webshit weekly
An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of January, 2019.
Bash 5.0 released
January 07, 2019
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Sears has another chance to avoid closing down
January 08, 2019
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The petulant infant in charge of driving an American commercial institution directly into a volcano receives a six hundredth second chance. Hackernews argues extensively about whether a business with a hundred-year head start and an identical business model could possibly have stood a chance against the unavoidable ascendance of Amazon. Many other threads are devoted to pointing out that perhaps things would have gone differently, had it not been for the human barrelfish inexcusably allowed to participate in adult business transactions with actual money.
Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)
January 09, 2019
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A pensioner pretends to be able to tell birds apart. One Hackernews recounts being bullshitted by a teacher about whether penguins can fly... and comes out the other end blaming the penguins for the humiliation. A different pack of Hackernews argue over whether it is possible to domesticate animals, while the bulk of the comments -- almost a third -- wistfully speculate on whether it's possible for animals to experience human emotions. Most Hackernews express regret that they must kill and eat animals to survive, even though they're talking about a story involving an animal none of them have ever eaten. No technology is discussed.
How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project
January 10, 2019
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A grifter writes vague motivational blogspam about how to swim in money. The latest grift involves attempting to "help companies tell stories that inspire with new company," which is both a grammatical disaster and the most bullshit possible business* model. Hackernews enumerates all the ways they've tried to wring dollars from the unsuspecting, generally involving liberal application of webshit. One Hackernews realizes the grifter is in fact an e-mail spammer, but the rest of the Hackernews point out that at least it's quality spam. Another group of Hackernews debates whether money tastes better if you bleed on it first.
I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi
January 11, 2019
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A dipshit discovers that Google does not waste time or money on customer service. Hackernews staffs the lectern in shifts, explaining why it just wouldn't make any sense for Google to give a shit about the people whose money and data they collect, and it's best to just lie back and think of Adsense.
GoDaddy injecting JavaScript into websites and how to stop it
January 12, 2019
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A webshit finally pays attention to the garbage faucet, and is outraged to discover a tracking script someone else dropped in the stream. Hackernews shares in the outrage, and bickers over which domain registrar they should use to host websites. The rest of the comments are Hackernews getting nerd-sniped into escalating the surveillance webshit arms race.
The Man in Seat Sixty-One
January 13, 2019
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A train enthusiast sells information about trains. Hackernews knows a lot about trains -- that is, any given Hackernews who has ridden a train is an expert on that particular train.
Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases
January 14, 2019
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Some webshits make some webshit to centralize all your other webshit. Hackernews dives right in with third-party client software, since webshit is their native language. Later, it turns out the data-scraping webshit also, as it happens, collects as much possible data about every single move you make, to everyone's profound surprise. Other Hackernews pine for some kind of alien technology that would enable them to record and organize text. The problem remains unsolved.
Writing an OS in Rust: Introduction to Paging
January 14, 2019
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The Rust Evangelism Strike Force throws a fancy-dress party, where Rust dresses up as a programming language anyone wants to use for non-webshit tasks. Hackernews finds the material commendably approachable, which is a natural condition that arises from hypothetical programming. Sadly, while the article itself receives a frenzy of vote increases, the content is technical, so Hackernews observes the traditional ten-to-one vote to comment ratio. Most of the comments thirst for embedded systems development in Rust, which is of course a perfect fit for a language so elegant and lightweight that it must be implemented in six million lines of C++ grafted onto a multi-gigabyte compiler toolchain.
* business here used in the most general form, to wit: accepting someone else's money.