webshit weekly

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

Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language
June 22, 2017 (comments)
An internet makes a website for some vaporware. The creators arrive in the comments section to yammer about how much Other People's Money they've wasted bolting Scratch to Hadoop. Hackernews spends equal time schmoozing the marks and asking technical questions, the answers to all of which amount to "lol I dunno." Near the end, the truth comes out: this is just another pack of Haskell people trying to be taken seriously.

Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads
June 23, 2017 (comments)
An advertising agency promises not to look at your stuff. A few Hackernews notice this is suspiciously closely timed with upcoming legal requirements that they stop looking at your stuff. Hundreds of other Hackernews emerge from the shadows to insist that Google's motives this time, unlike literally every other time, are completely pure. The rest of the comments are people inventing internet advertising from first principles.

Pencil – an open-source GUI prototyping tool for all platforms
June 24, 2017 (comments)
Some webshits release some trash. Hackernews loves the trash, which explains how we got into this mess.

Intel Skylake/Kaby Lake processors: broken hyper-threading
June 25, 2017 (comments)
Intel fucks up again. By the time anyone notices, fixes have been made available. Nobody got hurt but the eight OCaml users who do not work for Jane Street. Hackernews, a horde of web programmers, is furious that someone may have built something that wasn't perfect.

The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
June 26, 2017 (comments)
Some idiots use Mechanical Turk and web forms to make decisions about how the human brain works. Hackernews decides they can combat this by reciting poetry. Any poetry. Other Hackernews trade tips on how to survive with a hipster phone.

Magic-Wormhole – Get things from one computer to another, safely
June 27, 2017 (comments)
Some webshits reinvent rcp, but with more webshit. Hackernews is basically just a storm of nearly-identical software recommendations and bitching about how hard it is to install software, with a side of whining about how hard networking is.

An easter egg for one user: Luke Skywalker
June 28, 2017 (comments)
A webshit stalks a celebrity. Hackernews is mildly creeped out, but approves of the technical implementations chosen by the stalker.

Milestone: 100M Certificates Issued
June 29, 2017 (comments)
Some idiots brag about how many 90-day certificates they've shat out. The announcement yammers about "a 100% HTTPS Web," which is a goal that n-gate will single-handedly ensure they never reach. Hackernews sets about writing love songs for the idiots, regardless of how much customer data is leaked, how many illegal certificates are issued, or what percentage of the issued certificates are for "www.paypal.com.sendmoney.глупец.ru".

“Which word begins with “y” and looks like an axe in this picture?”
June 30, 2017 (comments)
An internet obsesses about trivial shit. Hackernews debates whether this person is a genius or just extremely bored, then spends several hours arguing about the conclusions.