webshit weekly

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

Zhou Youguang, creator of the Pinyin writing system, has died
January 15, 2017 (comments)
A repentant Commie has passed away. Every Hackernews is both native Chinese and a professional linguist.

Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless
January 16, 2017 (comments)
A webshit, based on a hobby project, decides that the entire web advertising market is a lie. He's right, but for the wrong reasons. Hackernews trades tips on convincing themselves their entire industry isn't a sack of bullshit.

Gene Cernan has died
January 17, 2017 (comments)
An astronaut has passed away. He retired from NASA in 1976, since which time humanity has been phoning it in with this whole space-travel scene. Half of Hackernews recognizes this as the massive failure it is; the other half seizes the opportunity to virtue-signal about all the other problems nobody's fixing.

Nylas Mail is now free
January 18, 2017 (comments)
An asshole made a blog post with an equal number of emojis and actual words. The topic is the asshole's webshit email client, which the asshole has finally recognized is not worth money. Hackernews is full of people asking why the mail client requires a login (for the client itself in addition to the actual email account), but nobody knows.

My Go Resolutions for 2017
January 19, 2017 (comments)
Lifetime Bell Labs Intern Russ Cox posts, in unwarranted detail, the to-do list provided by the people the intern followed to Google. Hackernews, immune to change, still wants exceptions and generics and polymorphism and all the other shit they've been chanting about since Go was released. The Rust Evangelism Strike Force dispatches a psyops team to ensure people know Rust is everything anyone could ever want.

Introducing ProtonMail's Tor hidden service
January 20, 2017 (comments)
A webshit email service announces that it now caters to pedophiles and drug dealers. Hackernews trades advice on how they, too, can provide services to pedophiles and drug dealers.

Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot
January 21, 2017 (comments)
A Hackernews links to a webhost that has been around for years. Hackernews reminisces about webhosts they used to use, then settles down to bitch that this particular service, which specializes in simplicity and static file hosting, doesn't support server-side programming, eighteen-factor authentication, and isn't, in fact, Wordpress.