webshit weekly

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

Paul Allen has died
October 15, 2018 (comments)
A famous person dies, which happens pretty often, but this particular person worked in Hackernews' industry, so all of them who ever entered the same building as the deceased has a heartfelt, meaningful, and lesson-packed anecdote to relay. Several of the deceased's projects resulted in excellent museums, which Hackernews enumerates in order to engage in less uncomfortable nostalgia.

What I loved about Paul Allen
October 16, 2018 (comments)
Another famous person involved in Hackernews' industry relays some heartfelt, meaningful, and lesson-packed anecdotes about the person who died the day before, Hackernews spends all day arguing about whether the author was an asshole to a dead associate.

Helm: Personal Email Server
October 17, 2018 (comments)
Some dipshits decide what email needs is a physical device in everyone's house that reverse-proxies through Amazon Web Services. Hackernews bikesheds the terrible business model, but the dipshits show up to argue about it. The resulting five hundred comments all contain Hackernews incorrecting each other about some combination of encryption, NAT, TLS, privacy law, spam prevention, and SMTP... and in some cases, all of them at once.

Paper Airplane Designs
October 18, 2018 (comments)
An Internet makes a list of paper airplanes. The list curator arrives to bask in the attention, but a couple of HackernEUs shows up to bitch about letter-sized paper. Some of the comments reminisce about paper airplane contests, some of them attempt to reverse engineer Google's advertising network, and the rest of the comments are Hackernews linking to their paper airplane design of choice, about half of which are present on the site originally linked.

Japan's Hometown Tax
October 19, 2018 (comments)
The Hackernews Popularity Contest bronze medalist makes a blog post about being smarter than some unnamed experts, and excitedly describes the manner in which Japan managed to turn part of their tax system into some kind of cutthroat money-laundering service. As usual with posts originating with Hackernews darlings, two camps emerge. The die-hard fans breathlessly expound the wondrous possibilities surfaced by this byzantine nightmare of wasted effort. The other sect grimly sets about poking holes in the article, and this is the camp that strives, based entirely on the content of this blog post, to ascertain whether or not democracy is desirable, or even possible at all.

Not exercising worse than smoking, diabetes and heart disease study finds
October 20, 2018 (comments)
Some doctors discover that being a shiftless layabout might be bad for your health, and recommend maybe getting off your ass once in a while. As with any medical advice, Hackernews is a font of links to various website-based can't-fail thinkpieces. The other Hackernews medical ritual ensues: a Hackernews doesn't want to follow the advice because of a huge list of boring excuses. Another Hackernews replies that it would be easy if you weren't doing it wrong. The first Hackernews replies that this assessment is making some pretty big assumptions there, but the other Hackernews is ready with a 1,500-word jargon-laden shitpost about how it is an ineluctable result of doing it wrong. About half of the jargon is misused or inapplicable, but the Excuses Lister isn't qualified to recognize that, so it just turns into another anecdote slog.

Who Are My Investors?
October 21, 2018 (comments)
The Saudis are being assholes in public again, so some people are starting to wonder if they're willing to be picky about where their money comes from. Hackernews isn't, for the most part, but they seem attracted to the idea that it's probably okay to take money from assholes if you think nobody will notice. Failing that, try to get some other people between you and the assholes. A few Hackernews just declare that there's no such thing as an asshole. I rarely^* recommend reading "Hacker" "News" comments, but if you want to see the inner strugglings of people who just aren't sure if they should, through their labor, enrich murderers, this is the place to do it.

^* - never.