All Topics

This cluster focuses on issues with online restaurant reservation platforms like OpenTable and Resy, including high costs to restaurants, booking difficulties, no-shows, scalping practices, and proposed innovations or alternatives.

Commenters frequently compare the discussed news aggregation or paywall-bypassing service to Apple News or Apple News+, highlighting its bundled access to paywalled publications and suggesting it as an existing alternative.

This cluster consists of comments recommending, referencing, and discussing 'Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality' (HPMOR), a rationalist fanfiction rewrite of the Harry Potter series.

Commenters share personal anecdotes about meeting and marrying their partners through online dating sites and apps like OKCupid, Facebook, ICQ, and Myspace, often contrasting with traditional meeting methods.

The cluster discusses NIST and FIPS 140 standards for cryptographic modules, debates their trustworthiness due to perceived NSA influence, and their role in government compliance and procurement.

The cluster discusses how messaging apps like Signal handle notifications and offline message delivery on mobile devices using push services such as Google FCM/GCM and Apple Push instead of persistent connections to conserve battery and manage connectivity issues.

Users complain about spoilers in Hacker News posts and comments, repeatedly requesting spoiler alerts, warnings, or tags to avoid ruining surprises in movies, books, games, and stories.

Discussions center on the uncanny valley phenomenon in AI-generated videos, animations, and realistic human renderings, where near-photorealistic depictions evoke unease due to subtle imperfections. Commenters frequently reference this concept to explain why demos appear creepy or off-putting.

The cluster centers on debates about whether Antifa is a formal organization, a loose anti-fascist movement, or a myth propagated by media, frequently discussing its association with violence, political ideology, and comparisons to fascism.

Comments debate whether graffiti qualifies as art or vandalism, particularly regarding its use on public property, signage fixes, and distinctions between creative expression and defacement.

The cluster discusses volatility in DRAM and NAND memory chip prices, including recent hikes and crashes, supply shortages, manufacturer strategies like production cuts or shifts to high-margin products, and historical price-fixing allegations.

The cluster debates the effectiveness of SAT preparation courses and tutoring, citing studies showing minimal average score gains alongside personal anecdotes of improvements from practice tests, techniques, and free resources like Khan Academy. Discussions highlight concerns over socioeconomic advantages for wealthy students able to afford expensive prep.

The cluster discusses Googlebot's ability to crawl, render, and index JavaScript-heavy websites and SPAs for SEO purposes, including its limitations, execution reliability, and solutions like prerendering or server-side rendering.

The cluster discusses the origins of the US War on Drugs, focusing on claims that Nixon's administration used it to criminalize and disrupt black communities and anti-war hippies, primarily citing John Ehrlichman's quote.

The cluster centers on debates about teachers' unions, particularly in the US, with discussions criticizing their power, protection of underperforming teachers, and negative impact on education quality, alongside some defenses highlighting their role in improving teacher conditions and outcomes.

The cluster focuses on the high costs and complex licensing of commercial fonts, why companies develop custom typefaces to avoid recurring fees, and debates over pricing, value, and open-source alternatives.

Cluster discusses studies, experiments, and personal anecdotes where wine experts and amateurs fail to distinguish red from white wines, cheap from expensive ones, or provide consistent ratings in blind taste tests, questioning connoisseur expertise.

This cluster discusses the copyright status of fonts and typefaces, licensing terms for redistribution (especially Google Fonts and web formats), and legal distinctions between font designs, files, and software under US and international law.

This cluster consists of comments referencing the 1995 film 'Hackers' in response to a hacking-related post, often sharing scenes, praising its vibe, and comparing it to other Hollywood hacking movies like Sneakers, WarGames, and Swordfish.

Commenters frequently compare the article's technology to Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM), highlighting its role in Windows APIs, cross-language interoperability, and historical significance.

The cluster centers on discussions of panic buying, hoarding, and supply shortages of toilet paper, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, with jokes, historical references, and observations on consumer behavior.

This cluster debates perceived biases in family courts favoring women in child custody, alimony, and asset division during divorces, often from a men's rights perspective, with many arguing these risks deter men from marriage.

The cluster debates the pros and cons of group brainstorming versus individual ideation, citing issues like groupthink, production blocking, and evidence favoring solo idea generation followed by group discussion.

Comments debate the purpose of funerals (for the living or dead), the obligation to attend despite discomfort, and etiquette around paying respects versus skipping them.

Comments repeatedly quoting and invoking Hacker News guidelines urging users to respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of others' statements and assume good faith to avoid strawman arguments.

This cluster focuses on discussions and debates about Donald Trump's presidential approval ratings, with commenters citing polls from FiveThirtyEight, Gallup, Economist, and others to argue whether they are low, high, trending down, or comparable to past presidents.

Discussions focus on government grants like SBIR from agencies such as NSF, NIH, and DOJ as funding options for startups, including application processes, success rates, and comparisons to VC funding.

Comments primarily recommend Mosh as a superior alternative to SSH for remote terminal access over high-latency, unreliable, or roaming connections, often comparing it favorably to tmux and screen.

Discussions center on the classic FizzBuzz programming problem, including various code implementations, common errors, optimizations, and humorous references like Enterprise FizzBuzz edition.

The cluster centers on discussions about prion diseases like CJD, CWD, and mad cow disease, focusing on their transmission risks, extreme stability, resistance to destruction methods like cooking or autoclaving, and potential human health implications.

The cluster discusses React's BSD+Patents license, debating whether the patent grant can be revoked if users sue Facebook for patent infringement and clarifying distinctions from the copyright license.

Discussions revolve around using shell command-line tools like sort, uniq, cut, awk, and grep in pipelines for tasks such as deduplication, sorting, and frequency counting of words or lines, often comparing them to scripts in languages like Perl or Python.

The cluster focuses on Hypothes.is and similar tools for annotating web pages, PDFs, and other content, including discussions on W3C Web Annotations standard, integration features, editing capabilities, and related projects like Smort.io and promnesia.

The cluster discusses hypotheses like the quantum mind theory, particularly Roger Penrose's ideas, debating whether quantum effects such as entanglement and superposition are necessary for consciousness or if it emerges from classical brain processes.

The cluster centers on debates over whether Edward Snowden's leaks constitute treason under US constitutional law, distinguishing it from espionage and questioning legal definitions and citizenship requirements.

This cluster discusses comparisons between Wikipedia and traditional encyclopedias like Encarta and Britannica, with nostalgia for the latter's immersive quality, writing style, and consistency contrasted against Wikipedia's vastness, timeliness, and accessibility.

The cluster focuses on criticisms of Grok AI, including its perceived censorship, alignment tweaks to match Elon Musk's views, system prompt changes, and controversial behaviors like searching for Musk's opinions. Debates also cover its capabilities, comparisons to other AIs, and attributions to Musk or xAI.

Discussions center on the strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of Django's ORM, including data modeling, relationships, migrations, and comparisons to alternatives like SQLAlchemy.

The cluster discusses US military veterans' post-service experiences, focusing on VA healthcare quality, benefits adequacy, eligibility debates, and criticisms of government support compared to sacrifices made.

Comments warn against trusting or buying Lenovo laptops due to their history of preinstalling malware, spyware like Superfish, rootkits, and adware that persist even after OS reinstalls.

The cluster debates whether Reddit should compensate its volunteer moderators for their unpaid labor, which is crucial to moderating communities, versus arguments that mods gain power or enjoyment and Reddit couldn't afford to pay them.

Discussions focus on the current lack of native garbage collection support in WebAssembly, proposals and progress toward WasmGC, and implications for compiling GC-based languages to WASM.

This cluster centers on comparisons between Flow and TypeScript as static typing tools for JavaScript, debating their features, maintenance, adoption, editor integration, and which is preferable for projects.

Cluster focuses on comparisons between manga and Western comics/graphic novels, emphasizing manga's cultural depth, accessibility, market success in Asia, and potential with AI generation.

The cluster focuses on Calibre, an open-source ebook management tool, with discussions about its features like library organization, format conversion, DRM removal, server modes, UI criticisms, and alternatives such as calibre-web.

The cluster discusses how religious individuals and groups tend to have higher birth rates than non-religious people, debating causes like culture, genetics, retention rates, and implications for future demographics and the persistence of religion.

The cluster focuses on strategies for managing finances in relationships, debating joint versus separate bank accounts for couples, and the benefits of multiple accounts for budgeting, security, and avoiding spending friction.

Discussions center on user experiences with Kaiser Permanente health insurance, praising its integrated insurer-provider model, efficiency, and competitive rates while criticizing restrictions and comparing it to providers like UnitedHealthcare.

Discussions focus on the Pareto principle (80/20 rule) applied to project timelines, especially in software development, where the first 80-90% of work takes a proportional amount of time but the final 10-20% consumes the remaining majority of effort. Variations like the ninety-ninety rule are commonly referenced.

Comments focus on Gmail's groundbreaking 2004 debut, emphasizing its 1GB storage, invite-only exclusivity, long beta phase, and superiority over rivals like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail.

The cluster centers on the controversy of green bubbles in iMessage for SMS/MMS from Android users versus blue iMessage bubbles, discussing social stigma (especially among teens signaling low status), technical limitations like poor group chat functionality and media quality, and Apple's role in ecosystem lock-in.

The cluster focuses on comparisons between SpaceX and Blue Origin, emphasizing Blue Origin's slower progress and lack of orbital achievements despite being founded earlier than SpaceX.

The cluster discusses the distinction between 'lifestyle businesses'—sustainable, small-scale ventures providing a good living without hyper-growth—and 'startups' aimed at massive scaling and VC-backed exits, often referencing Paul Graham's growth essay and debating VC attitudes, bootstrapping, and entrepreneurial preferences.

The cluster discusses the appropriate use of the 'Doctor' or 'Dr.' title, debating distinctions between PhD holders, medical doctors (MDs), cultural norms, etiquette, and honorary degrees.

This cluster discusses the CIA's Project MKUltra, a historical program involving illegal mind control experiments, LSD testing, and unethical human experimentation, with users sharing Wikipedia links, senate reports, and references to its reality versus conspiracy theories.

The cluster focuses on the Eastern District of Texas (EDTX) and its reputation as a pro-plaintiff venue for patent trolls, known as the 'rocket docket' due to fast case handling, favorable judges, and economic incentives, with discussions on Supreme Court rulings limiting forum shopping.

Comments discuss hidden yellow tracking dots and watermarks embedded by color laser printers on printed pages to encode serial numbers for counterfeiting detection and traceability, including privacy concerns and related firmware features.

The cluster focuses on complaints and observations that Google Search deindexes, downranks, or makes older web content harder to find, prioritizing fresh results and potentially erasing web history.

This cluster centers on John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment, debating whether simulating intelligent behavior, such as responding in Chinese, constitutes true understanding or consciousness in AI systems.

The cluster discusses the effectiveness of various methods for constituents to contact politicians, such as emails, phone calls, and physical letters, emphasizing that form emails are often dismissed while handwritten letters and calls have more impact.

Comments focus on vacuum tubes, including nostalgic references, jokes about reverting to them amid modern tech limitations, historical context, links to related articles, and discussions of their use in audio amplifiers, EMP resistance, and potential revival via vacuum transistors.

Commenters repeatedly label the discussed product, technology, or project as vaporware, expressing doubt about its actual development or release despite hype. Discussions highlight cynicism towards announcements without tangible progress.

This cluster discusses the distinction between wisdom and intelligence or smarts, often defining wisdom as the practical application of knowledge and arguing it is superior to mere intellect.

The cluster revolves around debates over whether 'crypto' refers to cryptography or cryptocurrencies, with many users expressing frustration at the term's appropriation by cryptocurrency contexts causing confusion.

Debate on whether smartphones and tablets qualify as general-purpose computing devices unlike video game consoles, which are argued to be similarly capable hardware restricted by manufacturers.

The cluster centers on debates about using blockchain for supply chain tracking and transparency, with heavy skepticism on trusting data inputs from untrusted parties and the oracle problem despite immutability benefits.

Discussions center on Matplotlib as a Python plotting library, including comparisons to alternatives like Plotly, Bokeh, and Seaborn, criticisms of its API and defaults, and recommendations for better options.

The cluster discusses the historical misconception that ancient or medieval people widely believed the Earth was flat, with commenters citing evidence like Eratosthenes' measurements and Asimov's 'Relativity of Wrong' to affirm early knowledge of Earth's sphericity.

Cluster focuses on Hacker News users treating bans, flaggings, or moderation as a 'badge of honor,' with calls for medals, knighthoods, or black bar memorials to recognize the 'honored' individuals.

Discussions debate the relative speeds of cash versus card payments (especially chip-enabled cards) at retail checkouts, emphasizing US delays from insertion, PIN/signature processes, and extra prompts, contrasted with faster cash or contactless options elsewhere.

Comments center on Atul Gawande's 'The Checklist Manifesto', debating the effectiveness, implementation, and best practices of checklists in medicine, aviation, software, and other complex fields to reduce errors.

Discussions center on Visual Studio Code's RAM consumption and performance, with users debating if it's bloated or efficient compared to IDEs like WebStorm, IntelliJ, and Visual Studio, sharing personal experiences on various hardware.

Users debate the quality, performance, value, and design of Dyson appliances including vacuums, hair dryers, hand dryers, fans, and air purifiers, sharing positive experiences with suction power alongside criticisms of high prices, noise, and durability.

The cluster revolves around discussions debating the differences between 'expat' and 'immigrant', including semantic distinctions, temporary vs permanent moves, and biases in terminology based on nationality or perspective.

Discussions center on Redis's shift to source-available licensing for modules while keeping the core BSD-licensed, community reactions to perceived bait-and-switches, impacts on cloud providers like AWS, and debates over open source sustainability.

The cluster centers on discussions about the meaning, pejorative usage, and controversy surrounding the acronym 'SJW' (Social Justice Warrior), including explanations, defenses, criticisms, and calls to avoid it.

Comments humorously claim that the article's subject will trigger a zombie apocalypse, repeatedly using meme phrases like 'This is how you get zombies' or 'Do you want zombies?'. This cluster revolves around exaggerated, pop-culture zombie references in response to a likely scary science or health-related topic such as prion diseases.

Users complain about and share shortcuts for backspace and delete key behaviors in text inputs, especially on Macs with Fn+Backspace for forward delete and preferences for word-by-word deletion.

The cluster focuses on discussions about the historical Puritan settlers' lasting influence on US society, manifesting in modern puritanical attitudes, prudishness, and cultural differences from Europe.

The cluster focuses on the theoretical equivalence between regular expressions and finite state machines like DFAs and NFAs, contrasted with practical regex engines that support non-regular features such as backreferences and backtracking.

The cluster focuses on discussions about app usage, installation, and analytics statistics for the iOS App Store, including whether Apple collects such data, third-party services like SensorTower providing it, and comparisons to Android.

Discussions center on the practicality and use of ferries, boats, and cruise ships for transportation in trip routing and remote access, often comparing them to flying, driving, or other modes.

Comments discuss the composition, members, affiliations, and influences in steering committees, boards, and governance bodies of open source projects, standards organizations like W3C and GCC, and related tech groups.

Commenters repeatedly ask who the pronoun 'we' (or 'us') refers to in the original post or statements, challenging vague or presumptuous group inclusions across political, social, and technical contexts.

The cluster discusses why many restaurants have poor, outdated, or no websites, often relying on social media like Facebook, Yelp, and Google instead, and explores ideas for easy website creation or auto-generation to improve their online presence.

This cluster centers on whether pi's decimal expansion contains every possible finite sequence of digits, tied to the unproven conjecture that pi is a normal number, including discussions on compression, randomness, and related constants.

The cluster focuses on discussions of various spatial indexing algorithms and data structures such as R-trees, quadtrees, geohashes, H3, S2, and Hilbert curves for efficient geospatial queries and point lookups.

Cluster focuses on user experiences and preferences for handling footnotes, endnotes, side notes, and personal annotations while reading books and essays, including techniques like marginalia, multiple tabs, and digital tools.

Discussions critique and suggest improvements to the styling, hierarchy, spacing, capitalization, and semantic usage of headings like H1 and H2 in web pages, documents, and markup such as HTML or Markdown.

Comments identify and discuss the Streisand Effect, where attempts to suppress or censor information inadvertently increase its visibility and publicity in the context of the story.

Discussions center on apps like Merlin Bird ID and BirdNET for identifying birds by sound, sight, or photos, including user experiences, comparisons, APIs, and related citizen science tools.

The cluster centers on critiques of Malcolm Gladwell's work, highlighting his storytelling style, cherry-picking of facts, and presentation of entertaining anecdotes as science rather than rigorous analysis, with some defending him as enjoyable reading.

Comments discuss Django's release cycles, LTS support, upgrade challenges between versions like 1.4 to 1.8, and the slow transition to full Python 3 compatibility.

Discussions explore the universal use of 'mama' and 'papa' (or similar) for mother and father across languages, explained by babies' easy pronunciation of these sounds, with examples from various cultures and debates on kinship terms.

Discussions focus on David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), his creation of Ruby on Rails, his outspoken personality, and controversies over his political opinions prompting debates in the Rails community about disassociating from him.

Comments debate the dangers and historical failures of appeasement strategies, drawing parallels to WWII events like Chamberlain's policies and the Munich Agreement in the context of modern geopolitical aggression.

The cluster centers on debates about the correct meaning of 'begging the question' as a logical fallacy, versus its widespread misuse to mean 'raising the question', including praises for proper usage, corrections, and discussions on language evolution.

The cluster focuses on the challenges, biases, and importance of publishing negative or null results in scientific research to prevent repetition of failed experiments and improve scientific progress.

The cluster centers on Richard Dawkins' concept of memes as self-replicating cultural units that evolve like genes, often likened to mind viruses or parasites, with discussions on memetic evolution, propagation independent of host benefit, and examples like religions.

This cluster centers on the history of cracking the German Enigma machine during WWII, including Polish cryptographers' initial breakthroughs, Bletchley Park's role, Alan Turing's contributions, and related machines like the Bombe.