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Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead
Why the poorest people in the world spend fortunes burying their dead
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 613 posts.
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After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)
Soon after I launched this blog in February 2005, I signed up for Google AdSense. My goal was to make a little money and learn about the industry from the inside. In particular, if I was going to cover the...
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Locating the source of a mysterious beep
Our house has a box room, full of boxes that we still haven’t unpacked from our last move. A couple of weeks ago something in that room started intermittently beeping. …
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Is "colorectal cancer" rising in "young people"?
(Yes, but.)
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Don't use your phone while you poop
Your brain needs to offload just as badly as your butt does. I know it sounds boring to sit in there, alone, naked from the waist down, staring at the wal...
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I'd not buy a LG monitor
There is a video by Gamers Nexus making the rounds that makes me really angry. It reports about LG's latest practise to add blatant spyware to a monitor. Or to be precise to the *software* application associated with that monitor. The icing is that Windows apparently automatically downloads this software by default…
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My Friend Bob Cringely
Bob Cringely died on Oct 3, 2026
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Dear people who work at the airport
I would like you to know that we passengers are trying our best. To you, this place makes sense -- you come here every day. You speak the lingo. You kno...
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Bus travel from Lima to Rio de Janeiro
In 2025, I traveled by bus in South America, starting in Lima, Peru and ending in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Here are some details for anyone interested in doing the same.
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You don't have to
"In the year 5555, your arms are hangin' limp at your sides, your legs got nothing to do, some machine doin' that for you." Zager and Evans sang these words in 1969. Now, thirty-five centuries ahead of schedule, it's never been easier to tell the world "I didn't care about this and I don't care about you."
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Greg Brockman interview [video]
The AI race, the future of AGI, and the inside story of OpenAI. Greg Brockman is the co-founder and President of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and GPT-5. He was the first engineer at Stripe before leaving in 2015 to help start OpenAI. In this rare conversation, Greg goes inside the moments that built, and nearly …
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Take better notes, by hand
Researching a topic is hard, because not only are you trying to puzzle together the causes and effects of a given problem or historical series of events, you're also looking out carefully for leads and new threads to pull. Falling down rabbit holes is common—and encouraged—but eventually you need to pull yourself back…
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Here be monsters: What do you still need to know when agents do the work?
AI agents write code faster than anyone can read it. What engineers still need: fundamentals, breadth, and the willingness to dive in when it breaks.
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If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?
Yesterday, I received this email as a response to You Can't Vibe Code Love. It's such a remarkable and powerful statement that I asked permission to share it here, in its entirety, with personal information redacted: Hey Jeff, Hope you and your family are doing well. Just jogging
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Pre-2022 Books
I noticed that I seem to, subconsciously, gravitate towards books published on or before 2022, and somewhat discount books published after, especially from authors I haven’t heard of.
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My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood
In Which I go into Great Detail About Digitizing Video8 and Learn My Grandmama Lived With a Prostitute
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Are two heads better than one?
A look at the surprising probabilities behind a simple coin flipping game
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Introduction to Obsidian
An introduction to Obsidian. Why you should use it, how to keep it simple, and how you can use it.
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The Harness Is the Thing
Models are commodifying. The harness - skills, extensions, a scriptable app - is where the work and the leverage now live.
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Networking and the Internet, from First Principles
How electricity, light, and radio move data across independently operated networks.
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Punk, or why I don't stream anymore
If you’re the sun, I’m a black hole – The Stephen Hawking, Say Anything
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Why are we even doing all this?
[This is a guest post by Rikab Gambhir. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] First, they came for the artists, and I did not speak out…
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My Favourite Laptop
I’m not a big owner of things, but the best laptop I’ve ever owned is a roughed-up 2015 Thinkpad X250.
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There's no point at which turning your brain off will work
In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs 1 . They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked 2 . This generally didn't work in early 2025 and the result was often quite silly.
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A love letter to flashcards
A personal reflection on how spaced repetition and hand crafted flashcards helps me to keep understanding alive
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Maybe comments should explain 'what' (2017)
People say “Comments should explain why, not what.” I feel like starting a flame war today so I’m going to argue that comments should explain ‘what’ too. Please don’t use this as justification to write bad code, okay? Okay. First of all, why shouldn’t comments explain ‘what’? If you need comments to explain what’s…