webshit weekly

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

The Guardian Pulls Out of Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple News
April 22, 2017 (comments)
A newspaper stops paying for retarded comments on its articles. Hackernews has strong opinions about monopolies, decentralization, paying for journalism, and their complete inability to survive without Facebook. Mostly they're trying to decide if they hate the newspaper because it is full of nazis, or if they hate the newspaper because it is mean to nazis.

Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone
April 23, 2017 (comments)
Some internets teach their DECTalk to poorly impersonate politicians. Hackernews is no longer sure what is real: they're worried that history is unreliable, the future is terrifyingly confusing, the company might have faked their samples, and next week we will lose track of what a human being is. You're watching television. Suddenly you realize there's a wasp crawling on your arm.

Robert M. Pirsig has died
April 24, 2017 (comments)
A professional lunatic passes away. Hackernews misunderstands basic economics for a few hours, moves on to misunderstanding religion for a while, expands to misunderstanding philosophy, then settles in to bitch about how useless school is.

Painting with Code: Introducing our new open source library React Sketch.app
April 25, 2017 (comments)
Some webshits make new webshit. It's basically "Rapid Application Development" from the 90s, except without the rapidity and resulting in no application. Hackernews is over the moon with joy. Presumably AirBnB, whose business model is "Uber for toilets," created this to stress-test potential toilets before entering into business partnerships with them.

Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid
April 26, 2017 (comments)
Some assholes write a mail transport agent -- not a mail delivery agent -- and because webshits are incapable of doing otherwise, they write it in Ruby on Rails. It has over thirty direct dependencies in Ruby, only a handful of which are version pinned. One of them is 'mail', raising the question of what the hell the other thirty are for. Hackernews spends a couple days cargo-culting about how hard it is to run an email server. One Hackernews claims to successfully run an email server; everyone observes how easy that is and also that it's probably being done wrong.

Rust 1.17
April 27, 2017 (comments)
Christ Jesus of Nazareth, Light of the World, Lamb of God, Son of Man descends bodily from heaven and delivers unto our undeserving civilization the Blessing of a new version of the Truth. This one contains minor syntax updates. An unsuspecting Hackernews blasphemes by asking what the point of Rust is. The Rust Evangelism Strike Force ensures the resulting thread is exclusively comprised of shitting on other languages. Never forget: Rust isn't the best because it's good; it's the best because using anything else is morally equivalent to genocide. One Hackernews tries to build code that built last year. One guess whether it works.

The Boring Company [video]
April 28, 2017 (comments)
Frustrated with not being taken seriously as a Bond villain, Elon Musk sets about literally undermining civilization. Hackernews declares all skeptics to be heretics and fools who will be the first against the wall when the Muskolution comes. Hackernews is resolute on two facts: Elon Musk is smarter than every other living creature, and all successes at any Musk-related companies are Musk's personal doing, which have nothing to do with the billions of dollars spent hiring the brightest scientists and engineers on earth. There is only Elon (peace be unto Musk).

Show HN: Sorting Two Metric Tons of Lego
April 29, 2017 (comments)
An internet overthinks sorting his toys. Hackernews bikesheds both the machine-learning crap that does all the work and the actual physical hardware involved in the project. Eight hundred people tell the creator to start a doomed business sorting toys.

Why Use Postgres?
April 30, 2017 (comments)
An internet wants you to use some database software. Hackernews is excited at the possibility of pushing more computation out of their programs and into an overbuilt database management system. The rest of the comments are partisan bickering between people who like support contracts and people who ascribe morality to copyright licenses. An idiot wants to know how PostgreSQL compares to MongoDB, and nobody comes right out and says "one is a database and the other is incompetent webshit garbage."