webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of June, 2018.

Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox
June 01, 2018 (comments)
Hackernews examines the scratch pad of a group of webshits willing to help Mozilla bolt yet more random bullshit to the side of the only Mozilla project anyone has ever noticed. Hackernews doesn't really care whether it ever works, as long as they get to bikeshed the implementation details and argue about administrative minutiae. When they're done incorrecting one another about networking, they line up to namedrop every webshit fad in current vogue, hoping to convince Mozilla to bolt new, different random bullshit to a web browser.

MIT 9.11: The Human Brain (Spring 2018)
June 02, 2018 (comments)
A photographer narrates a slideshow in excruciating detail, then shows up in the Hackernews comments to be excited that someone noticed. Hackernews votes for the story because it's from MIT, but has next to nothing to say about it because none of them understood any of it. Some of them get distracted using a common software tool to reimplement the tool's own command line arguments.

Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub
June 03, 2018 (comments)
A near-monopoly closed-source software company, fed up with trying to seem like a good corporate citizen by releasing source code of their worst programs, is acquired by Microsoft. Hackernews is either terrified or cautiously optimistic, based exclusively on whether they've received money from Microsoft in the past. Some time is spent pretending they have opinions about the business implications of the acquisition, but almost all of the discussion has a different focus: warnings from people who have been fucked ruthlessly by large software companies, and complaints about the unfairness of those opinions, mostly by people who haven't yet had their turn in the barrel. A brief sidebar is held on the topic of decentralized internet services, wherein Hackernews explains that services are mostly centralized because of the ineffable will of society, and not because programmers aren't smart enough to build interoperable software.

Hello, GitHub
June 04, 2018 (comments)
Microsoft, responding to the tremendous outpouring of user feedback about their acquisition of Github, finds the perfect person to ensure that none of it is acted upon or even heard: a GNOME developer. The announcement is illustrated, for some reason, only with a 3-megapixel photograph nearly a megabyte in size. Hackernews decides that the future of Github is safe in the hands of this person, because some of them have seen that name somewhere on the internet once. The rest of the comments are copied and pasted from the previous day's thread.

How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team
June 05, 2018 (comments)
A small child hemorrhages boilerplate indoctrination for entry-level bureaucrats. Hackernews carefully upvotes the article to ensure maximum exposure; the most important management skill in Hackernews' arsenal is deriding other people's management advice based on how much it differs from whatever boilerplate indoctrination they received when they were first promoted away from the ability to directly fuck up their employers' software. The small child arrives in the comment threads to not defend any of the content.

Things I Regret About Node.js [video]
June 06, 2018 (comments)
Some webshits presumably talk for half an hour about all the things they fucked up; I'm not watching this shit. Hackernews explores reasons why programmers can't seem to stop fucking everything up in nearly identical ways on every project in wide use. The consensus is that this must be some fundamental atomic force at work, because it can't possibly just be a pack of shitheads with no self control failing exactly like the previous packs of shitheads with no self control. The Rust Evangelism Strike Force flirts with the idea of a campaign here, but doesn't have the heart for it, since they're in the process of making all the same mistakes, in the same order, for the same reasons.

AI at Google: our principles
June 07, 2018 (comments)
Having been shamed into walking away from a lucrative murder automation contract, The Google of Google blogs about how that was totally the plan from the beginning, you guys. The article contains a weasel-worded declaration of intent to avoid surveillance, which contains so many qualifications and escape hatches that it must have taken days to type through the tears of laughter. Hackernews can't decide if they buy this bullshit; on the one hand, this document is so transparently meaningless as to be obvious public relations fodder, but on the other hand, Hackernews isn't really sure how to exist without function (i, s, o, g, r, a, m) so it's probably best not to rock the boat too much. See you at Google I/O! Until they rename it to better align with brand values, after which: see you at Google C4ISR!