webshit weekly

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

Disclaimer: I wrote this article on the side of a mountain using an OLPC XO-4 with a Spanish keyboard. These typos were honestly come by and I intend to keep them.

I didn't get paid, so I open-sourced my client’s project
June 08, 2019 (comments)
A webshit learns how much 'full-stack' development is worth. Hackernews is outraged to discover that some webshit oversteps its bounds when demanding access to personal information. The author shows up to explain that getting hosed by a client is par for the webshit course, but Hackernews sternly informs everyone that work belongs to the client, even if they stiff you.

Blender Is Free Software
June 09, 2019 (comments)
Some programmers confuse a licensing contract with a religion. Hackernews can't understand why more people don't convert to the religion. After spending some time bikeshedding the phrasing of the liturgy, Hackernews invents the labor theory of value from first principles, but mistakes 'typing things into VS Code' for labor.

Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome
June 10, 2019 (comments)
An Internet is upset about not being able to more efficiently contribute to Google's feature detection products. Some Hackernews suggest that it might be possible to be dissatisfied with Google; a donnybrook ensues.

Micro Frontends
June 10, 2019 (comments)
A webshit advocates creating websites by making dozens of smaller, shittier websites and mashing them together client-side. Hackernews strongly encourages this behavior, because the currently-fashionable pile of abstractions is too fragile to survive sane development practice. Also, it's what they were taught to do during their last stint either at Amazon itself or some also-ran who desperately cargo-cults Amazon's programming directives. Down at the bottom, greyed out by downvotes, one Hackernews plots an escape from the webshit mines...

No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
June 11, 2019 (comments)
Some webshits try to figure out how to get anything done when nobody is in charge. For inspiration, they turn to the IETF, which disrupted voting by not counting votes and just doing whatever Google thought of. Hackernews, masters all of human interaction, know what the problem is but declare it insoluble. No technology is discussed.

The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)
June 12, 2019 (comments)
IPv6 still sucks, and an Internet recounts the path that got it there. A Hackernews Beauty Pageant finalist shows up, so there is a flurry of interest in this years-old post. Many words are excreted in defense of a protocol so awful that a majority of the Internet utterly ignores it with no measurable impact.

Dear Bureaucrat, my job wants me to lie
June 13, 2019 (comments)
Some rando is displeased with the disconnect between reality and corporate politics. Advice is dispensed: maybe try to fix it? but probably don't bother. Hackernews recounts all the times they were bullshitted via paperwork, then spends the afternoon telling each other why that was wrong. No technology is discussed.

My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
June 14, 2019 (comments)
An Internet is radicalized. Hackernews isn't so sure this is the best plan, but can't get to the bottom of anything because each participant's opinion is based entirely on whether they write more code than they run or vice versa. Fully one quarter of the comments are Hackernews incorrecting each other about copyright law. Nobody changes their mind as a result of any of the text involved, in the article or in the comments.