webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of May, 2019.

Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story
May 08, 2019 (comments)
A tech company would like to stop doing a couple things the hard way. Hackernews considers the ramifications of minor changes in a service atop which they've spent over a decade building sandcastles. In the process, they reinvent the Internet from first principles. Many Hackernews are flummoxed that they cannot forever trust promises like "your data will last ten thousand years." Other Hackernews smugly point out that the data will be intact, merely inaccessible -- because the precise wording of an idiotic assurance is much more important than the idiocy of the assurance.

We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business
May 09, 2019 (comments)
Some spammers are so vile that not even PayPal wants to do business with them. Hackernews is mostly okay with this, except for the ones who expect full accountability from a company whose business model is "we're a bank, but without all that pesky consumer protection" (2019 edition: "Uber for banking"). The rest of Hackernews drags out horror stories about all the times PayPal was mean to them, too, and hypothesizes the right set of money-transfer rituals to undertake so that they may continue to enrich companies who are actively hostile to them.

GitHub Package Registry
May 10, 2019 (comments)
Microsoft would like webshits to entrust even more of their shit unto GitHub. This news is hailed as a definitive win by the people who have encrusted their working lives with sufficient bureaucracy that they spend at least half their time untangling themselves from it. Some debate occurs over whether the incumbent services can withstand a frontal assault from Microsoft, but most of the discussion focuses on which webshit Microsoft will absorb next. The remaining comments consist of whining that someone else's favorite programming language got picked first.

Adults learn language to fluency nearly as well as children: study
May 11, 2019 (comments)
The owner of some language-teaching webshit would like people to learn languages, even if they are old. Hackernews suspects this might be a trick, but gets distracted by spouting wild-ass guesses about the nature of learning, cognition, linguistics, and human society. No technology is discussed.

How I Run a Company with ADHD
May 12, 2019 (comments)
An Internet has advice on how to overcome a tendency to get distracted: have someone give you thousands of dollars to focus, or else pay someone to tell you to focus. The result is a terrifying glimpse into the psyche of Hackernews; they catalog all of their personality traits they've determined to be abnormal, the methods through which they discovered the apparent abnormality, and the rituals they undertake to ensure they can still click emoji reaction buttons on GitHub issues for a living. Nothing, however, is quite as disturbing as the Hackernews who reports having played "handball at an elite level," which caused me to search the Internet for "semi-professional macaroni necklaciers." It turns out there is only one: Gavin Hazelwood, of Australia.

WhatsApp voice calls were used to inject spyware on phones
May 13, 2019 (comments)
In a bid to evade European anti-trust investigations, Facebook now bundles third-party spyware with some products. Hackernews argues over who the good guys are, then spends six hours refreshing their phones' app store to try to get the version without the malware conduit.

ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Intel CPUs
May 14, 2019 (comments)
Intel continues the war against its own users. The news of an Intel hardware security flaw is by now so unsurprising that Hackernews spends most of its time complaining that the academics who identified the latest batch of failures did not get a sufficiently artistic shout-out in the GReeTZ section of Intel's mitigation .nfo. If Intel spent as much money on hardware engineering as they do on convincing shareholders their core product is not a Matroyshka doll of bad decisions, at the very least they wouldn't be a full generation behind on PCIe. The rest of the field day sees Hackernews select among several now-traditional Intel Flaw Thread Activities: reminiscing about architectures gone by, incorrecting one another about how computers work, fretting about Intel stock prices, and pretending they're going to buy anything else ever.