webshit weekly (2020/01/31)

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the last week of January, 2020.

Procrastination is about managing emotions, not time
January 22, 2020 (comments)
Some academics, via the BBC, correct a misconception nobody had. Hackernews tries to decide if being a lazy piece of shit is heritable or a product of upbringing. The rest of the comments are personal anecdotes about how Hackernews has always been healthy, but really began to excel once they convinced doctors to give them amphetamines.

What happened to Mint?
January 23, 2020 (comments)
The answer to the headline question is "it got bought by a regulatory-capture-enhanced monopoly and ignored." Hackernews has about sixteen thousand stealth-mode startups just about to swoop in and pick up the slack. Each Hackernews who announces such intent is immediately beset by unsolicited advice from armchair bankers. The rest of the comments are recommendations of financial services that almost, but do not, replace Mint.

List of Twitter mute words for your timeline
January 24, 2020 (comments)
An Internet figures out that Twitter's muting system can sometimes block their own advertisement platform. Hackernews complains about a lack of documentation for a list of twenty words to paste into a text box. A Twitter reports that there is nothing users can do to unfuck their timelines. The idea is nice, so the link is upvoted, but there isn't anything to say except "Twitter sucks at the only thing anyone wants them to do" so there isn't a lot happening in the comment section.

Am I Unique?
January 25, 2020 (comments)
Yes, no matter what you do. Hackernews struggles with the age-old conflict of the browser: "why should this program have so much power over my data" versus "I want to do everything I do with computers inside this program." Later, the second-oldest conflict is discussed: "I don't want to be identifiable on the internet" versus "this surveillance company will make my life hell unless I am identifiable."

Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years
January 26, 2020 (comments)
Wikipedia is excited that they are once again available in the Soviet Union. The Erdogan apologists and the free-speech advocates organize a dance-off in the comment threads.

An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google
January 27, 2020 (comments)
A Google resigns to reinvent host-based authentication from first principles. Hackernews recognizes the Google's username, and commences to eulogize. No technology is discussed, but open-office plans are still unpopular.

WireGuard is now in Linus' tree
January 28, 2020 (comments)
The Linux kernel assimilates another hundred and fifty thousand lines of code. Hackernews is excited, because this greatly increases the chances that they'll get to use the software the next time they boot Ubuntu in a virtual machine on their Macbooks. The rest of the comments are people translating their VPN configurations into confused narratives.

Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)
January 29, 2020 (comments)
The United States Government declares that website owners must use technology to combat scrapers instead of using the United States Government. Hackernews knows this is getting escalated to a higher court, and so feels entitled to expound poorly-constructed legal opinions based on their understanding of contract law.

Not everyone has an internal monologue
January 30, 2020 (comments)
An Internet discovers a method to determine which people are people and which are artifacts of the simulation. Hackernews quickly determines, based on various experiential reports from around the internet, that there is an hierarchy to how people's minds work, and that Hackernews is definitely at the top of that hierarchy, and that amphetamines are the key to staying there. Another set of Hackernews explain to us that some of these reports are incorrect, the reporters are simply misunderstanding their own thoughts, and Hackernews knows better than you do how your mind works.

My Second Year as a Solo Developer
January 31, 2020 (comments)
A webshit constructs a series of tables explaining in excruciating detail the process of losing money by making webshit. Hackernews is absolutely well-qualified to provide advice regarding the loss of money through making webshit, and proceeds to do so in volume and at scale. The top comment comes from the Hackernews Beauty Pageant Bronze Medalist, who provides hundreds of words amounting to zero practical information, then refuses to respond to the blog author.

webshit weekly (2020/01/21)

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the third week of January, 2020.

Mozilla lays off 70
January 15, 2020 (comments)
Mozilla successfully defends its title as only unprofitable major web browser vendor. The company remains certain that money will begin to flow from its new product, which promises to hide all your web traffic from everyone except Mozilla's primary funding source. Several unemployed Hackernews show up in the comments to tell us they are not angry about being shitcanned with no warning. Another Hackernews thread focuses on the fact that high-paid executives are treated better by the company than people who primarily interact with text editors. Whether this is some kind of class warfare or the Invisible Hand high-fiving the important people comprises the rest of the discussion. The team responsible for the continued functionality of the Beacon API are safe forever.

Unofficial Apple Archive
January 16, 2020 (comments)
Apple's equivalent of SeaOrg catalogues decades of corporate propaganda. Some Hackernews try to decide if Apple made better shit Back In The Goodle Days or if they're just stuck in a nostalgia fog. Other Hackernews gleefully recount their experiences as minor cogs in a massive machine. The rest of the comments are links to other fansites and arguments about which OS X widget theme was correct.

A Sad Day for Rust
January 17, 2020 (comments)
The Rust Evanglism Strike Force regretfully informs us of the excommunication of the author of one of the six Rust programs anyone actually uses. Veterans of the First Webshit Incursion sagely point out that this day was inevitable from the moment the author made use of certain features that are built into the core language but regarded as unclean by the clergy. Other Hackernews chime in to point out the necessity of being extremely polite and receptive to every single message received from anyone with a Github account. Within days, development of the condemned code resumes and the twelve websites which depend on the software do not notice anything happened.

Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'
January 18, 2020 (comments)
A German correctly assesses an engineering problem. Hackernews is convinced that they know better, because a nontrivial percentage of them receive paychecks from companies that have incorrectly assessed the engineering problem, and the rest of them because they personally cannot correctly assess any engineering problem. Half of the almost nine hundred comments are in one thread which consists entirely of arguments between people who drive Teslas once in a while in fair weather and everyone else on Earth.

My FOSS Story
January 19, 2020 (comments)
An Internet struggles to be extremely polite and receptive to every single message received from anyone with a Github account. The article contains a shitload of whining interspersed with, and followed by, admonitions that this shitty situation is in everybody's best interest. Hackernews agrees, and praises the author for arguing with people on the internet. Some Hackernews briefly experiment with the idea that Github pull requests are not the most important webshit technology ever developed, but since all the software that permits disabling them are not Github, no progress is made.

Immune discovery 'may treat all cancer'
January 20, 2020 (comments)
The British Broadcasting Coöperative weasel-words a scientific discovery into clickbait. Hackernews, in between seeing the headline and clicking on the link, sprouts several medical research doctorates and weighs in with sober analysis and whatever medical facts they remember reading recently. Later, Hackernews lists every malady that should be cured. One Hackernews thinks maybe scientific research would work better if it somehow involved pull requests from Hackernews. Even Hackernews thinks this is a terrible idea, but is insufficiently scornful to the originating idiot.

Every Google result now looks like an ad
January 21, 2020 (comments)
An advertising company blurs the line between the dumb shit you searched for and the extremely important and well-targeted information you need. Hackernews doesn't like it, which leads to the same debate Hackernews always has when Google iteratively befucks its search product: "use this other search engine!" "but that is not Google" "no, but you can make it redirect to Google." This is followed, in accordance with Hackernews tradition, by a litany of complaints about other things Google is doing to fuck the internet up for everybody; as it turns out, literally everything Google does is by now aimed at fucking the internet up.

webshit weekly (2020/01/14)

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of January, 2020.

Broot – A new way to see and navigate directory trees
January 08, 2020 (comments)
The Rust Evangelism Strike Force, using a mere five thousand lines of code (not counting the twenty remotely-imported libraries), implements a version of ls(1) that is not good at listing files. Hackernews has been looking for a file explorer with a complicated user interface for a very long time, and is extremely pleased. The author shows up, and to demonstrate their gratitude, Hackernews bickers over the Github etiquette, then lists all the other programs that have had the same functionality since the Reagan administration.

BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
January 09, 2020 (comments)
An Internet tries to convince us that a dead operating system was good by comparing it to a bad one. Hackernews experiences a devastating nostalgia storm, which gives way to dozens of minor skirmishes about who was a better middle manager or which 1980s computer processor could do a specific trick. Later Hackernews assert that the industry has progressed far since then, and hold up as evidence a pile of reimplementations of the 1990s software, but with webshit.

VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now
January 10, 2020 (comments)
A computer game gets naked. Hackernews tries to understand how the computer game attained popularity despite not adhering to received programming wisdom. Later, Hackernews mourns the death of Adobe Flash, and investigates the sixteen thousand half-assed replacements that have popped up over the years.

Goodbye, Clean Code
January 11, 2020 (comments)
A webshit seizes the means of abstraction. Having just read an article on the topic of inappropriate rigor in software design, Hackernews sets about generating an inappropriately rigorous metric for deciding when rigor may be inappropriate. In the rest of the discussions, Hackernews debates whether it's appropriate to spend company money duplicating a colleague's work because you didn't like the shape of the text.

Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run
January 12, 2020 (comments)
A webshit enthusiastically emits fifteen hundred words describing Google's reimplementation of CGI, which works absolutely wonderfully as long as nobody uses any of your websites. Hackernews is excited about the possibilities of CGI++, but concerned because (like all cloud services) there's no way to cap expenditures and nobody at the hosting company gives a shit about you or your problems. The cloud apologists arrive to assure everyone that neither of these are problems and you should just relax and move your products into this service ASAP. It's 2020, after all.

iOS 13 app tracking alert has dramatically cut location data flow to ad industry
January 13, 2020 (comments)
Apple successfully reroutes the digital oil pipelines to their own refineries. Hackernews declares that Tim Cook is the chosen one, foretold to defend us from their day jobs. Some light Android astroturfing occurs in response, but is blown away in the relentless gale of hot air about how much Apple cares about us on an intimate, familial level.

Patch Critical Cryptographic Vulnerability in Microsoft Windows [pdf]
January 14, 2020 (comments)
The National Security Agency, for the first time in recorded history, contributes as an Agency to the Security of the Nation. Hackernews is always delighted at the opportunity to be seen in public trying to understand cryptography, even if the lispy webshit they're using isn't really up to the task. Other Hackernews realize, with creeping horror, that Let's Encrypt did not, in fact, protect them against advanced persistent threats, despite the repeated whining from peripheral security-theater hucksters. When will these assholes learn that the only way to respond to a hostile government is to overthrow it? Stay tuned to find out.