webshit weekly

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

My Dad's Friendship with Charles Barkley
December 15, 2018 (comments)
A student reminisces about a famous person in the student's late father's life. Hackernews has opinions on sports and television, but since this story is primarily about human relationships, most of what Hackernews has to say is pretty gross. No technology is discussed.

Sandspiel – A falling sand game built in Rust and WebGL
December 16, 2018 (comments)
Thanks to decades of advances in webshit technology, the Rust Evangelism Strike Force proudly demonstrates, at long last, feature parity with a Turbo Pascal demo from 1994. This triggers a massive outbreak of nostalgia amongst Hackernews, but they shake it off long enough to pedantically whine about the physics of a toy simulation. After a short break to talk about how much better their toy simulation was, they get down to serious business: naming every program ever released that bears any characteristic at all resembling this webshit.

The Yoda of Silicon Valley
December 17, 2018 (comments)
A journalist manages to profile an alive member of the miniscule class of people who have done more good than harm with computers. Hackernews, unsatisfied with the one-day scope of the journalist's experience with the subject, compensates by recounting everything else the subject ever said to anyone, and several things nobody ever said.

Glitter bomb tricks parcel thieves
December 18, 2018 (comments)
A professional attention-gatherer gathers attention. Hackernews is mad at cops, parcel delivery personnel, thieves, and each other.

Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres
December 19, 2018 (comments)
The Grauniad documents a needlessly painful recovery from a series of bad decisions. Hackernews is enthralled, since it's like reading a biography of themselves. All of the technical commentary involves people ardently defending a terrible database program. Some Grauniads appear, responding to criticism of the article by agreeing with the critics.

Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
December 20, 2018 (comments)
A webshit IRC clone enforces the long-standing United States federal government ban on providing goods and services to people with the temerity to exist in lawless inimical rogue states like Canada. A few Hackernews opine that entrusting important communications to privately-controlled unfederable webshits might be foolish, but the rest of Hackernews immediately seizes them and drowns them in a barrel of gasoline. While this is the traditional punishment for suggesting open protocols in Silicon Valley, in this case the barrel is also ignited, because someone suggested that a non-programmer is capable of using any software except Google Chrome.

Indian government to intercept, monitor, and decrypt citizens’ computers
December 21, 2018 (comments)
The government of India thinks it's the Transportation Security Administration. Hackernews invokes the Fourth Amendment, which has never applied to either organization. While the main body of Hackernews gleefully engages in some good old-fashioned armchair constitutional lawyering, the rest of Hackernews are agreed: the government has no business intruding in people's personal computers. The advertisers don't like the competition.