webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of January, 2019.

Mickey Mouse and Batman will soon be public domain
January 01, 2019 (comments)
The world celebrates as the creators and artists in our society prepare to contextualize for us the hottest trends and thought-leadership of the Harding administration. Hackernews doesn't really give a shit about the content of any of the newly-public-domain intellectual property; they're just chomping at the bit to demonstrate their nuanced and insightful mastery of the 'copyright' and 'trademark' hashtags on medium.com.

Algorithms, by Jeff Erickson
January 02, 2019 (comments)
An academic crowdsources some free copy-editing services. This is obviously a terrible and exploitative process, as evinced by the fact that n-gate does it the same way. Hackernews doesn't have much to say about the content of the book, but once the author shows up in the comments, it turns into a Q&A session about how to academia.

Software Engineering at Google (2017)
January 03, 2019 (comments)
A Google writes a sales brochure for Google's software engineering recruiters. Literally none of the reported 'practices' are new to Google, but at least the author gets to write in the first-person plural. Hackernews reads tea leaves to associate inexplicably unpleasant experiences with Google products with the engineering practices that might have caused them, maybe. Anyone who doesn't immediately understand a given report is given an avuncular lecture about the infirmity of Man and the necessity of a heavenly father, guiding us all from the Mountain View campus.

Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App
January 04, 2019 (comments)
An elderly* webshit lectures aspirants on the ineluctability of the nodal V8-fold path. Hackernews agrees, but can't figure out why. Lots of sage opinions are expressed, but since the primary sources of app-download metrics and the primary sources of webshit-traffic metrics have every reason to juke their stats, Hackernews is doomed to strive in ignorance, with only blogspam like this to guide them.

Taxpayers Should Never Subsidize Stadiums
January 05, 2019 (comments)
A journalist is still mad about the Jets leaving Hofstra. Hackernews thinks the article is about whatever town they live in, so most of the comments are about San Francisco. The largest comment thread is devoted to debating whether the citizens of a democracy have the authority to legislate the behavior of an elected government.

How to Start Learning Computer Graphics Programming
January 06, 2019 (comments)
A mid-career* games developer provides advice at a rate of approximately eight words per day since grad school. A Hackernews wants people to try a specific university-course approach, but the rest of the pack insists that the only way to learn any topic is by rigorously following the exact protocol that any given Hackernews followed, and any other approach is doomed to failure.

Announcing unlimited free private repos
January 07, 2019 (comments)
GitHub gives us permission to keep our shit to ourselves, as long as we don't work together on any of it. Hackernews regards this move as a major business modification, since GitHub had previously worked very hard to convince these clods that anyone at all was paying for this garbage. Throwing that hypothetical revenue in the trash is regarded as brilliant, pending Hackernews' analysis of what Microsoft is playing at here.


* - elderly, adj. possessed of more than five years of experience.
* - mid-career, adj. possessed of approximately six months of experience.