Search Results for: Wired

Inside the making of the social network for programmers—which now has 1.3 million users and more than 2 million source code repositories:

At first, GitHub was a side project. Wanstrath and Preston-Werner would meet on Saturdays to brainstorm, while coding during their free time and working their day jobs. “GitHub wasn’t supposed to be a startup or a company. GitHub was just a tool that we needed,” Wanstrath says. But — inspired by Gmail — they made the project a private beta and opened it up to others. Soon it caught on with the outside world.

By January of 2008, Hyett was on board. And three months after that night in the sports bar, Wanstrath got a message from Geoffrey Grosenbach, the founder of PeepCode, a online learning site that had started using GitHub. “I’m hosting my company’s code here,” Grosenbach said. “I don’t feel comfortable not-paying you guys. Can I just send a check?”

“Lord of the Files: How GitHub Tamed Free Software.” — Robert McMillan, Wired

See also: “Why Software is Eating the World.” — Marc Andreessen, Wall Street Journal, Aug. 20, 2011

Scientists are discovering how chemicals can affect the way memories are formed, paving the way for a future where it could be possible to forget anything we wanted by taking a single pill:

This isn’t Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-style mindwiping. In some ways it’s potentially even more effective and more precise. Because of the compartmentalization of memory in the brain—the storage of different aspects of a memory in different areas—the careful application of PKMzeta synthesis inhibitors and other chemicals that interfere with reconsolidation should allow scientists to selectively delete aspects of a memory. Right now, researchers have to inject their obliviating potions directly into the rodent brain. Future treatments, however, will involve targeted inhibitors, like an advanced version of ZIP, that become active only in particular parts of the cortex and only at the precise time a memory is being recalled. The end result will be a menu of pills capable of erasing different kinds of memories—the scent of a former lover or the awful heartbreak of a failed relationship. These thoughts and feelings can be made to vanish, even as the rest of the memory remains perfectly intact. “Reconsolidation research has shown that we can get very specific about which associations we go after,” LeDoux says. “And that’s a very good thing. Nobody actually wants a totally spotless mind.”

“The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever.” — Jonah Lehrer, Wired

See also: “Remember This.” — Joshua Foer, National Geographic, Nov. 1, 2007

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Featured Longreader: Matt O’Rourke’s curated #longreads page, @fuckyesreading. See his story picks from Wired, The New York Times, BOMB magazine, This Recording, and more.

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s path from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to Washington—where he and the Obama administration have been forced to retreat on many of their alternative energy plans:

On a cold morning in mid-November, Chu was hauled into a committee room on Capitol Hill. The hearing was the spectacle of the week, and the GOP lawmakers kept Chu—the only witness—in his chair for five and a half hours. “You’re a very bright man—much brighter than I am. I know you didn’t leave your brain at the door,” Virginia freshman Morgan Griffith growled. Chu’s hands shook slightly as he handled the edges of his prepared testimony.

By the time we spoke a month later, Chu seemed to have survived the experience, though not without some bitterness; the hearing, he told me, ‘was not the high point of what I wanted to do with my time.’ Still, the whole affair had cast a harsh light on a scientist turned policymaker for whom things had not gone as planned, even before the Solyndra bankruptcy. The president who brought him to Washington three years ago had promised nothing less than an environmental revolution, and Chu was supposed to be at its center, presiding over the most dramatic expansion of the clean energy industry the federal government had ever attempted. Now Chu may have no choice but to preside over its similarly dramatic retreat.

“The Experiment.” — Charles Homans, The New Republic

Previously:  “Why the Clean Tech Boom Went Bust.” — Juliet Eilperin, Wired

A look at which alternative energy initiatives succeeded, which ones failed, and whether there’s hope for a rebound:

In 2005, VC investment in clean tech measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The following year, it ballooned to $1.75 billion, according to the National Venture Capital Association. By 2008, the year after Doerr’s speech, it had leaped to $4.1 billion. And the federal government followed. Through a mix of loans, subsidies, and tax breaks, it directed roughly $44.5 billion into the sector between late 2009 and late 2011. Avarice, altruism, and policy had aligned to fuel a spectacular boom.

Anyone who has heard the name Solyndra knows how this all panned out. Due to a confluence of factors—including fluctuating silicon prices, newly cheap natural gas, the 2008 financial crisis, China’s ascendant solar industry, and certain technological realities—the clean-tech bubble has burst, leaving us with a traditional energy infrastructure still overwhelmingly reliant on fossil fuels.

“Why the Clean Tech Boom Went Bust.” — Juliet Eilperin, Wired

See more #tech #longreads

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Featuring The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Rumpus, Wired, a #fiction pick, plus two guest picks from Jalees Rehman, Associate Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Photo: Yutaka Tsutano/Flickr

Self-driving car technology is advancing rapidly. But how comfortable can we get with the idea?

Beyond bureaucracy, there are deeper legal questions. Ryan Calo, director for privacy and robotics at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, which is studying the legal framework for quasi-autonomous vehicles, notes how active the liability landscape already is when it comes to cars’ safety features. ‘People sue over all kinds of stuff. People sue because some feature that was supposed to protect them didn’t. People sue because their car didn’t have a blind-spot warning when other cars at the same price point did.’ Imagine the complexity we’ll have when cars drive themselves. Who will be responsible for their operation—the car companies or the drivers? What happens, for example, when a highway patrol officer pulls over a self-driving car? Who gets the ticket?

“Let the Robot Drive.” — Tom Vanderbilt, Wired

See also: “Robots Say the Damnedest Things.” — Jon Ronson, GQ, March 8, 2011

Featured Longreader: David Veneski, U.S. media director at Intel. See his #tech story picks from Wired, Forbes, and more on his #longreads page.

Featured Longreader: Writer Jess Weiss. See her story picks from Wired, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and more on her #longreads page.