All Topics

Comments discuss the rapid evolution of societal attitudes toward homosexuality, from widespread taboo and illegality 20-50 years ago to mainstream acceptance today, often as an example of changing social norms and the Overton window.

Commenters overwhelmingly compare the article's ideas to Stoicism, arguing it is repackaged or inferior to the ancient philosophy and recommending texts like Meditations by Marcus Aurelius or works by Epictetus.

Cluster focuses on reactions to Pakistan mentions on Hacker News, including excitement about rare discussions and debates on its tensions with India, nuclear arsenal, relations with China and the US, and terrorism links.

Comments discuss practical applications of SAT solvers for software problems, puzzles, and real-world scenarios, often recommending tools like Z3, comparing to SMT/CSP solvers, and exploring alternatives to heuristics.

Discussions center on the pros and cons of Haskell's default lazy evaluation, including performance issues like space leaks and thunks, comparisons to strict languages, and whether it should be optional or fixed.

The cluster debates the stability of React and its ecosystem, focusing on frequent breaking changes, paradigm shifts, and upgrade pains especially with React Router, contrasting claims of easy maintenance with experiences of rewrites and churn.

The cluster revolves around heated discussions on what qualifies as 'real' or authentic pizza, primarily contrasting traditional Neapolitan Italian styles with American variants like New York, Chicago, and chain pizzas, including debates on ingredients, preparation, and cultural biases.

Users complain about software, APIs, and websites that only support US ZIP codes, rejecting international postal codes, and discuss the need for global compatibility and alternatives.

Cluster centers on debates identifying and interpreting nihilism in a statement or viewpoint, distinguishing it from related philosophies like absurdism, existentialism, and Nietzschean ideas, while questioning its implications and value.

Commenters criticize tech companies and startups for overly hyping their brand, culture, and self-image through marketing narratives, often seeing it as disingenuous, generic, or prioritizing personalities over products.

The cluster focuses on discussions about scenes being deleted, edited out, or altered in movies for TV, runtime, censorship, or director's cuts, with users debating different versions and their availability.

The cluster focuses on discussions about internet peering arrangements between ISPs, including settlement-free peering, IP transit costs, traffic imbalances, and disputes like those involving Comcast, Netflix, and Level3.

Discussions debate the safety of boxing gloves versus bare-knuckle fighting and MMA, arguing that gloves protect hands but enable more frequent head strikes leading to greater brain damage.

Comments revolve around Gentoo Linux, including user experiences, its customization advantages, lengthy compile times, stability, and comparisons to alternatives like Arch Linux or LFS.

Discussions focus on the history, poor naming, mathematical validity, and fundamental nature of imaginary and complex numbers, often comparing them to real and negative numbers while defending their importance in math and physics.

The cluster discusses the prevalence, effectiveness, scope, and variations of background checks in hiring processes, including whether they detect past issues, differences by company size/country/job type, and related services.

The cluster discusses arguments that COVID-19 primarily kills the elderly and those with comorbidities, downplaying its severity and questioning lockdowns' societal costs, countered by criticisms of ageist or eugenics-like attitudes toward vulnerable populations.

Comments debate the stereotype of the Middle Ages as a 'Dark Age' of ignorance and backwardness, challenging historical misconceptions and often drawing parallels to modern society.

Comments debate the feasibility of bike commuting and daily cycling in adverse weather conditions like rain, snow, cold, and heat, with users sharing personal experiences from cities worldwide and countering excuses for not biking.

The cluster debates the trade-off between developer time and efficient use of computing resources like RAM and CPU, criticizing bloat in apps such as Electron, Spotify, and web pages while countering the 'resources are cheap' argument.

Comments center on the distortions introduced by the Mercator projection in world maps, particularly exaggerating sizes of polar regions like Greenland and Antarctica, and discussions of alternative projections or preferring globes.

Comments primarily compare a discussed search solution to established full-text search engines like Lucene, Elasticsearch, Solr, Sphinx, and Manticore, often recommending or questioning alternatives.

This cluster centers on repeated discussions and arguments about the market share of specific companies, products, or technologies, often comparing percentages like 90% vs. low single digits and debating its importance for success or dominance.

The cluster debates whether software and algorithms are patentable, given that mathematics is not, with discussions on US patent law distinctions between abstract ideas and practical applications, workarounds, and Supreme Court precedents.

The cluster focuses on debates about customer acquisition costs (CAC) in SaaS and subscription businesses, comparing them to customer lifetime value (LTV), retention rates, and overall profitability.

Reactions to Hacker News submissions of blog posts where tech workers announce quitting their jobs, including personal resonances, criticisms of self-promotion, and comparisons to similar 'Why I Quit' articles.

Discussions center on using triangulation, trilateration, or multilateration to locate radio signal sources like phones or devices, questioning effectiveness, accuracy, and potential countermeasures.

The cluster debates imposing sin taxes on sugar, soda, and unhealthy foods similar to those on tobacco and alcohol to offset public health costs and negative externalities.

The cluster discusses the decline and scarcity of local news sources like newspapers and TV stations, their replacement by national outlets or social media, and the importance of sustaining local journalism for community coverage amid consolidation and economic challenges.

Discussions focus on the half-lives of radioactive isotopes like plutonium-239, uranium-235/238, and fission products in nuclear fuel and waste, debating how longer half-lives indicate lower radioactivity and shorter-term hazards versus long-term storage concerns.

Cluster focuses on criticisms of modal dialogs and popups in web interfaces, highlighting user frustration, accessibility issues, and calls to ban or avoid them in favor of non-modal alternatives.

The cluster discusses the privacy leak from unencrypted Server Name Indication (SNI) in TLS handshakes, allowing ISPs and observers to identify destination domains despite HTTPS encryption. Commenters debate solutions like Encrypted SNI (eSNI), TLS 1.3 features, and their limited deployment.

Discussions focus on obscure, underrated, or long-stagnant programming languages, their histories, reasons for lack of adoption, and occasional revivals or niche uses.

Comments debate the US-centric nature of Hacker News, challenging assumptions that most users are American and emphasizing the site's significant international audience and readership.

The cluster focuses on debates about using symbolic links (symlinks) and hard links for file management, highlighting their pros, cons, cross-filesystem limitations, and platform support as alternatives to duplication or other approaches.

The cluster discusses vulnerabilities in keyless car entry systems, especially relay attacks that allow thieves to steal vehicles by extending key fob signals, along with defenses like rolling codes, physical keys, and design improvements.

The cluster focuses on concerns about data persistence and durability in RAM-based or in-memory storage systems, especially risks of data loss from power failures, crashes, or delayed disk flushes before writes are durable.

The cluster focuses on Backblaze's hard drive failure statistics, their strategy of using cost-effective drives with higher failure rates due to software redundancy, and debates on price vs. reliability trade-offs in large-scale storage.

Comments criticize how companies market 'unlimited' data, storage, and bandwidth services that impose hidden limits, throttling, or fine print caveats, debating deceptive advertising versus realistic expectations.

Comments revolve around comparing the discussed project to Keybase for identity and crypto key management, debating Keybase's future after its Zoom acquisition, and suggesting alternatives.

Discussions center on recent UK knife attacks like the Southport child stabbings and soldier murders, media bias in labeling perpetrators as terrorists or militants, public riots fueled by misinformation about immigrants, and arrests for inflammatory online comments.

The cluster discusses motivations for drug use, including seeking pleasure and joy on-demand, escaping pain or boredom, coping mechanisms, addiction risks, and comparisons to legal substances like alcohol or caffeine.

The cluster focuses on discussions about using bloodletting, blood dilution, or reducing blood volume to remove toxins or microplastics from the bloodstream, including historical references, mechanisms like blood flow and oxygen, and skeptical questions about efficacy.

Commenters debate how people spent free time, entertained themselves, and managed distractions in the past (before internet, TV, and modern tech) compared to today, often claiming more spare time, hobbies, or fewer options for consumption back then.

Cluster centers on debates comparing film and digital cameras/sensors in terms of image quality, resolution, dynamic range, unique aesthetic 'look', nostalgia, process, and technical superiority.

Comments discuss data deduplication techniques in filesystems like BTRFS, ZFS, XFS, and cloud services like Dropbox and Mega, including block-level vs file-level dedup, cross-user deduplication, and storage efficiency benefits.

Discussions center on the ELF executable format, including parsing challenges, loaders, comparisons to formats like a.out and Mach-O, performance issues, and workarounds or criticisms.

Commenters compare the post's events or investigation to Sherlock Holmes stories, whodunits, Agatha Christie novels, and other detective fiction.

The cluster discusses comparisons of hardware specs, graphics fidelity, frame rates, resolutions, and optimization between PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo consoles and PCs across generations.

Discussions focus on the rules, pitfalls, and safety issues of default and zero-initialization for variables and structs in C++, comparisons to Rust's stricter model, and proposals for improvements like explicit uninitialized markers in future standards.

The cluster discusses the AI alignment problem, debating its definition, feasibility, challenges in aligning superintelligent AI or AGI with human values and goals, and related issues like human misalignment.

Discussions center on tools like PyInstaller, Nuitka, cx_Freeze, and py2exe for bundling Python applications and dependencies into standalone executables or binaries to ease deployment without requiring Python installation.

Discussions compare historical maritime explorations for spices, gold, and trade routes to modern space ventures, often using sarcastic historical analogies to defend space investment against claims of wastefulness.

Commenters reminisce about classic text-based multiplayer games called MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons), share memories, links to active MUDs, and compare them to modern MMOs or the article's subject.

Users humorously reference Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide quotes about plans 'on display' in inaccessible spots like cellars, basements, and disused lavatories to mock the hard-to-find location of a public notice mentioned in the article.

Commenters repeatedly question or emphasize the need to specify the legal jurisdiction in discussions about laws, courts, and rulings, noting that applicability varies widely by country, region, or court.

The cluster centers on debates over whether US migrant detention centers and Chinese Uyghur camps qualify as 'concentration camps,' discussing the term's historical definition, hyperbolic usage, and comparisons to Nazi internment camps.

Discussions center on comparing FLOPS/TFLOPS metrics across GPUs, CPUs, supercomputers, and AI chips, debating their impressiveness, units, precision, sparsity, efficiency like FLOPS per watt, and relevance to real performance.

Commenters overwhelmingly recommend or inquire about using small claims court to resolve minor disputes with companies or individuals, citing low fees, no lawyers needed, and high success rates due to defendants often not appearing.

Commenters debate the validity and limitations of using mobile app download counts as a measure of popularity or success, emphasizing that downloads do not equal active users, installs, or unique developers.

Cluster discusses Meta's Threads app as a potential Twitter competitor or replacement, focusing on its Instagram integration, user growth, features, and criticisms.

The cluster focuses on discussions about climate change causing mass displacement and migration of millions or billions from uninhabitable hot or flooded areas, leading to refugee crises, border conflicts, and societal challenges.

Discussions center on the secrecy, complexity, and criticisms of Google's search algorithm, including doubts about whether even Google engineers fully understand it, its reliance on machine learning, and impacts on search quality and SEO gaming.

This cluster focuses on the US mortgage interest tax deduction, debating its limited benefits for most homeowners due to the increased standard deduction, which leads about 90% to not itemize and thus forgo it.

Discussions primarily recommend and reference Clayton Christensen's 'The Innovator's Dilemma', including links to his lectures, videos, and related business innovation books like 'Good to Great'.

Commenters frequently compare the societal and informational impacts of a modern technology or phenomenon to the historical invention of the printing press, highlighting its role in mass reproduction, idea dissemination, and overcoming restrictions like bans.

The cluster focuses on discussions about using Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) for servers, networking gear, home WiFi, and other devices to handle power outages and enable graceful shutdowns.

The cluster centers on discussions of silicon chip degradation mechanisms like electromigration, heat, thermal stress, and transistor reliability, particularly in modern nanoscale processes and high-stress usage.

The cluster debates whether churches should pay taxes due to their vast wealth, tax exemptions, lack of spending transparency, and comparisons to businesses or non-profits, including government funding and tithing practices.

The cluster focuses on discussions of Price-to-Earnings (P/E) ratios for tech companies like Amazon, Tesla, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia, comparing their values and debating implications for growth, valuation, and investment potential.

The cluster discusses security risks of hardcoding or exposing API keys in mobile apps, web frontends, and client-side code, including how hackers can easily extract them from binaries or traffic, and debates on prevention methods like encryption or open-sourcing.

Discussions center on Google's PageRank algorithm, its current status and relevance in search ranking, potential deprecation, gaming issues, and applications to social or personal ranking like karma.

Comments debate the extent of legal enforcement, national flags, navies, and treaties like UNCLOS governing ships, platforms, and activities in international waters.

Comments analogize human population growth and resource consumption to natural boom-bust cycles in yeast, algae blooms, locusts, or cancer, predicting collapse from overshooting Earth's carrying capacity. Discussions highlight survivorship bias in stable ecosystems and debate if humans are exceptional or inevitably self-destructive.

The cluster discusses the effectiveness and difficulties of online and remote learning for school children, particularly younger students during COVID lockdowns, highlighting issues like lack of structure, social development, and poor engagement compared to in-person education.

This cluster discusses liquidation preferences in venture capital deals, explaining how they work to protect investors by prioritizing their payouts in exits like acquisitions or IPOs, often at the expense of founders and employees.

Comments debate whether dictionaries prescribe correct language usage or descriptively reflect evolving common usage, emphasizing that language is defined by popular use rather than authority.

The cluster debates whether traditional hierarchical file systems and folders are intuitive for average users or if they should be hidden behind app-centric interfaces like in iOS and mobile OSes, with many sharing anecdotes of user confusion.

Commenters overwhelmingly compare the discussed product or feature to Google Wave, highlighting similarities in collaborative real-time editing and communication while lamenting Wave's premature demise and potential.

Commenters correct errors in unit conversions (e.g., liters vs. cubic meters, area vs. volume), debate metric vs. imperial systems, and suggest relatable analogies like football fields or cubes for large quantities.

This cluster discusses the implementation, challenges, and usage of async/await in Rust, focusing on libraries like Tokio, executors, blocking operations, and comparisons to other languages.

The cluster debates whether college education is necessary for aspiring entrepreneurs or if skipping college to start a business or join startups provides superior learning and success opportunities, often citing dropouts like Gates and Jobs, Thiel Fellowships, and accelerators like YC.

The cluster discusses whether Christmas is a religious Christian holiday or a secular cultural tradition with pagan roots, including celebrations by atheists and non-Christians, Santa Claus, and its commercialization.

The cluster focuses on the EU's regulations mandating USB-C (and previously micro-USB) as the standard charging port for smartphones to reduce e-waste, debating its impact on Apple’s Lightning connector, innovation, and historical precedents.

The cluster focuses on the challenges of patent trolls—non-practicing entities that sue companies over patents without producing products—and discusses strategies to combat them, such as pledges not to settle, collective defense funds, patent invalidation, and calls for patent system reform.

The cluster revolves around user feedback on product pricing, with developers and founders frequently acknowledging concerns, promising adjustments to pricing models, and seeking input on reasonable prices.

The cluster focuses on discussions of patent infringement lawsuits in tech, including potential settlements, patent trolls, willful infringement, and outcomes like licensing or prolonged litigation.

This cluster discusses the ecological benefits of wolves as predators, including rewilding and biodiversity, versus conflicts with ranchers over livestock predation and human safety concerns.

Comments discuss the low metallicity of the Sun compared to planets, the stellar nucleosynthesis of heavy elements in previous star generations, and how these elements from supernovae or neutron star mergers incorporated into Earth and the solar system.

The cluster centers on debates and clarifications distinguishing between undergraduate and graduate school experiences, expectations, or applicability of certain statements about degrees and education levels.

The cluster centers on debates about the ethics, legality, and implications of mandating or forcing medical treatments, implants, or interventions without patient consent, emphasizing bodily autonomy and informed consent rights.

Discussions revolve around changing or spoofing browser user agent strings as a workaround for website blocks, compatibility issues, or restrictions, often recommending Firefox extensions to mimic Chrome or other browsers.

Discussions center on Amazon's practice of commingling its own inventory with third-party FBA sellers' stock, raising concerns about counterfeit products being shipped even when items are listed as 'sold by Amazon'. Debates include whether sellers can opt out and the implications for buyers seeking authentic goods.

The cluster discusses particle-based simulations of fluid dynamics, debating their accuracy, realism compared to real fluids like water, viscosity, friction, and traditional methods like Navier-Stokes equations.

Comments debate whether Bitcoin's electricity usage scales with transaction volume or is fixed per block due to proof-of-work mining, difficulty adjustment, and block rewards.

Discussions center on occult beliefs, esotericism, secret societies like Freemasons and Ordo Templi Orientis, mystical traditions, and figures such as Aleister Crowley, with some debate on their suitability for Hacker News.

The cluster focuses on discussions about the idea of individuals or communities starting their own local Internet Service Providers (ISPs), including feasibility, costs, technical challenges like upstream connections, and real-world examples from rural or underserved areas.

Discussions center on EXIF data in images, including privacy risks like embedded location coordinates, and how platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Imgur strip or preserve this metadata.

The cluster focuses on discussions about the precision, accuracy, calibration needs, and tolerances of various measurement devices such as calipers, scales, rulers, and sensors, with users questioning the reliability of cheap tools and emphasizing proper calibration.

Users repeatedly request, complain about, or suggest adding a table of contents to a lengthy webpage or book preview due to poor navigation and difficulty finding specific sections.