webshit weekly

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

I Charged $18k for a Static HTML Page
May 15, 2019 (comments)
A webshit is overpaid and underworked by morons. Hackernews considers this the best-case scenario for their industry, and comments that it's much easier to land such gigs if you stay quiet and let the morons forget about you. After some discussion, they decide that not working while getting paid is perilously close to boredom. Several Hackernews report that some companies actually keep track of what they spend money on, but all of these are determined to be safely disconnected from Silicon Valley.

Can we all stop using Medium now?
May 16, 2019 (comments)
A webshit is mad about medium dot com. Hackernews laments that there is no possible model for content distribution other than digital sharecropping, both because of the Hypothetical Idiot User and because everyone with the necessary training to implement an alternative (i.e. Hackernews) still believes ridiculous SEO urban legends circa the Bush administration. The idea that someone could just rent space in a colocation facility, install a web server, and start posting information onto the internet is, sadly, one hundred percent impossible, and can never happen.

Aldi, a brutally efficient grocery chain, is upending America's supermarkets
May 17, 2019 (comments)
CNN notices a seventy-three-year-old grocery chain. The article is too long, so Hackernews independently reports every single fact contained therein as a timesaving measure. The European division of Hackernews wanders into a corner to argue about which grocery store is best. American Hackernews note that they save money when they shop at stores that have lower prices.

Virtual DOM is pure overhead (2018)
May 18, 2019 (comments)
Some webshits have opinions about javascript. Specifically, the opinions are about which overengineered abstraction javascript victims should swear fealty to. Since the meat of the article is pointless microbenchmarks being used to justify sweeping generalizations regarding implementation details, Hackernews goes absolutely nuts. Three hundred comments appear, each one a graduate-level thesis explaining precisely the best way to reimplement basic web browser functionality using nothing but a programming language, several hundred megabytes of libraries, a virtual machine, a transpiler, and a web browser. Along the way, the Semantic Web people start throwing bombs, and a million unread thinkpieces die in the blast.

How to do hard things
May 19, 2019 (comments)
An Internet introduces the concept of 'practice' to a grateful world. Hackernews argues about whether a specific pottery class was offered. Other Hackernews report that some things are harder than other things.

DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
May 20, 2019 (comments)
A webshit ports rm(1) to Facebook. Hackernews wonders whether we can trust Facebook to delete something when we click on the delete button. All of the rest of the comments are people linking to their implementations of the same idea.

I don't know how CPUs work so I simulated one in code
May 21, 2019 (comments)
A webshit wins the prize for The Hackernewsest Article Title of 2019. By just switching one word, you can derive entire corporate histories of Silicon Valley:

Less entertainingly, the article itself is a mundane recounting of someone following textbook exercises to design a simple processor. Hackernews recounts the classes they took on the topic, and recommends several series of video lectures to play at work while you wait for your CircleCI pipelines to fail since you were too lazy to run them locally before you pushed.