Five Weekend Longreads From Hacker News

There is no need to explain Hacker News - for the years of its existence, it has become synonymous with the Web itself. Hacker News is a place where Internet legends are born or torn to pieces. Its audience is notoriously critical - many try to win its approval, but only a few succeed to the top of its first page.

And yet, Hacker News is not a place that one would expect to go to for lengthy reading. We wanted to put that to the test, so we grabbed the first page of results (i.e., the ones most upvoted by the HN crowd in the past 24 hours) and let each website through our beloved AI assistant. The five results below are what it picked for your weekend reading enjoyment.

Happy reading!

How to Travel

On the cheap, like a local, and without a lot of luggage.

Chris Arnade walks the worldChris Arnade

‘Status and Culture’ Review: Making the Cut

Why do fashions—hairstyles, clothes, music and language—come and go? For one writer, it’s all about moving up.

The Wall Street JournalVirginia Postrel

Age of Invention: Why wasn’t the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part I

Things I thought I knew, and on which I agreed with a lot of other historians, turned out to be ever more questionable. Perhaps even wrong. And so I had to delve ever deeper to get to the truth, and to reformulate what I knew.

Age of Invention, by Anton HowesAnton Howes

Age of Invention: Why wasn’t the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part II

As I noted in Part I, the general idea of using heat and steam for mechanical work had a long and continuous history back to ancient times. But when we talk of the breakthrough “steam engine” in the eighteenth-century sense, we don’t mean a machine that exploits steam’s expansive, or pushing force.…

Age of Invention, by Anton HowesAnton Howes

Age of Invention: Why wasn’t the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part III

You’re reading Age of Invention, my newsletter on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation. This edition went out to over 12,200 subscribers. If you’ve just been forwarded this, you can sign up here: Previously, on

Age of Invention, by Anton HowesAnton Howes

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