Top all-time · #337
Tim Harford
Personal blog · timharford.comeconomicsculture
Tim Harford's personal blog at timharford.com covers economics and culture. Since 2008, 157 different Hacker News readers have linked it 268 times, most often “The Problem with Facts”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Often recommended · 17 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link timharford.com mainly for the Cautionary Tales podcast and Tim Harford's books. Commenters call them excellent, well produced and well worth the time.
- Recommended for · 17 comments
- Cautionary Tales podcast called excellent and well produced; a book called enthralling and well worth reading.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The Problem with Facts5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-03-18
- Why big companies squander brilliant ideas5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-10-07
- Behavioural economics helped me kick my smartphone addiction3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-02-13
- Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-02-02
- /2019/11/cautionary-tales-ep-3-lala-land-galileos-warning/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-06-25
- Claude Shannon – Fritterin’ Away Genius [audio]3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-05-14
- What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-11-24
- /2022/11/cautionary-tales-the-inventor-who-almost-ended-the-world/2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-03-22
- How much would I have to pay you to quit Facebook?2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-05-25
- Bowie, Jazz, and the Unplayable Piano2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-01-25
What Hacker News says?
There is a very good set of podcasts[0] by Cautionary Tales about the German V2 rockets in WW2 which tried to use this. It was so hard the Allies allowed them to continue wasting money on it during the war. Well worth a listen to if you're into that. [0] https://timharford.com/2023/07/cautionary-tales-the-v2-trilo...
Comment linking /2023/07/cautionary-tales-the-v2-trilogy/
on “No GPS required: our app can now locate underground trains”Submitted Why brilliant people lose their touch as a story · 432 points
HN discussionTim Harford’s “Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure”¹, an enthralling collection of tales from really diverse projects. I’ll freely admit to only picking it up because I recognised the name from the More or Less² podcast, but it was well worth the read. 1. http://timharford.com/books/adapt/ 2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd
Comment linking /books/adapt/
on “Ask HN: Favorite nonfiction books of 2018?”Submitted The Tyranny of Spreadsheets as a story · 405 points
HN discussionI find your certainty about something you appear to know nothing about mind boggling. Every crash is a deficiency of sorts, so let’s just tell Airbus to build planes that don’t crash! Easy! Let’s just have peace instead of war! Obvious! It is not sufficient to point out “obvious deficiencies”, one must also point out possible improvements. As other posters (with more patience than I can muster) have pointed out, it…
Comment linking /2019/11/cautionary-tales-ep-3-lala-land-galileos-warning/
on “Almost 1 in 3 pilots in Pakistan have fake licenses, aviation minister says”Submitted The case for ending Amazon’s dominance as a story · 320 points
HN discussion> SpaceShipTwo is an inherently risky experimental test craft—with death always waiting on each side of a narrow envelope—and it always will be. Management is willfully ignorant of this. This comment reminded me of another story from a previous aerospace era (blimp cruise liners aka airships), the summary of which is: > A British Lord wanted to build the best airship in the world – and so he had two rival design tea…
Comment linking /2019/11/cautionary-tales-ep-4-the-deadly-airship-race/
on “The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight”Submitted A universal income is not such a silly idea as a story · 308 points
HN discussion> software quality doesn't appear because you have good developers. It's the end result of a process, and that process informs both your software development practices, but also your testing. Your management. Even your sales and servicing. If you only take one thing away from this article, it should be this one! The Therac-25 incident is a horrifying and important part of software history, it's really easy to think…
Comment linking /2025/07/cautionary-tales-captain-kirk-forgot-to-put-the-machine-on-stun-2/
on “The Therac-25 Incident (2021)”Submitted What We Get Wrong About Technology as a story · 297 points
HN discussionThis was adapted from Tim Harharford's podcast Cautionary Tales eps Wrong Tools Cost Lives https://timharford.com/2021/05/cautionary-tales-wrong-tools-... If you have not listened to the series I highly recommend it. His episode "LaLa Land: Galileo’s Warning" is by far one of my favorite pieces of media. In brief it is why redundant tightly coupled fail safes will often lead to cascading failures. https://timharford…
Comment linking /2019/11/cautionary-tales-ep-3-lala-land-galileos-warning/
on “The Tyranny of Spreadsheets”Submitted The billable hour is a trap into which more and more of us are falling as a story · 268 points
HN discussionI knew this was going to happen when I saw some of the office picture/renders a few months back. Highly relevant article: http://timharford.com/2017/02/what_makes_the_perfect_office/ And for a bit of history about cubicles, their first incarnation was actually a developer's dream: https://www.wired.com/2014/04/how-offices-accidentally-becam...
Comment linking /2017/02/what_makes_the_perfect_office/
on “Apple staffers reportedly rebelling against open office plan”Submitted Statistics, Fast and Slow as a story · 265 points
HN discussionA chief tool used by industry to deceive was to cast doubt on independent science and scientists. A popular book on misuse of statistical methods, one that I'd read and liked myself, How to Lie With Statistics , turns out to have been part of that effort, as detailed by Tim Harford in his own book, How To Make The World Add Up https://timharford.com/books/worldaddup/ The ultimate cautionary tale here is Darrell Huff…
Comment linking /books/worldaddup/
on “Leaded fuel reduced IQ of children born before 1990”Submitted Too many people are buying cars using financial products they do not understand as a story · 255 points
HN discussionThe other really impressive part is that they also treated the workers really well during the construction. Cautionary Tales did an episode on this: https://timharford.com/2024/09/cautionary-tales-steel-and-ki... They paid good wages but also kept a high bar on quality and performance. The workers in turn were incentivized to do a good job and gave feedback like ideas on how to improve efficiency, e.g. build an inte…
Comment linking /2024/09/cautionary-tales-steel-and-kindness-the-clash-of-the-skyscrapers/
on “The size of BYD's factory”Submitted Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic as a story · 216 points
HN discussionThis was on HN just a few days ago - http://timharford.com/2016/10/theres-magic-in-mess-why-you-s... The short version is use piles to sort and purge the piles regularly. The "good stuff" will rise to the top and you discard the junk. Bookmarks are just another pile...
Comment linking /2016/10/theres-magic-in-mess-why-you-should-embrace-a-disorderly-desk/
on “Ask HN: How do you organise/integrate all the information in your life?”Submitted What makes the perfect office? as a story · 206 points
HN discussionNo, but the price difference between buying normal and fair trade (as a consumer) is much larger than the price difference between the underlying coffee crop used in each. Tim Harford wrote about this: http://timharford.com/2008/04/business-life-fair-trade-or-fo... In some cases, he says, fair trade is 10X the margin! Fair trade exists to segment the market and collect more consumer surplus (more than it exists to i…
Comment linking /2008/04/business-life-fair-trade-or-foul/
on “The Knife Maker”Submitted Explain it to me like I'm ten as a story · 200 points
HN discussionThanks :-) Cautionary Tales Ep 3 – LaLa Land: Galileo’s Warning [1] has the following in the shownotes: > Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents introduces the idea of complex, tightly-coupled systems and has good accounts both of the Three Mile Island and the Fermi reactor accidents. Just after we’d recorded the episode, I heard the sad news that Charles had died on November 12th. He’ll be missed. [1] https://timharford…
Comment linking /2019/11/cautionary-tales-ep-3-lala-land-galileos-warning/
on “Why the Mauritius oil spill is so serious”Submitted The value of institutional memory as a story · 197 points
HN discussionWow! The history of Monopoly continues to amaze me! :) Here's more in case anyone is interested: https://timharford.com/2021/05/cautionary-tales-do-not-pass-...
Comment linking /2021/05/cautionary-tales-do-not-pass-go/
on “I interviewed Brian J. Fox, the creator of Bash”Submitted The curious economics of being ripped off on holiday as a story · 190 points
HN discussionVery close to another concept called, "masterly inactivity," that appears in a number of disciplines. https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Masterly+in... https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/may/10/busy-doing-... and: https://timharford.com/2021/04/cautionary-tales-masterly-ina... (podcast from FT columnust)
Comment linking /2021/04/cautionary-tales-masterly-inactivity/
on “Do nothing (2020)”Submitted Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush as a story · 189 points
HN discussionPut into much better words than I managed: https://timharford.com/2022/10/what-we-keep-getting-wrong-ab...
Comment linking /2022/10/what-we-keep-getting-wrong-about-inflation/
on “Inflation is at a 40 year high. What can history teach us?”Submitted Why we still love board games as a story · 160 points
HN discussion
