webshit weekly
An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the third week of October, 2016.
Disclaimer
Nobody mentioned Rust this week. The Department of Justice is investigating.
Becoming a CTO
October 15, 2016
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A PHP programmer who has failed up maximizes Peter Principality by belittling people who are outspoken about PHP being shitty. It is the held opinion that CTOs should make technical decisions without consulting anyone else because this creates Business Strategy. Even Hackernews is largely unconvinced by this idiot. Someone is impersonating the author's future, the first known case of preemptive identity theft.
Walmart Paid Its People More to Get Cleaner Stores and Higher Sales
October 16, 2016
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Wal-Mart pays its employees more than they used to, resulting in cleaner stores, higher sales, and lower profits. Hackernews reminisces about how great and/or awful it was when they worked at Wal-Mart. No technology is discussed.
Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of anonymous data scientists
October 17, 2016
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Some Bitcoin idiots try to program investments. Hackernews decides they don't trust it, but only one of them figures out why. The rest while away the afternoon trading poorly-conceived economic theories and untested investment advice. One Hackernews provides insight into hedge fund management, and asks whether anyone can tell if the Bitcoin idiots are succeeding. Nobody knows.
Why Your Next iPhone Won't Be Ceramic
October 18, 2016
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A two-megabyte webpage informs us that Apple will not make a ceramic iPhone because it makes aluminum iPhones. Hackernews is suddenly full of materials scientists and machine-tool experts. The author shows up to respond to all criticism by claiming to have known that already, but having cut relevant sections out of the article to meet an arbitrary length limit nobody cares about. Hackernews toys with the idea that programmers are not really engineers, but decides that they are after all because they read blog posts about process.
The Linux Foundation Unites the JavaScript Community for Open Web Development
October 19, 2016
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Several Fortune 500 companies announce that everyone should use their javascript shit, and that javascript is good for more than just webshit. Hackernews agrees with the latter but disputes the list of javascript shit that should be used. This endeavor is judged to be pointless or brilliant, depending on whether the judge stands to make any money from its adoption. Someone notices there are no meaningful web companies listed among the Javascript Foundation members.
Netflix Chaos Monkey Upgraded
October 20, 2016
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Netflix has written software to fuck over computers at random. There is a new version that just turns them off instead. A Netflix employee appears and explains the change was made because a program called 'Chaos Monkey' was found to be insufficiently sophisticated or precise. Hackernews is attracted to this software, because they sense in it the seed of an artificial intelligence to which they can relate on a personal level.
The Neural Network Zoo
October 21, 2016
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An internet has drawn pictures of the various state machines that computer scientists use to obfuscate statistics. One Hackernews bemoans the fact that machine learning is bullshit, but to avoid being culled as a nonbeliever, couches it in terms of 'theoretical underpinnings.' Another Hackernews jokes that everything must be fine because something sometimes seems to work, and most of the rest of the herd takes this at face value. The rest of the thread is comprised of some Hackernews asking for help understanding the core concepts involved, and the others assuring them that nobody understands anything. A bibliography is constructed demonstrating the latter.