted for miscarriages mistaken as abortions, doctors delaying care for pregnancy complications due to legal fears, and increased maternal and infant health risks.

Discussions center on what unikernels are, their advantages over traditional kernels, microkernels, and containers, as well as comparisons to technologies like Xen and specific projects such as MirageOS and IncludeOS.

Debates center on racism, sexism, bias, and diversity problems in the tech industry, including Hacker News' tendency to downvote or dismiss related discussions.

The cluster discusses the bidding war among cities to host Amazon's second headquarters (HQ2), focusing on debates over tax breaks, subsidies, and their economic impact on taxpayers versus job creation benefits.

Discussions focus on browsers' lack of direct TCP/UDP socket support, reliance on WebSockets or proxies for networking, and security concerns around localhost/private network access from web pages.

Comments discuss the role, risks, and often illusory nature of liquidity in financial markets, including stocks, crypto, and trading, with sarcasm around 'providing liquidity' amid concerns like evaporation during crises.

Users discuss inaccuracies, omissions, and characteristics of lakes in a geographical mapping or visualization tool, highlighting missing Great Lakes, man-made dams, seasonal variations, and real-world examples.

The cluster focuses on discussions about IBM's POWER architecture, including its performance, current usage in servers and HPC, ongoing development like POWER9 and POWER10, market relevance, and OpenPOWER variants.

Users speculate about dementia or Alzheimer's symptoms in someone, share personal family experiences with cognitive decline, and discuss potential treatments or reversals.

The cluster debates the link between democratic political systems and economic success, questioning if free markets and prosperity require democracy using examples like China, Singapore, South Korea, and historical cases such as post-war Germany and Japan.

The cluster centers on debates comparing fire risks between electric vehicles (EVs) and gas-powered (ICE) cars, including statistics on fire incidence rates, spontaneous combustion concerns, and challenges with battery fires that are harder to extinguish.

The cluster discusses reliable methods and challenges for preserving digital data over decades or centuries, evaluating storage media like SSDs, HDDs, tapes, M-Discs, and exotic alternatives such as etched film or quartz while addressing degradation, bit rot, and obsolescence.

This cluster centers on debates about the massive death tolls from communist regimes, especially Stalin's USSR (Holodomor, purges), Mao's China, and others, with estimates of 60-100 million deaths cited from sources like Wikipedia and The Black Book of Communism, often compared to Nazi atrocities.

The cluster centers on discussions of the human drive for social status as a fundamental motivator, often surpassing money or wealth, and its role in behaviors, capitalism, and societal comparisons.

Cluster focuses on recommendations for hands-on courses, CTFs, bootcamps, and platforms like PentesterLab, HackTheBox, and picoCTF to learn penetration testing, offensive security, and hacking skills.

Discussions center on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), existing financial regulations, audits, and their effectiveness in preventing corporate fraud and ensuring accurate reporting, often contrasting burdens on large vs. small companies.

This cluster centers on the debate over whether individual consumers or corporations bear primary responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions, with arguments on demand-driven pollution versus corporate accountability and the effectiveness of personal actions.

The cluster debates the historical shift from stable, lifetime employment with pensions in the mid-20th century to today's gig economy, service jobs, automation, and outsourcing, questioning if low-end jobs have truly disappeared or evolved.

Comments revolve around debating, questioning, and humorously repeating the term 'good' to evaluate the quality or performance of something, likely an AI model given references to generation quality and data labeling.

The cluster discusses police use of facial recognition for identifying suspects or victims from photos, including concerns about accuracy, false matches, framing risks, court admissibility, and comparisons to fingerprints.

Comments center on differences in egg handling, such as US requirements for washing and refrigerating eggs versus unwashed eggs in Europe, alongside discussions of egg prices, quality, and freshness.

Cluster focuses on debunking the misconception that quantum entanglement enables faster-than-light information transfer, repeatedly citing the no-communication theorem and explaining why classical channels are still required.

The cluster centers on commenters invoking Boston Dynamics' robots (like Atlas and Spot) to compare, critique, or reference them against the article's robotics topic, often highlighting BD's superiority or relevance.

The cluster centers on debates about fly-by-wire flight control systems in Airbus and Boeing aircraft, contrasting Airbus's protective computer interventions with Boeing's direct pilot control, often referencing crashes like Air France 447 and flight laws.

Discussions center on using various oils such as vegetable, olive, sunflower, or mineral oil for the classic physics demonstration where oil spreads into a single-molecule-thick film on water to measure molecular size. Debates include which oils work best, historical uses, rancidity concerns, and alternatives like animal fats.

The cluster discusses the idea of repurposing vacant office buildings into residential housing to address excess office space from remote work and urban housing shortages, debating feasibility, design challenges like plumbing and natural light, and economic viability.

The cluster discusses electric vehicle (EV) performance in cold weather, comparing range loss, battery heating, starting reliability, and cabin heating to internal combustion engine (ICE) cars, which face similar winter challenges like reduced efficiency and starting issues.

The cluster focuses on discussions about Go's channels and goroutines for concurrency, including their philosophy, advantages, limitations, best practices, and comparisons to alternatives like mutexes or other languages' approaches.

The cluster focuses on discussions about the WebP image format, including its browser and software support, compression advantages, comparisons to PNG/JPEG/AVIF, and debates on adoption and quality.

The cluster centers on discussions about Ruby on Rails version compatibility, backwards compatibility issues, upgrades from older versions like 3.x to newer ones, and related bugs or patches in conjunction with Ruby versions.

Comments debate the advantages of pipelines over rail or trucks for oil transportation, highlighting pipelines as safer, cheaper, and more efficient while criticizing alternatives for higher risks, costs, and emissions.

Discussions debate the cost, density, reliability, and practicality of LTO tapes and drives versus hard drives for archival and long-term data storage.

The cluster debates the full costs of homeownership including property taxes, maintenance, insurance, and HOA fees compared to renting, questioning whether owners bear these expenses or pass them to tenants via rent.

Comments debate the definition, existence, and skills of full-stack developers, contrasting them with frontend/backend specialists and questioning if it's a legitimate role or marketing term.

The cluster centers on debates about the copyrightability of video game mechanics and the legality of creating clones, citing cases like Sega v. Accolade and Atari v. Amusement World.

Cluster focuses on discussions about peanut and nut allergies, including causes like genetics or lack of early exposure, prevention strategies such as introducing peanuts to infants, personal anecdotes, and debates on rising prevalence.

Comments discuss how people tend to act irrationally, panic, and make poor decisions under stress, danger, or crisis situations, often explaining or contextualizing such behavior rather than condemning it.

Discussions focus on recommendations and comparisons of various diff viewers and merge tools like difftastic, Meld, Delta, Sublime Merge, and others for improving git and version control workflows.

The cluster centers on debates about social mobility in the US compared to European countries, with commenters citing sources like the Global Social Mobility Index to argue that the US has lower mobility than popularly believed, countering myths of high American opportunity.

Discussions center on the benefits, underuse, implementation, and libraries for state machines in software development, including comparisons to switch statements and requests for tutorials.

Comments discuss seat sizes, legroom, configurations, and overall comfort in commercial aircraft like the A380, 787, and 777, emphasizing variations by airline and preferences for more spacious models.

Users recommend System76 laptops for Linux users, sharing positive experiences with hardware compatibility, build quality, customer support, and performance.

Commenters discuss Indian food, emphasizing its spices, vegetarian options, and cultural aspects as healthy, palatable alternatives or dietary solutions.

Discussions center on tools, apps, APIs, and startups for house hunting, property searching, and real estate management, often focusing on bypassing traditional agents and sharing similar projects.

Commenters complain about insufficient pocket sizes in modern pants like skinny jeans, advocate for cargo or hiking pants with larger pockets, and note issues with women's clothing pockets.

Comments repeatedly invoke Bayes' theorem and Bayesian reasoning as a solution or explanation for the parent post's problem, often sharing links to Wikipedia, articles, and tutorials on Bayesian concepts.

Comments focus on a person's appearance in photos, expressing surprise at how much younger (or sometimes older) they look than their actual age, with speculation about plastic surgery, makeup, hair, lighting, and genetics.

The cluster discusses cultural, religious, and historical reasons for food taboos around eating specific animals like pigs, dogs, horses, cows, and offal in different societies, highlighting variations such as pork bans in Judaism/Islam and beef avoidance in India.

The cluster focuses on debates about Adobe's transition to subscription-based pricing for Creative Cloud products like Photoshop and Lightroom, weighing one-time purchase costs against ongoing fees, user abandonment, added value, and alternatives like Affinity.

Discussions focus on typos, factual errors, and proofreading mistakes in technical articles, books, papers, and manuals, with commenters pointing them out and authors often acknowledging and committing to fixes.

Discussions center on the limited RAM and flash memory of embedded microcontrollers like PIC, AVR, STM32, and ESP32, evaluating if programs, interpreters like MicroPython, or other software can run on such resource-constrained hardware.

This cluster centers on discussions about SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, including its high costs, implementation challenges, negative reputation, widespread adoption by large companies like Microsoft and Google, and comparisons to alternatives.

Comments primarily compare a new product or service to Cloudflare Workers, discussing similarities, differences, performance benchmarks, use cases, and potential competition.

The cluster debates the true origins and definition of object-oriented programming, contrasting Simula as the first OOP language with Alan Kay's Smalltalk-inspired vision of message passing, and their influences on C++, Java, Objective-C, and Ruby.

Commenters repeatedly ask for clarifications on what abbreviations like 'M', 'MM', 'MMM', and similar terms stand for, often in contexts like millions in finance, Mister Money Mustache, modules, or MVC components.

Comments criticize AMP for not inherently improving page speeds, attributing its perceived speed to Google's preloading and caching in search results, and argue that optimized standard HTML pages can load just as fast without AMP's restrictions or Google's control.

Discussions center on the RNA world hypothesis, the roles of RNA, DNA, proteins, and specific amino acids in the origins and early evolution of life.

The cluster centers on arguments about whether public figures like Elon Musk are 'American' based on birthplace, citizenship, naturalization, or residency, often challenging assumptions of native-born status.

Discussions center on how the human body uses fats versus carbohydrates for energy, including debates on ketosis, gluconeogenesis, ketone production, and whether fat is directly burned or converted to glucose.

Discussions focus on the viability of lifelong renting for salaried individuals in European countries, especially Germany, where tenant protections, rent controls, and cultural norms make it a stable alternative to home ownership compared to places like the US.

Discussions focus on how technological improvements in editing tools, CGI, shooting equipment, and AI reduce costs and barriers in film and video production, enabling solo creators and comparing to traditional Hollywood methods.

Cluster focuses on debates comparing Linux's epoll with BSD's kqueue, Solaris event ports, Windows IOCP, and other I/O event notification mechanisms, discussing their performance, features like batching and event types, and adoption reasons.

The cluster focuses on debates about using barcode scanners for product identification in retail and checkout processes, including feasibility, reliability issues, and comparisons to alternatives like RFID or phone apps.

The cluster focuses on the FCC's opposition to net neutrality, especially under Ajit Pai's leadership, including the repeal of rules, historical policy shifts between administrations, and criticisms of comment manipulation and industry influence.

The cluster discusses the criteria, legal processes, personal experiences, and ethical debates surrounding involuntary hospitalization or commitment to psychiatric wards for mental health treatment, often focusing on requirements like imminent danger and fears of abuse.

Debates on whether internet access should be classified and regulated as a public utility similar to electricity, water, or phone services, covering arguments for universal access, natural monopolies, and government regulation of ISPs.