webshit weekly

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

Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already
December 01, 2017 (comments)
The captain of the Hackernews Popularity Contest pisses into an ocean of piss. Hackernews takes turns agreeing with specific ripples. The runner-up in the Hackernews Popularity Contest scolds everyone for having the temerity to discuss the scripture laid down from on high. There is no reliable information or worthwhile insight to be found in the initial puddle of tweets or the resulting discussion.

Django 2.0 released
December 02, 2017 (comments)
Some webshits crank out a new release of their noise. All of the new features are esoteric evolutions of the existing over-engineered dumpster. Hackernews launches into a detailed analysis of the advantages of this particular webshit, in comparison to six thousand nearly-identical webshits, with preference going to the one written in each particular Hackernews' favorite scripting language.

How Stripe Designs Websites
December 03, 2017 (comments)
A webshit writes an ode to someone else's webshit. Hackernews, lacking anything better to do, disagrees. A brief inquest is held regarding whether and when it is acceptable to clone someone's website for your own purposes. The crowdsourced advice: "as long as you're pretty sure you won't get sued," which is also how Hackernews evaluates business models.

Apple is sharing your facial wireframe with apps
December 04, 2017 (comments)
A newspaper is worried that a ubiquitous face mapping device might lead to trouble. Apple reassures us everything will be okay, because they make people promise to be good. Hackernews agrees that the device will not pose problems, both because it doesn't work as well as Apple claims and because we're already fucked by existing ubiquitous face recording devices. Other Hackernews derive confidence from the fact that Apple loves them and just wants to take care of them.

AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government
December 05, 2017 (comments)
A bureaucrat, seeing the success of last week's bureaucratic temper tantrum, posts on Hackernews to drum up support for a specific political position. The bureaucrat purports to give advice on how to sway Federal policy, but mysteriously does not lead with "spend an absolutely phenomenal amount of money on lobbying," presumably because nobody really thinks a web forum for brogrammers is going to affect anything. Hackernews uses each of the bureaucrat's posts to incorrect each other about existing telecommunications case law.

The Big Vitamin D Mistake
December 06, 2017 (comments)
A doctor says we need more vitamins. Hackernews spends some time debating whether direct sunlight will instantly kill you or whether you will certainly die without it. When that gets boring, they switch to shitting on the article, the doctor who wrote it, and the journal that published it. One Hackernews wants all the hard sciencey words explained, which triggers five identically useless nonexplanations of terms. The rest of the posts are people arguing about which random-ass nutritional supplements cured their brain cancer and gave them the ability to levitate.

A Classic Extension Reborn: Tree Style Tab
December 07, 2017 (comments)
Some rando interviews a webshit who has failed to recreate one of the extensions Mozilla recently shitcanned. Irony saturation reaches critical levels as the webshit lauds Firefox's extension API stability. Another wonderful benefit of Firefox is touted: you can't do a lot of stuff with it that you used to be able to do. Hackernews discusses workarounds for the failures in the extension featured in the article, and expresses gratitude that Mozilla cares about us so much that it's willing to cripple its own products to protect us from ourselves. As always, Hackernews discusses Firefox and several alternative browsers, evaluates them based on their similarity to Chrome, and then continues to use Chrome.