On Tuesday, the SF Board of Supervisors moved to study whether a Mission laundromat is a historic resource, delaying 75 units of housing by 5 months. We wanted to look back at famous laundromats of history.

Garden of Eden, 6000 BC

Eating the forbidden fruit without any napkins makes quite a mess. Adam and Eve stop by the Garden of Eden Wash & Fold on their way to getting expelled from the Garden.

Mesopotamia, 1754 BC

After someone takes his clothes out of the dryer and drops them on the ground, the sixth Babylonian King, Hammurabi, has had enough. He writes a set of laws on a stone stele. The resulting Code of Hammurabi is one of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world.

Wittenberg, Germany, 1517

Martin Luther posts his famous 95 Theses on the door of All Saints Church. The theses include theologically thorny questions such as "How come 60 minutes isn't ever enough time to get my clothes dry" and "Could God make a shirt so stained that even He couldn't get it clean?" Luther's questions kickstarted the Reformation, a schism that permanently divided the Catholic Church and altered Europe forever.

Easter Island, 1600

Two islanders begin arguing after one claims the other stole a pair of stonewashed jeans out of the washer at the Rapa Nui Super Wash. The ensuing fight engulfs the island. Everyone dies. The island lies empty for centuries.

Appomattox, 1865

It turns out your clothes get quite dirty during a scorched earth campaign. After accepting Lee's surrender, General Ulysses S. Grant headed to the Appomattox Soap 'n' Suds to get some clean duds.

Germany, 1867

The Trier Launderland swallows Karl Marx's quarters for the fourth straight visit. Marx publishes Das Kapital, a groundbreaking work documenting the conflict between the ruling class, which owns the means of production, and the proletariat.

Sarajevo, 1914

Gonzalo Princip doesn't realize you can't mix colors with whites and stains all his clothes. He's so mad he storms out of the Stari Grad Coin Laundry and assassinates Archduke Franz Ferdinand, starting World War I and throwing the world into turmoil.

Nadikdik Atoll, Marshall Islands

45 years after vanishing over the Pacific Ocean during her around-the-world excursion, Amelia Earhart is discovered helping the locals get clean clothes at The Clothes Spin, a punny store-name on this island of 50,000 residents.

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The open source community was shocked to learn Tuesday that millions of lines of source code had gone missing from Github.com, a popular online version control website.

Github stores source code in "reposotories", which are big chunks of code that can be edited by Github members. Most version control websites will keep a small portion of the source code online (collectively known as the "hot repos") and store the rest of the repos offline, to prevent a mass download of all of the source code. Instead of using hot repos and cold repos, Github stored all of the source code online, which allowed the attackers to download all of it.

It's unclear how long the source code has been missing. Slides from a leaked Keynote deck indicated that Github's main strategy was to "just kinda ask people to push their code back up to the site without noticing anything". On Twitter, some people attributed the theft to an honest mistake (Github left the popular port 22 open for the attackers), while others speculated that the founders absconded with the code after building up trust in Github.

Github is based on a "distributed version control" system, designed so that many different copies of the source code can live on different computers. But because everyone stores their source code in Github, it became very easy for the attackers to download all of the source code from one place.

"My code could be running on anyone's computer right now, anywhere in the world," said open source developer Andrew Benton. "Frankly, that is terrifying." Other members of the community laughed at anyone who thought their source code was secure when hosted with a version control system that runs in the cloud.

Github could not be reached for comment, but they did release a special "Hackedocat" to commemorate the occasion.

At press time, the top comments on Hacker News were from a person complaining about how dumb Github is for losing the code, another person explaining to everyone that this article is satire, and a third person explaining that while he understands this is satire, the article is "dumb" and "not that funny", and seven non-sequiturs about the wisdom of free markets.

with thanks to Kyle Conroy, Andrew Benton, and Gabriel Gironda for reading drafts, and to Kyle for the Hackedocat

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