Yiren Lu, a recent Harvard grad who now studies computer science at Columbia, takes a step back from the startup world to wonder what it means for our tech infrastructure when all the bright young things want to make apps but aren’t skilled in networks and hardware — the stuff that makes the Internet go. […]
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Posted inEditor's Pick
The Creeping Tech Angst in Silicon Valley: Our College Pick
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick.
Posted inEditor's Pick
How the Other Half Works: An Adventure in the Low Status of Software Engineers
Software engineers are paid well, but they still don’t seem to move into leadership roles. Church investigates what happened: “There was a time, perhaps 20 years gone by now, when the Valley was different. Engineers ran the show. Technologists helped each other. Programmers worked in R&D environments with high levels of autonomy and encouragement. To […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Netscape, 20 Years Later
Chris Wilson: I still remember the very first time I got HTML content pulled over the network through Libwww and I was displaying it on my debugging monitor in my office at NCSA with Jon Mittelhauser sitting over my shoulder looking at it, and thinking that was amazing. I knew that it was going to […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
How Apple’s Transcendent Chihuahua Killed the Revolution
Few are excited about the Apple Watch—its burdens are too easily imagined. And yet we treat it as an inevitability. How did this happen?
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Founder of Flickr and Slack on the Psychological Torture of Selling Too Early
Stewart readily admits he sold Flickr too early. “If we had waited six months we would have made much more money. If we had waited a year we would have made 10 times more money,” he says. He regrets it now. But at the time, after the dotcom crash, the Nasdaq plummet, and September 11, […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * * 1. Why Poor Schools Can’t Win at Standardized Testing Meredith Broussard | The Atlantic | July 21, 2014 | 12 minutes (3,091 words) […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Trust Us: The Ethics of Our Automated Future
“You should presume that someday, we will be able to make machines that can reason, think and do things better than we can,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in a conversation with Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla. To someone as smart as Brin, that comment is as normal as sipping on his super-green juice, but […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
High Tech
On the science and tech companies hoping to cash in on cannabis, which has been legalized for recreational use in two states and decriminalized in some form in many others: For the science and technology set, it’s a classic opportunity to disrupt an industry historically run by hippies and gangsters. And the entire tech-industrial complex […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
‘Let’s, Like, Demolish Laundry.’
A look at the highly competitive world of laundry startups: In early October, Washio opened up shop in San Francisco. Not surprisingly, the area around Silicon Valley was already awash in laundry disrupters. In addition to Prim, there was Laundry Locker, along with three other locker-technology-enabled businesses: Sudzee, Drop Locker, and Bizzie Box. There was […]
