webshit weekly

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

Privacy is Power: Why the fight for privacy matters
February 08, 2017 (comments)
An idiot posts to Medium a rambling narrative regarding the importance of a phone app. Hackernews maintains the only way to be sure your shit is right is to host all of your own communications tools. Google Analytics silently notes which citizens have been contaminated with toxins inimical to surveillance capitalism. The machine sleeps.

Optimizations in Syntax Highlighting
February 09, 2017 (comments)
Some moron "optimizes" a feature of a text editor that is written in javascript and requires hundreds of megabytes of memory to open an empty file. Hackernews recommends you switch to this editor, or away from this editor, or anything, just switch. Whatever you're doing isn't what they're doing: fix it. In accordance with Federal law, one Hackernews implemented the feature in question in Rust.

London’s Lonely Unicorn: Two Frugal Expats and Their Billion-Dollar Startup
February 10, 2017 (comments)
Some foreigners do forex. Hackernews is not impressed with this ancient idea. They could have done it better, but they're not going to bother trying.

pfSense: Open source network firewall distribution
February 11, 2017 (comments)
Hackernews discovers there are things you can do with Unix that don't involve laptops or phones. Recovering from the initial shock, they realize that this is not linux, and begin to attack it for not being linux. Others attack it for being the wrong BSD.

Four Kinds of Dystopia
February 12, 2017 (comments)
An internet makes up words. Hackernews is angry they didn't make up enough words and the ones they made up are wrong.

Effectively Using Android Without Google Play Services with Gplayweb in Docker
February 13, 2017 (comments)
An idiot doesn't like installing software to use, instead preferring another layer of abstraction. Now instead of just using the software, you get to orchestrate a swarm and then use the software. Hackernews suggests several alternatives, none of which do the task at hand.

New Macbook Pro power efficiency and time remaining
February 14, 2017 (comments)
A fanboy posts counterpropaganda attacking those who insult Apple. Hackernews is full of mechanical engineers, so they spend some time reconstructing Apple's design process from first principles. Conclusion: everything Apple does is correct. If it seems incorrect to you, that means you don't fully understand the problem.