webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the third week of May, 2018.

Completely Silent Computer
May 15, 2018 (comments)
Nadine Hurley takes up computer building as a hobby. Hackernews scoffs that perfectly silent computers have been available for a while now and are called iPhones, then name a handful of other fanless computers, then complain that half of them make noise anyway. Some daylight is burned trying to figure out what 'computer' means in the first place. Later, Hackernews lines up to name every piece of computer equipment they've ever purchased.

JavaScript is Good, Actually
May 15, 2018 (comments)
A webshit incorrectly decides that javascript is not a shitshow, because all of the bad design choices have excuses and workarounds. You just don't know javascript the way webshits do; it loves them and it only hits them when it's been drinking, which is not its fault. Hackernews is seized in a paroxysm of indecision; they can sort-of map javascript shit to the things they learned in Khan Academy computer science videos, but not quite... so is this a failing in javascript, to be a pile of bad implementations of questionable goals? Or is this a failing in computer science, to have posited concepts that javascript can't quite fully deploy? This conundrum proves to be insurmountable, so Hackernews settles in to enumerate every single programming language they've ever heard of, compare them all to javascript, and agree that as bad as it is, it's not C, which is hard and the people who use it are mean. Perl is not mentioned at all in the entire thread, which is an excellent reason to immediately use perl as often as possible.

US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data
May 16, 2018 (comments)
Corporations with access to data sell the data. Hackernews spends their lunch break making secret accounts to confirm this groundbreaking news and go on to claim that it's not only endemic to the entire mobile device market but that there are in fact customers who wish to purchase access to the data. Other Hackernews take a break from buying and parsing this same data to mull over ways they can stop their employers from acting like shitheads, but soon reach the conclusion that there's no way to stop any misbehavior of any sort and the only logical response to the situation is to get paid to misbehave.

LocationSmart Leaked Location Data for All Major U.S. Carriers in Real Time
May 17, 2018 (comments)
One of the customers of the data from yesterday's story is found to have the data they paid for. A webshit figures out how to trick it into giving the data away for free. Hackernews bemoans the fact that this information was not used to cause the general population to rise up and strike down the people who employ most of Hackernews.

The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written
May 18, 2018 (comments)
Some webshits glamorize malware. Hackernews disagrees, and thinks that other, more boring software should also be glamorized. To get to the bottom of whether the malware in question is sufficiently glamorous, Hackernews invents several engineering disciplines from first principles, then declares them all trivial. Once they're done deciding that nobody but Hackernews is qualified to have any opinions on warfare, they move on to clarify that nobody is qualified to have any opinion on anything at all.

A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign
May 19, 2018 (comments)
An Internet points out that Wikipedia is unreliable because it is infested with assholes. Hackernews scrambles to be first in line to vomit forth half-baked technical solutions to get rid of assholes, then gets distracted by the question of whether it's worth getting rid of assholes, or whether there are even people alive who are not assholes. Nearly all of the discussions get derailed by pedantry regarding the complaints about the articles in question, leading to the world's first Wikipedia-editing cold war by proxy.

Getting Google to ban our entire company
May 20, 2018 (comments)
A Reddit, on a phone in a bathroom stall, accidentally flushes an entire company. Hackernews does not lend any credence to this story, because Google is flawless and would never deploy an automated system that accidentally fucks over an entire organization (except for the many, many times they do precisely that). When defending the honor of Google loses its luster, Hackernews moves on to telling war stories about other shitty customer support from other software companies, presumably to make Google feel better about being a pack of incompetent stooges.

82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding
May 21, 2018 (comments)
An old person has free time. Hackernews is smitten; any story about someone typing things on a computer is definitely the feel-good human-interest story they need after yesterday's harrowing brush with apostasy. After a while they forget what they're talking about and return to form, constructing an a-priori definition of learning and retconning dimly-remembered high school linguistics lessons to justify it. Noam Chomsky would be proud, if it weren't for being too busy training for the Dunning-Kruger Prize in International Politics.