webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of July, 2017.

How I Took an API Side Project to 250M Daily Requests
July 01, 2017 (comments)
An internet accidentally gets customers. Having exerted no effort, it is clearly time to claim expertise and spam a blog post to Hackernews. Hackernews gets wrapped around the axle about whether developers are immune to advertising.

Largest-ever study of controversial pesticides finds harm to bees
July 02, 2017 (comments)
Some academics are pretty sure poison fucks shit up. Hackernews debates whether humanity could survive without bees. The rest of the comments involve wondering what exactly bees do. Some Hackernews decide we can just replace them with drones.

New Skype Update Is Horrible
July 03, 2017 (comments)
Microsoft continues its war against its own users. Hackernews -- in typical webshit fashion -- declares it is obvious that any web-based technology or cloud-related application is unreliable garbage, unless they wrote it themselves. The rest of the comments are people demanding that everyone stop using a given service and other people making scads of excuses regarding why they must continue using it forever.

It is as if you were doing work
July 04, 2017 (comments)
An academic makes a webshit game depicting an idea of what working for a living must be like. Hackernews strongly relates, since it is an accurate portrayal of the closest they've ever come to working. Half of the page is people arguing about window managers.

Making a virtual machine in Google Sheets
July 05, 2017 (comments)
A webshit demonstrates that javascript is Turing complete. Hackernews dimly realizes that maybe they don't understand how computers work, so they trade links to similarly primitive demonstrations. Other Hackernews trade similar abuses of spreadsheet software.

Wildcard Certificates Coming January 2018
July 06, 2017 (comments)
Lets Encrypt, having spent years telling the world that wildcard certificates are a bad idea, announces their upcoming implementation of that bad idea. They continue blathering about "100% HTTPS" goals: not on my watch. Hackernews spends some time circlejerking about having free access to a bad certificate authority. Some Hackernews experience cognitive dissonance at the realization they like something they're not paying for. The rest of the comments are defending idiotic decisions by Lets Encrypt.

Still locked out of my AWS account
July 07, 2017 (comments)
An idiot blogs on Google Docs about fucking up. Hackernews doesn't bother reading it but trades stories about how Amazon is awesome and/or terrible. Lots of tips are voiced about how to deal with large corporations who do not give a fuck about you. The most common advice is to send a message to an email address named after the CEO. Eventually, the idiot reports that the problem is resolved.