webshit weekly
An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the third week of February, 2018.
Why I don't use my real photo when messaging with customers on my website
February 15, 2018
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A webshit discovers that the internet is full of trash. Several Hackernews claim that women would be treated more respectfully by strangers if women could pass a Turing test. Several more claim that women would be treated more respectfully if they stopped trying to help their customers. One Hackernews is angry that random passersby don't respond positively to catcalls. Another can't understand how repeated requests for photographs of sex organs can possibly constitute abuse. The rest of the comments are people explaining that it's okay to type sexual harassment into message popups.
OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
February 16, 2018
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An Internet bemoans the state of a website devoted to bikeshedding maps. Hackernews can't decide if there is a user interface problem or a fundamental design failure. The founder of the website in question arrives to inform the world that nobody needs maps any more because of self-driving cars. Hackernews spends a while debating whether Google Maps (from Google) or Waze (from Google) is the right answer.
MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images
February 17, 2018
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Apple continues its war against its own users. Some Hackernews express mild concern, but an army of partisan Mac users organize patrols to interrogate nonbelievers. Any suboptimal behavior of an Apple product, decrees Hackernews, is the fault of the idiot user, who clicked the wrong button or downloaded the wrong third-party disk molestation utility from the App Store. Anyway it can't be Apple's fault because filesystems are really hard and nobody has ever written one that works.
Working remotely, 4 years in
February 18, 2018
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An Internet never shows up for work. Neither does Hackernews. Nobody notices.
Maybe you don't need Rust and WASM to speed up your JS
February 19, 2018
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A webshit vomits forth thousands of words of utterly useless garbage. Utterly useless garbage being Hackernews' stock in trade, they spend several hours bikeshedding the webshit's pointless results. The Rust Evangelism Strike Force is on hand to dispatch suppressive persons to the Mozilla Re-education Camps.
JupyterLab is ready for users
February 20, 2018
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Unsatisfied with having built an entire operating system based around the Python REPL, the IPython people have picked a dumber name, added more scripting languages, and shoved themselves into a massive webshit casserole. A Hackernews declares intent to use this software, and is immediately dogpiled with lectures about the Right Way to Do Things. Some Hackernews complain that they love the "shove everything onto the screen at once" school of program design, but wish for a world in which code and data could ever be extricated. One Hackernews asks what the hell, exactly, this program in fact does. Nobody answers.
Signal Foundation
February 21, 2018
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Someone gave Moxie more money. Hackernews has ideas on how to spend it. No improvements in any Signal-related products are announced. The Cash Source talks about "universal availability" when referring to a program that only works on two kinds of cellular phone. The XMPP Memorial Society files into a side room to trade war stories about the last chat protocol that Changed the World.