webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of January, 2018.

The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds
January 08, 2018 (comments)
A journalist has run out of things to talk about, and so resorts to whining about smartphones. Hackernews gets engrossed in a discussion of the finer points of introducing their children to Apple products without letting them learn how to fend for themselves. Other Hackernews are angry that this newspaper article is not a peer-reviewed academic paper with a citation list. Most of the rest of the comments are from people who regard any public expression of worry as a direct act of psychological warfare on the reader.

A letter about Google AMP
January 09, 2018 (comments)
Some Internets are angry that Google runs the web. The few Hackernews with the temerity to disagree with Google are buried in an avalanche of straw men stuffed with red herrings. Several dozen Hackernews try to imagine what search engine optimization should look like, without ever stopping to question why "search engine optimization" is a thing that the web would ever need in the first place. The consensus seems to be that AMP is necessary because without it people won't do what Google wants, which is clearly an unsustainable position for humanity to take.

Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime
January 10, 2018 (comments)
The police are not required to enforce webshit terms of service. Hackernews is glad to have the cops off their tails, but can't stop for a sigh of relief: they're wasting all their breath bickering about commonly-used legal terms in an attempt to justify software piracy.

Signal partners with Microsoft to bring end-to-end encryption to Skype
January 11, 2018 (comments)
Microsoft pays some nerds. Hackernews, unwilling to settle for reinventing chat programs from first principles, reinvents the chat program industry from first principles. Some Hackernews wrestle with whether Signal is the encrypted comms tool that will save the world, or whether it's just another NSA front. A sidebar is held to bitch about Skype's user interface.

An Experimental Course on Operating Systems
January 12, 2018 (comments)
A graduate student in the Rust Evangelism Strike Force is given enough rope. Hackernews spends some time shopping for light-blinking accoutrements and then questions whether it's even possible to write software that is not just a reimplementation of existing software. A subgroup of these decide the fundamental purpose of an operating system is to render webshit. A roll call is held for every operating system Hackernews has ever heard of.

Aaron, 5 years later
January 13, 2018 (comments)
An Internet writes about coping with the death of a family member, concluding with some sage advice: "You should follow me on Twitter". Hackernews discards this instruction and instead pastes quotes about the deceased from every other Twitter account they can find. The rest of the comments are people speaking well of the dead and other people arguing about whose fault the death was.

LinkedIn is ignoring user settings
January 14, 2018 (comments)
A webshit is mad because a spam company isn't following instructions. Hackernews is familiar with the spam company because they have all accidentally given it money. As usual with "I'm too stupid to direct the flow of my own capital" discussions on Hackernews, the thread devolves into competitive bank-shilling. The rest of the comment threads are the old Hackernews standards: "this website is dying because I don't like it," "this is a user interface problem and not a fundamental design flaw," "I am smarter than everyone I know," and the inevitable "I am better than you because I don't use this service."