Connections

What Hacker News says

1. ahazred8taJul 2026
   James Burke's book version of 'Connections' https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55024.Connections

   Also Douglas Coupland's 'Microserfs', described as "Here's a guy who seems to have spent a week with engineers and effortlessly absorbed everything that is important about engineering culture, everything that matters about working at a big company, and everything that matters about working at a startup." https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2748.Microserfs

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2. dredmorbiusOct 2025
   James Burke's Connections (companion to his 1978 television series of the same name) does this in fair part, though it tracks a number of distinct (and somewhat idiosyncratic) paths through time.

   <https://openlibrary.org/search?isbn=9780333248270>

   There's Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China though that's not exactly a coffee-table book. It's staggering in its own way, however:

   <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_Ch...>

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3. WalterBrightDec 2024
   > More likely it was because the systems didn't exist that incentivized figuring out solutions to the problems which technology solves.

   That is partially true. There is no incentive, for example, for slaves to make any improvements. I cannot think of any technology developed by slaves. That meant the few people in power were not enough to think of much new stuff.

   You could say free markets were the greatest invention, because it incentivized everyone to be a creator.

   The evolution of guns is an interesting topic. So is the evolution of sailing ships. The latter occurred over thousands of years. Very very slow!

   You might want to investigate James Burke's "Connections" book and series. It's an entertaining overview of the history of invention.

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4. dredmorbiusAug 2024
   Availability (or not) of insurance coverage is surprisingly effective in enabling or disabling various commercial ventures.

   The penny dropped for me whilst reading James Burke's Connections on the exceedingly-delayed introduction of the lateen-rigged sail to Europe, largely on the basis that the syndicates which underwrote (and insured) shipping voyages wouldn't provide financing and coverage to ships so rigged.

   Far more recently we have notions of redlining for both mortgage lending and insurance coverage (title, mortgage, property, casualty) in inner-city housing and retail markets. Co-inventor of packet-based switching writes of his parents' experience with this in Philadelphia:

   "On the Future Computer Era: Modification of the American Character and the Role of the Engineer, or, A Little Caution in the Haste to Number" (1968)

   <https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3780.html> (footnote, p. 6).

   Similarly, government insurance or guarantees (Medicare, SSI, flood insurance, nuclear power plants) has made high-risk prospects possible, or enabled effective services and markets, where laissez-faire approaches would break down.

   I propose that similar approaches to issues such as privacy violation might be worth investigating. E.g., voiding any insurance policy over damages caused through the harmful use or unintended disclosure of private information. Much of the current surveillance-capitalism sector would instantly become toxic. The principle current barriers to this are that states themselves benefit through such surveillance, and of course the current industry is highly effective at lobbying for its continuance.

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5. max_Jan 2024
   Lewis Mumford's Books;

   - Technics & Civilization

   - The Culture of Cities

   - The Story of Utopias

   Lewis Mumford talks about technology, but from an anthropological pint of view.

   Another book I would recommend is The Nature of Technology by Brian Arthur

   The other I would recommend is James Burk's Connections he's has some books but I but the documentary is highly recommended.

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6. hotpotamusJun 2023
   Well, this isn't really at all what the article is about - I think it's more a criticism of "The End of History" type thinking. But the study of history is an interesting subject too and I've got some recommendations.

   Tim Urban (whose recent work I'm not especially enamored of) wrote about this a bit and came up with an interesting visual[0]. Not so much a map about events, but placing famous figures side-by-side so you see whose lives overlapped in time which is not always intuitive.

   It also sounds like you really need to watch or read "Connections" by James Burke.

   > Connections explores an "Alternative View of Change" (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress. Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation.

   [0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/01/horizontal-history.html

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