webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the last week of December, 2016.

A Git catastrophe cleaned up
December 22, 2016 (comments)
An internet claims that git's unaimable footgun is evidence that git is the best. Hackernews is torn between the idea that dangrous overcomplicated garbage might not be the best and their religious conviction that git is the greatest thing ever to happen to computing. This debate is followed by dozens of pages of arguing about which particular git misfeature is the most important to humanity.

OpenWrt and LEDE to re-merge
December 23, 2016 (comments)
A while back, the premier basement-nerd operating system for shitty walmart hardware forked. They're done now. Hackernews is excited that development is continuing -- they might want to use it if they ever break their Airport Extreme.

Why time management is ruining our lives
December 24, 2016 (comments)
The Grauniad posts sixteen million words regarding being stressed out about email. Hackernews waits until Christmas Eve, then spends all night arguing about it.

Ask HN: What Are the Best Current Methods to Delete Yourself from the Internet?
December 25, 2016 (comments)
Hackernews answers: stop being yourself. Merry Christmas.

Basics of Making a Rootkit – From syscall to hook
December 26, 2016 (comments)
An idiot makes some trivial kernel modules and calls them a rootkit. Hackernews doesn't care enough to say anything meaningful, so I'm not sure why this got voted the top story.

The farmer who built her own broadband
December 27, 2016 (comments)
Someone ran fiber out in the middle of nowhere, where it is the absolute easiest it can be to run fiber. Hackernews thinks their internet is slow because of political corruption. No solutions are considered.

Finger Trees: A Simple General-Purpose Data Structure (2006)
December 28, 2016 (comments)
Some academics 'invent' a linked list of pointers to unbalanced trees. Like all 'innovation' from functional programmers, it has nothing to do with how computers work and turns out to be slow on actual hardware. The Rust Evangelism Strikeforce notes that this is not trivial to implement in Rust, but that is because Rust is so great.

Nintendo releases original Zelda design docs
December 29, 2016 (comments)
Nintendo advertises their new game on their blog by posting pictures of a previous, better game. Hackernews splits up into two camps to fight about whether it's better to design a program and then write it, or write a program and then design it. Nobody wins, including you or me.

The U.S. Will Surpass China as the No. 1 Country for Manufacturing by 2020
December 30, 2016 (comments)
Fortune posts an article making predictions about manufacturing output. Hackernews immediately confuses 'manufacturing output' with 'manufacturing jobs' and only takes a break from missing the point long enough to sigh about how China is better at everything and we should just give up.

The Hardware Hacker: Bunnie Huang's Tour-De-force
December 31, 2016 (comments)
A useless person posts a book review. The book is from a person who primarily invents useless things or expensive feature-reduced copies of existing things. The book is a collection of blog posts in print form. Hackernews worshipfully shares additional links to the same book or the blog posts it contains.

Better luck next year.