webshit weekly

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

FDA Agrees to New Trials for MDMA as Relief for PTSD Patients
December 01, 2016 (comments)
Hackernews is outraged that a medical professional disagrees with them about hard drugs. Tens of thousands of words are posted in a frenzied rush to spread the word that anyone who is harmed by hard drugs was doing it wrong and, by implication, had it coming. The rest of the posts are from people timidly wondering if perhaps decades of training and medical practice might qualify someone to have a conversation about drugs. Hackernews decides: you don't understand drugs unless you went to Burning Man.

"Solaris being canned, at least 50% of teams to be RIF'd in short term"
December 02, 2016 (comments)
An anonymous shitposting forum gets everyone's hopes up. Hackernews contributes anonymous comments, then switches back to their native forums and reposts those same comments but with better grammar. Most of the comments derisively ask why Solaris was even created. Perhaps as some sort of big-company fat-cat answer to Ubuntu?

Spec-ulation – Rich Hickey [video]
December 03, 2016 (comments)
An afro who was born without a personality drones on interminably about problems. Hackernews regards these problems as interesting, because they've never used a computer before.

Big Banks Are Putting Rain Forests in Peril
December 04, 2016 (comments)
A reporter is angry that other countries are getting rich in exactly the same way America did. This is blamed, in a newspaper founded by a banker, on the banks. Hackernews only gives a shit when it hurts animals. Some vegans show up.

Data Science: CSCI E-109 Publication Listing
December 05, 2016 (comments)
Lecture videos on a topic inapplicable to Hackernews.

Why does calloc exist?
December 06, 2016 (comments)
An internet posts irrelevant shit about optimizations while lying about the design purpose of calloc(3). The internet who wrote the blog post edited it to insert some kind of soapboxy lecture about how we all owe it to the author to take action in supporting some political views. The code is buggy. Hackernews agrees with the author and also doesn't.

Apple to Start Publishing AI Research
December 07, 2016 (comments)
Apple, falling behind in the Surveillance Capitalism wars, kindly throws its competitors a rope, so that they may drag Apple forward. Hackernews attempts to invent academia from first principles.