Paul Graham has a new article up called Stuff:

I first realized the worthlessness of stuff when I lived in Italy for a year. All I took with me was one large backpack of stuff. The rest of my stuff I left in my landlady’s attic back in the US. And you know what? All I missed were some of the books. By the end of the year I couldn’t even remember what else I had stored in that attic.

And yet when I got back I didn’t discard so much as a box of it. Throw away a perfectly good rotary telephone? I might need that one day.

On a related note, Paul’s site now has comments, which is a first. They’re powered by Disqus, which is a Y Combinator funded site. The comments look nice, and it supports threading and some advanced functionality like forums.