This article should have been titled “What I Read Last Week”—today is a bank holiday in Ireland so I took my sweet time.

  • Aspen Interactive Movie Map (1981)

    A true gem! The grandmother of Google Street View conceived and prototyped in 1981.

  • There is no such thing as a static website

    So, when we look at where the distinction between static and dynamic came from, it’s pretty clear that one of the main reasons it’s drawn where it is comes from looking at the operational complexity of running the different types of sites, and the actual technical line we draw — returning the same HTML/CSS/etc == static, returning different content depending on the request == dynamic — is essentially arbitrary. There’s computation and state involved in things on both sides of that line, the only difference is how much!

  • 1,000 True Fans (2008)

    This new ability for the creator to retain the full price is revolutionary, but a second technological innovation amplifies that power further. A fundamental virtue of a peer-to-peer network (like the web) is that the most obscure node is only one click away from the most popular node. In other words the most obscure under-selling book, song, or idea, is only one click away from the best selling book, song or idea. […]

  • Not even wrong: predicting tech

    This means that there is no predictive value in saying “that doesn’t work” or “that looks like a toy” - and that there is also no predictive value in saying “people always say that”. As Pauli put it, statements like this are “not even wrong” - they give no insight into what will happen. You have to go one level further. You have to ask “do you have a theory for why this will get better, or why it won’t, and for why people will change their behaviour, or for why they won’t”?

  • Rallies to the Bottom

    If there’s one chart that illustrates the difficulty of investing in stocks, this is it. As you can see, even as the U.S. stock market was collapsing, there were multiple periods where it rallied over 20% before continuing to fall further. Just imagine how maddening this must have been for everyone, even the most seasoned investors.

  • Dr. Michael J. Burry at UCLA Economics Commencement (2012)

I am also taking a little break from Hacker News. I still find it incredibly interesting, and it remains to be my favourite spot on the Web, however the volume of the daily content hitting the frontpage alone is more than I can keep up with every day.