webshit weekly

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

Filmmakers Ask Nikon and Canon to Sell Encrypted Cameras
December 15, 2016 (comments)
Some photographers are afraid. Wired.com thinks encrypting things would be hard, because nobody's invented hardware-accelerated cryptography. Hackernews remains steadfast in its opinion that all security is pointless when the government can beat you up. They also believe that nobody wants it anyway. They all have startups attempting to provide this pointless, unwanted solution for money.

Pyret – A language exploring scripting and functional programming
December 16, 2016 (comments)
An internet invents a toy language to indoctrinate children to shitty programming. Again. Hackernews, all of whom are self-taught, does not see the point in making tools to teach programming. Everyone should just use Scheme. Everyone should just use python. Everyone should just use javascript. Everyone should just use OCaml. Everyone should just use Elixir. Everyone should just use Pascal(!). Everyone should just use Haskell.

Stroustrup's Rule and Layering Over Time in Rust
December 17, 2016 (comments)
A member of the Rust Evangelism Strikeforce explains that one of the benefits of Rust is the way the syntax constantly shifts with every release. Hackernews thinks this is fine because they ported Clippy to Rust programming. I am not making that up.

Shopify has paid over $300k in security exploit bounties
December 18, 2016 (comments)
An Internet wrote a webshit nightmare in Ruby and has paid tons of money to people who broke it. Hackernews circles up and marinates in each other's joy juice about how great Shopify is. Some Hackernews point out that they could have hired a security engineer for less money, but nobody suggests writing secure code to begin with.

Making SQL Server run on Linux
December 19, 2016 (comments)
Microsoft's database software depends directly on the Windows NT kernel. Instead of fixing that, they wrote an emulation layer to translate ABI calls to Linux calls. Hackernews is deeply impressed with the elegance of this shitshow. A late-1990s-style flamewar breaks out when the Knights of Linux invade the Windows on the Mount.

One Way to Improve Your Coding
December 20, 2016 (comments)
An Internet thinks the best way to get better at programming is to read programs. There are two sections highlighted in yellow; one could have been used to replace this whole article with a tweet and the other is a desperate attempt to increase audience interaction with a website. Hackernews isn't so sure and also does not like the guy's font selections. I was unable to continue reading the Hackernews comments when I came across the sentence "I feel like I learned sane C++ by reading LLVM code" which seems like it should be English but doesn't add up to anything that can possibly be true.

No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
December 21, 2016 (comments)
A member of the medical industry is concerned that young doctors are being worked too hard. Hackernews presumably relates strongly to this article because it contains the phrase "panic, inadequacy, and exhaustion", which succinctly describes most of their entire careers. A surprising number of Hackernews have spouses with MDs; this explains how they can pay rent on their 800-square-foot loft in the Mission while working on a dog-grooming MOOC startup for equity.