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The two tabs have following tooltips
They seem to display different questions with some common ground.
What is the exact difference between hot and active ?
I think Hot is taking into account a different measurement of the "velocity" of that question such as number of views, number of votes, and number of answers within a given time frame. Active questions are questions that have immediate activity on them (i.e. a question with a new answer is immediately bumped up).
Active is based on creation / last modified time of any answer or the question itself. So the recently changed questions or new ones are in the active list.
Hot seems to be a mix of how recent the question and how busy it is. (votes, answers, comments etc)
hot = most activity
active = most recent activity
