webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the last week of February, 2017.

Bash and Windows Subsystem for Linux Demo [video]
February 22, 2017 (comments)
Microsoft posts a low-quality video attempting to get Hackernews to boot Windows on their Macs so they can have bad implementations of modern Linux tools instead of the bad implementations of outdated Linux tools that ship with MacO's. Hackernews is excited about docker and disappointed their esoteric Debian shit isn't yet working. This is the right time to get Hackernews on board; nothing graphical works correctly and even simple things crash due to the poor implementation, which perfectly matches Hackernews development and operations efforts.

The Impact Github is Having on Your Software Career
February 23, 2017 (comments)
An internet thinks Github will take the place of basically every step of the hiring process throughout the IT industry. Even Hackernews knows this is full of shit, but they never pass up an opportunity to misinform each other about relevant employment law.

Missing $10,000 package of PAL SNES games recovered
February 24, 2017 (comments)
Some rando found a box. Hackernews dimly begins to suspect that the government services they're focused on 'disrupting' should probably be reliable. They're concerned, which in Hackernews parlance means they'll probably retweet something. A few arguments break out wherein half of the comments blame the recipient of the package and the other half insist that the sender should have mailed multiple boxes, presumably to reduce any motivation the USPS might have had for finding a lost one.

SHA-1 collider: Make your own colliding PDFs
February 25, 2017 (comments)
Hackernews resumes a previous thread, wherein they admonish each other never to 'roll your own crypto', but rolling your own public-facing internet service, database backend, programming language, kernel, messaging protocol, orbital launcher, autonomous war robot, or legal document is completely fine.

Annotation is now a web standard
February 26, 2017 (comments)
Some nerds pushed some useless shit through a nerd hive. Hackernews has a low opinion of the nerd hive in question, since it was mean to them once. The rest of the comments are mostly jerkoffsmanship about how hard this particular useless shit is, despite the fact that it amounts to hypertargeted blog comments, which amount to hypertargeted guestbook programs.

A solution for enabling UDP in the web
February 27, 2017 (comments)
An absolute asshole decides that TCP over HTTP is not enough, and sets about inventing UDP over HTTP, without even the courtesy of pretending it has useful applications. Hackernews opines that this is a wonderful goal, since just using UDP is clearly insane. One Hackernews wonders why we even separate the transport layer and the application layer, given that HTTP is literally the only thing anyone uses, ever. Nobody really knows. Nobody ever will.

Who Needs GPS? The Story of Etak's 1985 Car Navigation System
February 28, 2017 (comments)
Before the government launched a free location service for the entire world, some nerds figured out how to put a compass and an odometer on a car to guess where on a map the car went. Hackernews focuses on how hard maps are to read, and decides that having your phone shout instructions at you probably saves millions of lives.