webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the last week of March, 2018.

Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA
March 22, 2018 (comments)
A negligible amount of spam goes offline. Hackernews, in general, is angry whenever anything a government does affects anything a website does, but in this case they're extra angry because now it's harder to find full-stack genital UX designers on the internet. Now Hackernews is forced to sit online and argue about whether any government action has ever benefited any human being.

Congrats Dropbox
March 23, 2018 (comments)
Y Combinator is excited that one of their cultists has money now. Hackernews is too. Nothing of value emerges from the original post or the ensuing discussion.

Fred's ImageMagick Scripts
March 24, 2018 (comments)
An Internet uses some programs. We are not allowed to make money with the programs. Hackernews is desperate for someone to teach them how to use computers. A few Hackernews feel that just running programs is dumb, and things are better if webshit gets involved.

How to Fall Asleep in Two Minutes or Less
March 25, 2018 (comments)
An Internet reports on secret military training for going to sleep: stop being awake. Hackernews recounts all of their experiences with going to sleep. One Hackernews mentions a medical condition that interferes with sleeping, and is immediately instructed to demand a device that records every single breath, preventing the horrible dystopia in which someone does something without telling a computer about it. I didn't think anything could be less interesting to read than the Dropbox circlejerk, but nearly two hundred comments comprised of nerds recounting all the ways they fail at fundamental biological imperatives sure raised the bar.

I usually run 'w' first when troubleshooting unknown machines
March 26, 2018 (comments)
An Internet postulates that when shit breaks you can find out who broke it and ask them what they did instead of reconstructing the failure state from first principles or just erasing the whole world and starting a new one. The Hackernews discussion that appears in response consists entirely of Hackernews telling campfire stories of dumb shit their colleagues did, then listing the six thousand weird-ass diagnostic commands they read about on the Arch Linux forums.

Facebook Container Extension: Take control of how you’re being tracked
March 27, 2018 (comments)
Mozilla launches some software to ensure that Facebook, who does not pay Mozilla, can collect less data about Firefox users. There is no "Google Container Extension." Hackernews compiles a litany of ideas about ways in which browsers could protect user data, but discards them all because it breaks the websites they all work on for a living. A few Hackernews deride the effort as pointless because it is not flawless. The rest of the comments are bitching about Obama, which, bizarrely, seems to be developing into the standard Hackernews procedure when faced with any Facebook-related story.

Au Revoir
March 28, 2018 (comments)
Some rich asshole fucks off. Hackernews pontificates on the nature of leadership, the qualities that make a leader, whether a human owes anything to humanity (or is it the other way around?), the nature of commerce, and the pretty pictures on the blogspam. Half the comments complain that the blog crashed under load.

FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Broadband Satellite Services
March 29, 2018 (comments)
Some bureaucrats bureaucratize. Hackernews believes this will lead to a fundamental restructuring of the global telecommunications grid, despite satellite communications services already existing. The real source of Hackernews' relentless optimism about this trivial government filing report is the involvement of Elon Musk. The satellite communications industry is jam-packed with products that are not new, perform extremely poorly, and are ruinously expensive -- meaning the creator of Tesla is born to the task.

It's time to head back to RSS?
March 30, 2018 (comments)
A magazine tells everyone to go back to RSS. There is no RSS subscription information for the magazine itself; although it supports RSS, this feature is not even advertised in the article about RSS. Hackernews lists every RSS feed they've ever seen, as well as every RSS reader they've ever used. Everyone continues not using jsonfeed, except for the seven people who use it on N-Gate. Hi, weirdos!

I almost lost my hearing from the lid on the tank of a toilet
March 31, 2018 (comments)
A clumsy turbonerd investigates a noisy toilet. Hackernews recounts every loud sound they have ever heard, then tries to fix hearing problems with dietary supplements, Youtube videos, steroids, and humming. Once that gets boring, they start arguing about glossy computer screens. One Hackernews wants pictures of the loud toilet.