webshit weekly
An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of September, 2016.
Linux debugging tools you'll love
September 08, 2016
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A grown-ass human decides to talk about dstat, strace, tcpdump, wireshark, and perf in the manner of a middle-school student rushing to complete a class project. It is never explained why this content couldn't just be posted in text form on the author's blog. Hackernews proceeds to repeat everything in the 'zine' and then manually reproduce the output of 'ls /usr/bin', with commentary. The title of the article forgets to mention that there is Macos crap scattered throughout the meager information made available.
How to Write a Spelling Corrector
September 09, 2016
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A Google updates some old python to new python. Hackernews takes the opportunity to pretend that Google invented spellcheck -- a concept not disproved by what passes for literature review from the original author. Everyone is amazed to see met this blistering 21st-century webscale performance goal of ten words per second. The author defends the work by casually mentioning not having tried very hard. Nobody mentions -- even once -- Lorinda Cherry, presumably because Lorinda Cherry did not work at Google. In accordance with federal law, someone has ported this to Rust.
Python 3.6 dict becomes compact and keywords become ordered
September 10, 2016
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Python decides its programmers can never be trusted to do something correctly, so it decides to change the definition of 'correct'. The changes are left out of the actual language specification, so that when the implementation changes again in a few years everyone will get fucked. Hackernews decides that doing things carefully is the same as doing nothing at all. dict and OrderedDict will both remain and accidentally do the same thing as each other. One Hackernews recommends revoking trust in python.org's SSL certificate and routing the web traffic through Google's cache instead.
Cap’n Proto
September 11, 2016
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A Hackernews is lauded for finally figuring out the problem with data serialization: all the computers are wrong. To solve this, the Hackernews plays games with C++ to ensure that the data structures look the preferred way. This saves the Hackernews from having to pay severe performance penalties for needless data interchange, and has the bonus feature of giving the Hackernews an excuse for the datastructures being completely wrong for the program being written. It's a win-win! In accordance with federal law, someone asks about an implementation for Rust.
On Generative Algorithms
September 12, 2016
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A Hackernews ruminates on the Javascript version of a zen garden; the rest appreciate the pretty pictures, except one functional programming asshole who wants to talk about functional programming instead.
Google’s Self-Driving Car Project Is Losing Out to Rivals
September 13, 2016
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Hackernews monthly Google Apologetics Masterclass. Google, a company which is manifestly incapable of maintaining a product, is having such a rough time producing a car that they've started hiring people with experience in the automotive industry. Hackernews, quelling their acrid sense of betrayal, decides that Google is taking so long to release a product because it is better not to get in Elon Musk's way until they are sure that the Google Car will be an extinction-level event for automakers in general.
Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet
September 14, 2016
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A security expert announces that the world badly needs to listen to security experts. Hackernews is torn between their overpowering desire to slap [citation needed] tags onto any sentence they don't immediately understand, the urgent need to declare that everything is totally fucked and must change before next week, and their relentless belief that everything will always be fine.