webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the last week of March, 2019.

Bitcoin ETF research finds that 95% of Bitcoin volume is fake
March 22, 2019 (comments)
Bitcoin Idiots, LLC performs an analysis of the circulation of Fedoral Reserve Notes. It concludes that everything is fine, except for the rampant fraud, because if you are very selective about who you believe, you can pretend the Dunning-Krugerrand market looks something like markets for things that are actually valuable. Hackernews sets up a guard tower to gatekeep the incoming opinion flood based on who spends enough time obsessing over this garbage. Nobody mentions the fact that the 'health' of Bitcoin markets are judged by how closely they resemble the money markets they purport to render obsolete, even though the primary sales pitch involves removing human trust from the process.

Dell Autism Hiring Program
March 23, 2019 (comments)
Dell wonders if maybe their hiring process can be improved. Hackernews debates whether this is a cynical attempt to mine talent from previously-overlooked seams or a genuine attempt to treat human resources as human beings. Some Hackernews consider labeling such personnel so their specific status is on display at all times, an idea that nobody got from Nazi concentration camps.

Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
March 24, 2019 (comments)
Some webshits would like to teach you math. Half of Hackernews are working on almost-identical webshit, and are eager to discuss their versions in detail. The other half have strongly-held pedagogical views derived entirely from how badly they performed in grade school.

Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number
March 25, 2019 (comments)
Some rando is angry about the Twitter signup process. Hackernews erupts into philosophistry about where "typing text into some company's webshit" lands on the spectrum of liberty, from 'fundamental human right' to 'anyone who would want to do this should go to jail.' Many terrible analogies are created as Hackernews performs a half-assed crowdsourced comparative analysis of other webshits one might type text into. Nobody at Twitter notices.

A guide to difficult conversations
March 26, 2019 (comments)
A grifter posts on medium dot com a series of tips for people who do not know how to talk without being a huge asshole. Hackernews recounts all conversations they've had where at least one participant was an asshole, and trades URLs for commercial products that purport to compensate for various forms of assholery. I'm not sure why I was surprised, given the existence of so many other corporate products that exist to train Hackernews how to be human, but the existence of multiple competing product lines teaching idiots how to talk like a human being was a bit of an eye-opener. Look for the n-gate entry into this market, coming soon to a vanity publisher near you.

Facebook to ban white nationalist content
March 27, 2019 (comments)
Facebook takes away some snowflakes' safe space. Hackernews is absolutely outraged that someone in Silicon Valley could dare set foot on such a slippery slope, which could lead to a society in which you might not be able to post whatever you want on any website you happen across. In particular, Hackernews is concerned that this action may open the door to further persecute a specific political party, which is so downtrodden and abused that it merely controls two and a half of the three branches of the United States Government. These fears are met with similar concerns for the health and well-being of another party, which recently controlled a similar swath of American politics. Because no actual technology is discussed, and the comment threads are entirely composed of arm-chair legal theory, the vote to comment ratio is breathtakingly close to 0.5:1.

Why Bother with What Three Words?
March 28, 2019 (comments)
An Internet doesn't like some startup. Hackernews isn't sure whether the startup is worth a shit, but it sure doesn't like some Internet barging in and slandering a venture-backed operation. There is, apparently, honor among thieves, after all. Everyone seems to agree that the actual coordinate system rented out by the startup is sort of stupid, which is a good reason to name every other coordinate system ever invented, as well as inventing a few new failures along the way.

Apple Cancels AirPower Product
March 29, 2019 (comments)
Apple suddenly has quality standards for hardware. This news comes as a surprise to Hackernews and presumably many hardware engineers at Apple. Hackernews gets to work guessing what engineering problem caused the product to be canceled, then sets about solving poorly-conceived design challenges with poorly-understood lectures about physics.

Bezos Investigation Says the Saudis Obtained His Private Data
March 30, 2019 (comments)
The Saudi royal family will stop at nothing to collect dick pics, which raises the obvious question: why did they pursue Jeff Bezos instead of just making a Tinder account? Hackernews is flabbergasted that mobile phones are not perfectly secure, and begins to panic about the amount of blackmail material being theoretically accumulated by whatever political operative a given commenter fears the most.

Intel VISA Exploit Gives Access to Computer’s Entire Data, Researchers Show
March 31, 2019 (comments)
In what is easily the most horrific possible news story in the information technology industry, some security researchers reveal the terrifying, nightmarish truth: if you have a computer, you can access it. With a little bit of work, you can even get it to do things. Hackernews breaks up into focus groups, trying to decide who should be the most afraid. Preliminary reports indicate that video-streaming rent-seekers should be moderately concerned, perhaps, but nobody can exactly define who should actually give a shit, or how.