webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of November, 2018.

We're in a Golden Age for Amateur Radio
November 07, 2018 (comments)
An Internet declares the current era to be the best ever for a hobby, despite having no experience with any preceding era of the hobby. Hackernews is happy to lecture one another on the proper method for engagement, then relay nostalgic stories from the last few golden ages.

I've compiled the best SaaS Landing pages and broke down all their secrets
November 08, 2018 (comments)
A webshit enumerates the layout of the default Bootstrap landing page. Hackernews trades links to their favorite Bootstrap landing pages, then bikesheds the article for a few hours. Despite the relatively large vote count on the article, there isn't much action in the comment thread, which usually means everyone likes the topic (in this case, meaningless webshit garbage) but the content isn't interesting enough to actually read.

Romania orders investigative journalists to disclose sources under GDPR
November 09, 2018 (comments)
Some Internets are mad that a third-world government is using laws against its enemies. I redacted the goddamn Facebook tracking parameter embedded into the story link, but didn't bother fixing the pointless "presss-releases" folder in the url. Fully erect at the prospect of lecturing strangers on dimly-comprehended legal theory, Hackernews unleashes dozens of didactic analyses, all to set up their favorite debate topic of all time: why even have governments?

Building your color palette
November 10, 2018 (comments)
Another webshit posts class notes from an introductory design course, which prompts Hackernews to post insightful tips like "use CSS to set colors in your web page." Because this is an elite community of web professionals, about half the comments are people bitching that display technology is insufficiently advanced to faithfully render the precise artistic inspiration they bring to the refined, high-class world of animated button highlights. The rest of the comments are links to almost identical webshits who blogged about this topic in days gone by.

Google Kubernetes Engine's third consecutive day of service disruption
November 11, 2018 (comments)
Google's shit was broken for three days, but according to the status page it was broken for ten hours. This effects a Hackernews catfight about whether Google really gives a shit about any of them, even for money. The answer is a resounding "no," but several hundred Hackernews are sufficiently emotionally invested in this corporation to defend their imaginary relationship for hours in a web forum. Several Googles show up to cheer on their fanclub instead of fixing the broken services.

Web.dev by Google
November 12, 2018 (comments)
Google produces a new set of rituals for webshits to undertake if they wish to please their overlords. Running the compliance analyzer against this site results in bitching about https, again. Hackernews is mad that Google didn't consider Hackernews' pet webshit when concocting the judgment machine, and seeks vengeance by enumerating all the Google properties that are slow to load. Google seems unconcerned.

Medium is a poor choice for blogging
November 13, 2018 (comments)
A webshit blogs about some of the ways medium.com is terrible... on medium.com. Hackernews acknowledges that medium.com is no longer particularly nice to use, but stresses that this is an acceptable loss when faced with the necessity to appear to monetize their website. Hackernews spends an afternoon vivisecting the site and reverse engineering all the bad management decisions that led to the current shitpile, then recommends various shitty blog programs to try, based mostly on which programming language the commenter is capable of using.

Corretto – No-cost, multiplatform, developer-preview distribution of OpenJDK
November 14, 2018 (comments)
Amazon repackages OpenJDK and gives it an even dumber name. Hackernews explains the reason: people want long-term support, and of course an online retailer is the place to turn for that.