webshit weekly

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

You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
April 22, 2018 (comments)
Hackernews experiments with the webshit ur-religion, in direct violation of Papa Graham's dipshit dogma. Some Hackernews express disappointment that non-snakeoil programs aren't selling well to big investors, but they're quickly educated on rich people's need to invest in snake oil, just in case some of it works. Once that's tamped down, the rest of Hackernews chides the nonbelievers, reminding everyone that "knowing what the hell you're trying to accomplish" is antithetical to the agile development process.

Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance
April 23, 2018 (comments)
Yet another hipster combine preaches the glory of RSS. This particular webshit only supports Atom. Get you a blog who can do both. Hackernews congratulates itself for noticing that the corporations who employ Hackernews, all of whom rely on platform lockin to sell ads, discourage technology that does not lend itself to platform lockin or ads. This leads directly to a ritual chant regarding the impossibility of running a webshit that doesn't serve ads.

Hijack of Amazon’s domain service used to reroute web traffic for two hours
April 24, 2018 (comments)
Amazon got their shit snatched. The snatchers used this fleeting golden moment to electro-rob some clients of Bitcoin Idiots, LLC. Nothing of value was lost. Hackernews enters a confused frenzy trying to deal with the fact that HTTPS doesn't actually solve all the problems. Plans are made to replace BGP and DNS with HTTPS in order to solve the remaining problems, similar to Comcast and Verizon teaming up with Google to replace e-mail with HTTPS.

Medicare will require hospitals to post prices online
April 25, 2018 (comments)
The United States Government would like to see a wine list. Hackernews wonders why hospitals don't just serve ads and sell patient data to Cambridge Analytica.

Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App
April 26, 2018 (comments)
Some irrelevant weirdos ramble about their hobbies. Hackernews can't figure out why a borough of the European Union doesn't just use Slack instead of trying to control its own infrastructure. The mystery remains unsolved, although some of the weirdos show up to reassure everyone that it's written in Go.

EU agrees on total ban of bee-harming pesticides
April 27, 2018 (comments)
The Euros decide to stop poisoning bees. Hackernews is still mad about the last decision the Euros made, because it involved computers, and Hackernews doesn't like it when outsiders step on their turf. The rest of Hackernews tries to decide whether bees should be suffered to live.

Lessons learned from a failing local mall
April 28, 2018 (comments)
A webshit wants better crosswalks. Hackernews tries to define the term 'subsidy' but cannot. A consensus develops that the only way for a town to survive is to attract programmers, all of whom are interested in nothing but farmer's markets and small locally-owned clothing boutiques. This explains why all of the Hackernews side projects that involve physical goods are about mailing shit to people or hiring some poor person to drive shit over to people's houses.

“Lifefaker.com makes faking perfection easy”
April 29, 2018 (comments)
Some shysters post a webshit full of bikini pictures to advertise their scam. Hackernews is disappointed that the lies are not actually for sale, and sets about building a business plan to step in and fill this gap in the market. Other Hackernews start a 'kids these days' thread, where they bemoan the younger generation's obsession with fake internet points. These opinions are heavily upvoted. The rest of the comments are Hackernews trading tips on which photo filters they use to deceive potential dates on the internet.

IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
April 30, 2018 (comments)
An old person is mad that IBM's ad copy looks like the name of a book the old person wrote when Steve Wozniak still worked for Apple. In an industry that brands the concept of "inept statistics" as "machine learning" and "artificial intelligence," the author must be in a constant state of rage. While Hackernews agrees that IBM's terminology is criminally inaccurate, all the other machine learning tools are actually cool and good because some of them seem to work once in a while. Hackernews discusses the impossibility of understanding anyone who says anything -- whether using a computer or Hackernews' own brain -- and decides the only path forward is to crush human expression into a format more easily parsable by whatever the hell they can download from NPM this week.