webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the third week of April, 2019.

Notre-Dame cathedral: Firefighters tackle blaze in Paris
April 15, 2019 (comments)
The French memorial of the death of Saint Fructuosus gets a little out of hand. Hackernews can't make up their minds whether they are architects, historians, or theoretical firefighters, so the resulting thread contains the absolute finest collection of wild-ass guesses on this range of topics. Because of the sudden nature of the disaster, facts are scarce, and that's where Hackernews feels the most qualified to opine. No technology is discussed.

Animating URLs with JavaScript and Emojis
April 16, 2019 (comments)
A webshit demonstrates the depth of javascript depravity. The demonstration is pointless, wasteful, and obnoxious, so Hackernews is on board for votes, but it is not interesting, so the webshit shows up in the comment thread to talk about how to make bad videos instead.

Post-surgical deaths in Scotland drop by a third, attributed to a checklist
April 17, 2019 (comments)
The World Health Organization demands credit for getting Scottish doctors to kill moderately fewer people. The solution appears to be a checklist, presumably strategically placed between the whisky bottle and the benefits application. Hackernews creates an agile development model for producing checklists, then lists every computer program anyone has ever written to implement them.

Mozilla WebThings
April 18, 2019 (comments)
Mozilla introduces another product that has nothing to do with their only valuable asset. Hackernews is extremely excited, because they regard Mozilla as the only possible resistance against the dominance of Google. Since the primary difference is that when Google arbitrarily terminates a product there are users affected, we can conclude the foremost concern among Hackernews is harm reduction for abandonware.

Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties
April 19, 2019 (comments)
Some idiots in Europe want to get into a fistfight with the weather. Hackernews gets into an argument about which countries are going to try to deanonymize the internet next, which countries have laws that would prevent idiocy on this scale, and which countries don't have such laws but are populated with such superior people that nobody would even consider it. Other Hackernews, who have read too many Robert Ludlum novels, tell each other campfire stories about hiding from the government.

Joe Armstrong has died
April 20, 2019 (comments)
A programmer passes away. Hackernews relates stories of the programmer's kindness, and struggles not to notice that they've collectively ignored basically every idea the programmer has expressed for the past thirty years.

SuperTuxKart 1.0 Release
April 21, 2019 (comments)
Some programmers release a new version of their cloned video game. Hackernews can't understand why nobody is charging money for it.