webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of January, 2017.

The Riemann Hypothesis, explained
January 08, 2017 (comments)
An academic posts a bachelor thesis to medium.com. Hackernews really likes it (because it contains no new information) and posts lots of links to other number theory surveys (which contain no new information).

Chernobyl’s new sarcophagus
January 09, 2017 (comments)
Russia addresses their worst nuclear contamination problem by putting a shed on it. Hackernews trades photos of the devastation and bitches about people getting paid money to work on the shed.

Just how smart is an octopus?
January 10, 2017 (comments)
An academic writes for the Washington Post, trying to get people to be interested in a field. The answer to the headline question appears to be irrelevant, as Hackernews seems to regard an octopus primarily as food.

A Prettier JavaScript Formatter
January 11, 2017 (comments)
An internet wrote a code formatter for some webshit. Hackernews reveals that it considers syntax highlighting to be an important academic discipline. As for actual linebreaks and indentation, Hackernews is sure that this idea will catch on Real Soon Now, since Elm and Go invented it. One Hackernews discovers that this particular formatter breaks some code, but the others shout that one down for being too negative.

Poor Neighborhoods Make the Best Investments
January 12, 2017 (comments)
An idiot realizes that land is cheaper in impoverished areas. Hackernews starts arguing about voting rights.

Crafting a high-performance TV user interface using React
January 13, 2017 (comments)
Netflix, renowned worldwide for having the absolute worst possible user interface on every single platform they support, opens a window to shed some light on exactly what the fuck those idiots are doing over there. The big takeaway: it takes longer to render more complicated shit. Hackernews thinks the big problem is that Netflix's UI program doesn't move shit around over time based on user habits, because everyone likes it when your menu items are in a new place every week. Nobody explains why a device capable of rendering 1080p video from a network stream presents such a challenge to Netflix engineers trying to make pressing the 'up' arrow take less than thirty seconds.

Google Infrastructure Security Design Overview
January 14, 2017 (comments)
Google posts a shareholder-targeted document, promising they're totally secure as all hell you guys. Hackernews is salty that Google has more money than they do, but is glad to see that Google have needlessly reinvented Kerberos from first principles.