All Topics

Discussions revolve around the value, frequency, best practices, and personal experiences with one-on-one (1:1) meetings between employees and managers, debating their usefulness and how to make them effective.

This cluster revolves around repeated quotes and variations of the famous aphorism stating that the only hard problems in computer science are cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

Discussions center on seL4, a formally verified microkernel, highlighting its security proofs, comparisons to Linux, performance limitations, and potential for building secure OSes or hypervisors.

Comments focus on Japan's unique housing market where homes are treated as depreciating assets, frequently demolished and rebuilt every 20-40 years, leading to affordability in Tokyo compared to Western cities despite high land values.

Comments discuss vulnerabilities to Sybil attacks in decentralized networks and protocols, questioning resistance, prevention strategies, and referencing examples like Bitcoin.

The cluster discusses SSH host authentication security, debating the use of certificates versus traditional key fingerprints and trust-on-first-use model, and why SSH certificates are not more widely adopted like HTTPS CAs.

Discussions focus on the perceptibility, thresholds, and impacts of input lag, network latency, and delays in video games, especially competitive FPS, fighting, and rhythm games, comparing them to human reaction times.

Debates and clarifications on US tax code Section 174 amendments from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, requiring 5-year amortization of R&D expenses like software development salaries instead of immediate deductions, and distinctions from R&D tax credits.

Comments discuss the feasibility, challenges, costs, skepticism, and promotion of cryonics as a method for preserving human bodies or brains for potential future revival through advanced technology.

The cluster centers on technical challenges and architectures for scaling massively multiplayer online game (MMO) servers to support thousands of concurrent players in a single shared world, referencing games like EVE Online, Planetside 2, and technologies such as SpatialOS.

Users recommend the SponsorBlock browser extension, which uses crowdsourced data to automatically skip sponsored segments and other unwanted parts in YouTube videos.

The cluster focuses on discussions advocating for or debating the breakup of Google or Alphabet into separate companies, such as splitting Search, YouTube, Android, Ads, and Cloud, to address monopoly concerns and improve competition.

Discussions revolve around Google's policy ending support for less secure authentication apps for Gmail, with users debating the use of app-specific passwords generated via 2FA as a workaround for email clients lacking OAuth support.

Discussions revolve around the fascination, advantages, history, patents, and implementation of rounded corners in user interfaces, particularly in Apple products, OS designs, and CSS border-radius.

Commenters analogize parked cars on public streets to litter or abandoned dockless vehicles like bikes and scooters, critiquing the hypocrisy in tolerating car parking while complaining about other urban clutter.

Comments discuss the historical evolution of telegraph, telephone systems, Bell System/AT&T innovations, long-distance communication technologies, and parallels to modern internet and computing.

This cluster focuses on security vulnerabilities like CVEs in Docker container images, including issues with base OS packages, update challenges, scanning tools, and best practices for using official or hardened images.

The cluster debates the regressive impact of carbon taxes on lower-income people who rely on older cars, long commutes, and fuel-intensive lifestyles, while the wealthy can afford alternatives like electric vehicles. Discussions explore revenue-neutral proposals, rebates, and ways to mitigate disproportionate burdens on the poor.

Comments in this cluster overwhelmingly express complete and emphatic agreement with a statement or post, using phrases like '100% agree' or 'totally agree 100%'.

Discussions center on the advantages of ISO A-series paper sizes like A4 over US Letter, including scaling properties, folding, global usage, and impacts on printing and document handling.

Cluster focuses on Niklaus Wirth's Oberon programming language, its evolution from Pascal and Modula-2, influences on Go, variants like Oberon-07, and related projects such as Project Oberon OS.

Comments reference historical mega-corporations like the East India Company, which had private armies and controlled territories, to argue that today's powerful companies are not unprecedented and have historical precedents dating back to the 1600s.

Discussions center on the US SNAP (food stamps) program, its restrictions on purchases, effectiveness in aiding the poor, taxpayer costs, and alternatives like direct food provision versus cash benefits.

Discussions center on Common Lisp's condition and restart system, which handles errors without automatic stack unwinding, contrasting it with traditional exceptions in languages like C++, Java, and Python.

Commenters discuss, request, and critique 'Hello World' example programs in various programming languages, tools, and environments, often highlighting their simplicity, complexity, or boilerplate.

Comments focus on the necessity, feasibility, and realities of mining natural resources like minerals for technology, with many advocating aggressively for mining specific objects or materials while addressing common misconceptions about the industry.

Debates on the January 6, 2021, US Capitol attack, focusing on whether it was an armed insurrection or coup, participant armament, violence levels, police complicity, and security failures.

The cluster centers on advice for employees to sell company stock immediately upon vesting to diversify risk and avoid overexposure beyond salary, debating company restrictions, liquidity, taxes, and holding for potential upside.

This cluster features numerous comments sharing links to Outline.com, a service that provides clean, paywall-free versions of news articles for easier reading on Hacker News.

The cluster discusses the Trump administration's cuts to USAID funding, debating its accountability, effectiveness in foreign aid like disease eradication and famine relief, and allegations of misuse for political interference or bribes.

The cluster focuses on the use, generation, and effectiveness of synthetic data for training AI models, especially LLMs, with discussions on its benefits, risks like model collapse, and examples from companies like OpenAI.

Comments discuss the physics of sonic booms, supersonic speeds, shockwaves, and why they are absent or inaudible in videos of fast-moving objects like planes, rockets, or sightings.

Comments debate how modern regex engines like PCRE with backtracking and backreferences deviate from theoretical regular languages and finite automata, causing performance issues like ReDoS, contrasted with linear-time alternatives like RE2.

Comments recommend Tauri as a lighter, faster alternative to Electron for building desktop apps, highlighting its use of the host OS webview to reduce bundle size and overhead compared to Electron's bundled browser.

The cluster discusses the historical Ptolemaic geocentric model using epicycles for accurate planetary predictions, its comparison to heliocentric models by Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, and analogies to modern scientific theories.

The cluster centers on quotes, paraphrases, and adaptations of Martin Niemöller's 'First they came...' poem, used to argue about the risks of not speaking out against censorship or suppression of various groups in political or social contexts.

Commenters discuss techniques like multiple browser profiles, OS user accounts, VMs, and separate devices to isolate work and personal accounts, browsing, and environments for privacy, focus, and productivity.

Users recommend Zotero as the preferred tool for managing research papers, PDFs, citations, and references, frequently comparing it favorably to alternatives like Mendeley, JabRef, and EndNote.

Discussions focus on Apple's AirPlay technology for wireless audio and video streaming, its compatibility with devices like Apple TV and HomePod, limitations, and comparisons to alternatives.

Comments discuss the benefits of short 15-30 minute power naps during work or lunch breaks for improving productivity and focus, including personal experiences, tips for napping, and calls for workplace acceptance.

Users recount personal anecdotes about receiving unexpected emergency alerts on their phones for events like earthquakes, tsunamis, missile threats, floods, and false alarms, often highlighting panic, system failures, or surprises in public settings.

Discussions focus on the Aztec, Maya, and Inca civilizations, their practices like human sacrifice, large empires and cities, and their downfall through Spanish conquistadors, alliances with rival tribes, diseases, and internal factors.

Users reminisce about Apple's HyperCard software, highlighting its innovative accessible programming model, historical impact, Apple's discontinuation of it, and modern successors like LiveCode.

The cluster centers on the Boy or Girl probability paradox, where commenters debate the odds of two boys given at least one boy in a two-child family, discussing conditional probability, sample spaces, and common intuitions like 1/2 vs. 1/3.

Comments focus on Orthodox Jewish practices, creative loopholes, and accommodations for Sabbath observance, such as Shabbat elevators, eruvs, shabbos goys, and prohibitions on work or electricity. Discussions also note the irony of these topics appearing on Hacker News during the Sabbath when observant Jews cannot participate.

Cluster focuses on out-of-band server management tools like IPMI, iLO, iDRAC, BMC, and KVM-over-IP for remote console access, power control, and troubleshooting, including hardware recommendations and alternatives like Raspberry Pi setups.

The cluster focuses on comparisons between PhD program structures, durations, coursework requirements, and entry prerequisites in the US versus the UK and Europe, debating total time from undergrad to completion and systemic differences.

The cluster focuses on debates about intuitionistic (constructive) logic rejecting the law of excluded middle, unlike classical logic, and implications for proofs by contradiction and double negation.

Commenters debate the nature of rituals, distinguishing religious and superstitious practices from everyday human behaviors, often equating them as sources of comfort, discipline, or community rather than pure logic.

The cluster debates the use of decimal prefixes (e.g., GB as 10^9 bytes) versus binary prefixes (e.g., GiB as 2^30 bytes) for storage and memory, highlighting inconsistencies between hard drives, RAM, and operating systems.

Users recommend and discuss various GUI and CLI tools for managing PostgreSQL databases, frequently comparing alternatives to pgAdmin such as DBeaver, pgcli, Postico, TablePlus, and others.

The cluster focuses on Zillow shutting down its iBuying home-flipping business due to inaccurate machine learning-based price predictions, with discussions on Zestimate reliability, business incentives, and related articles.

Cluster focuses on tools, services like AWS Textract, Azure Document Intelligence, and LLMs for extracting structured data such as tables and key-value pairs from semi-structured documents including PDFs, invoices, receipts, and forms.

Users discuss the Vivaldi web browser as a Chromium-based alternative to Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, focusing on its power user features, lack of Google bloat, performance, customizability, and whether to switch to it.

The cluster discusses the challenges and techniques of bootstrapping compilers, including the need for an existing compiler to build a new one, historical examples from languages like Rust, GCC, Zig, and Go, and methods like using assembly or previous versions.

The cluster discusses the City of London's unique legal status as a separate entity within the UK, its role as a global financial hub involved in banking, money laundering, and tax evasion, and the impacts of Brexit on its position relative to the EU.

Comments frequently compare the post's topic to Factorio, sharing game strategies, mods like Bottleneck Lite and Pyanodon, tips for production optimization, and references to similar games such as Mindustry, Satisfactory, and Oxygen Not Included.

The cluster discusses the excessive use of antibiotics in livestock farming, especially in the US for growth promotion and to offset poor living conditions, and its contribution to antibiotic resistance, with comparisons to stricter EU regulations.

This cluster revolves around the long-standing meme and ironic predictions that the current year will finally be the 'year of the Linux desktop,' referencing ongoing hopes and jokes about Linux achieving mainstream desktop adoption.

The cluster revolves around a mathematical method or construction that claims to avoid explicit square roots, but commenters debate its validity by pointing out hidden square roots, such as sqrt(2) for square diagonals, and ambiguities in the term 'square'.

Comments debate the essence of message passing as a core OOP concept, distinguishing it from method calls, with references to Smalltalk, Ruby, Objective-C, and Erlang.

Discussions center on the utility and necessity of Lodash and Underscore.js libraries compared to modern native JavaScript features like map, filter, and reduce, including debates on their relevance, alternatives, and desires for standardization.

Comments enthusiastically praising the exact accuracy, precision, and specificity of a statement or description in the thread, often using phrases like 'technically correct is the best kind of correct.'

The cluster focuses on Common Table Expressions (CTEs) in SQL, especially their performance impacts in PostgreSQL such as acting as optimization barriers in older versions, improvements in recent releases, and comparisons to subqueries or recursive CTEs.

The cluster focuses on discussions about Minecraft's two editions—the original Java Edition and the newer C++ Bedrock Edition—including performance differences, modding support, compatibility, maintenance status, and concerns over Microsoft potentially phasing out Java Edition.

Discussions center on distinguishing BuzzFeed's clickbait content from BuzzFeed News' journalism, debating its quality, reputation, and legitimacy as a news source.

This cluster revolves around discussions of qualified immunity, a U.S. legal doctrine protecting government officials like police from civil lawsuits for rights violations, including explanations, criticisms, examples, and calls for reform or abolition.

Discussions center on personal safety strategies during tornadoes, hurricanes, storms, and other natural disasters, including debates on sheltering in place, evacuation, ideal locations to hide, and long-term relocation to safer areas.

The cluster focuses on debates about the value, persistence, and flaws of traditions, including arguments for respecting longstanding practices versus criticisms like appeal to tradition and calls to reassess or abandon them.

Discussions center on the standard 1500-byte MTU on the internet, challenges with jumbo frames, IPv6 minimums of 1280 bytes, path MTU discovery, and overhead from encapsulation or headers reducing effective payload sizes.

The cluster discusses Magic Leap's overhyped promises, misleading demos, and underwhelming actual product delivery, often comparing it to competitors like HoloLens and questioning the company's credibility.

This cluster discusses the inefficiencies of US corn-based ethanol production, arguing it uses more fossil fuels than it saves, increases emissions compared to gasoline, and primarily serves as a farm subsidy rather than a green biofuel.

Cluster focuses on challenges of cyclic references in reference counting memory management, solutions like weak references, cycle detection, and comparisons to garbage collection in languages such as Rust and Java.

The cluster focuses on the process, limitations, and features of migrating user accounts between Mastodon instances in the fediverse, including follower redirects, post retention, and scenarios like instance shutdowns or bans. Users debate portability compared to centralized platforms like Twitter.

Cluster focuses on personal anecdotes from dyslexic individuals about reading difficulties, letter swapping, and word recognition, while debating if a text effect or font simulates true dyslexia and mentioning specialized dyslexia fonts.

The cluster discusses the evolutionary reasons for human sleep patterns, including debates on whether ancient humans had biphasic or segmented sleep rather than modern monophasic 8-hour cycles, energy conservation, and predator avoidance.

Comments discuss the practice of legacy admissions at elite universities like Harvard, debating its fairness, role in favoring wealthy alumni children, ties to donations, and benefits for institutional prestige and funding.

Comments recommend and discuss various Python debuggers like ipdb, pudb, pdb, and PySnooper, sharing tips for effective debugging and comparing to tools like pry in other languages.

This cluster discusses the concept of induced demand in transportation, where building more roads or highways increases traffic volume rather than reducing congestion, with frequent references to Wikipedia and related articles. Debates explore its implications for urban planning, infrastructure policy, and alternatives like limiting demand.

The cluster discusses the Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL, its discovery after years in the codebase, catastrophic impact, patching, and use as an example of open-source security failures and auditing challenges.

Discussions focus on the challenges, quality, and improvements needed for user interfaces in complex video games like Dwarf Fortress, Civilization, and Factorio, debating bespoke designs versus standard UX practices.

This cluster centers on discussions recommending or debating the use of fail2ban and similar tools like sshguard to protect SSH servers from brute-force attacks, often alongside advice on key authentication and log monitoring.

Users recommend and discuss NewPipe and similar third-party apps like Vanced and Tubular as superior, ad-free, privacy-focused alternatives to the official YouTube app on Android.

Comments heavily reference Martin Luther King Jr., debating his non-violence philosophy, quotes, and legacy in contrast to more militant figures like Malcolm X, often invoking him in arguments about protests, civil disobedience, and social change.

Discussions focus on the biases and unfairness of mandatory arbitration clauses in consumer and employment contracts, where companies select arbitrators incentivized to rule in their favor, avoiding court costs like lawyer fees.

The cluster discusses challenges and technologies for real-time multiplayer networking in web-based games, focusing on WebSockets, WebRTC, UDP limitations, peer-to-peer connections, and netcode implementation.

Discussions center on personal experiences with eating hot peppers like Carolina Reapers and habaneros, capsaicin's physiological effects on pain receptors, and varying individual tolerance to spicy food.

The cluster centers on lithium-ion battery performance problems in cold temperatures, including charging difficulties, reduced capacity, degradation risks, and the need for heating systems, particularly in electric vehicles like Teslas and solar-powered devices.

Comments identifying, quoting, or recommending the Tao Te Ching and Taoist philosophy in relation to the parent post's content, often sharing links to translations or related discussions.

Discussions center on the Supreme Court case Citizens United v. FEC, explaining its allowance of corporate and union independent expenditures on electioneering communications as protected free speech, while correcting misconceptions about direct campaign donations and debating its impact on money in politics.

The cluster focuses on the US and UK-backed 1953 coup overthrowing Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mosaddegh to protect oil interests, installing the Shah, and how this contributed to the 1979 Islamic Revolution and current Iran-US tensions.

Comments discuss C#'s async/await feature, its history, implementation, comparisons to other languages like Go, F#, and JS, and debates on its effectiveness for asynchronous programming.

The cluster debates the use of phone numbers versus email addresses or usernames as primary user identifiers in messaging apps and services like Signal and WhatsApp, highlighting issues with phone numbers' lack of disposability, privacy risks, and poor UX for frequent changers, while preferring more flexible alternatives.

This cluster centers on comments invoking, questioning, or debating the application of Occam's razor to evaluate simpler versus more complex explanations or hypotheses in the parent discussion. Users argue over its relevance, limitations as a heuristic, and whether it supports or refutes particular theories.

The cluster centers on debates about banning plastic straws for environmental reasons, complaints about inferior paper and metal alternatives, and suggestions to default to no straws unless requested.

The cluster centers on debates about the definition, value, and impact of charisma in professional success, leadership, hiring, and persuasion, often contrasting it with competence, likability, and other traits.

Users recommend and compare tools like direnv, asdf, mise, and nix for automatically managing tool/language versions and environments per project directory, avoiding global installs and shell bloat.

The cluster centers on repeated invocations of Benjamin Franklin's quote warning that those who trade essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither, often in debates about government surveillance, security measures, and civil liberties.

The cluster focuses on discussions about using Django REST Framework (DRF) for building APIs, its strengths in Django projects, and comparisons to alternatives like FastAPI and django-ninja for simplicity, performance, and integration with SPAs.

The cluster focuses on comparisons between US and UK libel/defamation laws, highlighting how US laws place a higher burden of proof on plaintiffs while UK laws are more plaintiff-friendly and easier to use for silencing critics.