webshit weekly

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

Cloudflare S-1
August 15, 2019 (comments)
An internet company, through hard work and dedication, manages to keep their annual losses down in the tens of millions of dollars, and would therefore like to be considered a real corporation which adults run. Hackernews is concerned by the money hemorrhage, but figures they'll make it up in volume. Other Hackernews believe the company's claims that offering their product for free is worthwhile because it allows them to spend more money on R&D. Other Hackernews bikeshed the stock ticker symbol.

Japanese anime studio Khara moving to Blender
August 16, 2019 (comments)
Some programmers are excited about some cartoonists using their software. Hackernews is mad at Autodesk, so they're happy to see the cartoonists adopt competing software. Every program ever made capable of rendering an image is named, and then a couple Hackernews argue over whether things that require training to use should be permitted to exist.

WeWTF
August 17, 2019 (comments)
An academic develops immunity to a startup's Reality Distortion Field. Hackernews enjoys the author's aggressive writing style, especially because they think they are not the target. A debate breaks out about whether riding a wave of baseless technohype constitutes fraud or is merely a business plan best executed by shitheads. The Hackernews who are familiar with financial sector acronyms hold a masterclass on Terrible Business Hype Train writing, then everyone circles up to lecture one another on the correct operation of a national business. BoF sessions are held on grifting money off the business you launched, identifying and/or creating bad investment opportunities, and the Twitter musings of the Hackernews Beauty Pageant Bronze Medalist. No technology is discussed.

How to Build Good Software
August 18, 2019 (comments)
A politician's child takes four thousand words to advise us to hire competent people and have them work carefully. Hackernews is deeply moved by the idea that knowing things is an important contributing factor to being good at things. Other Hackernews debate whether it's okay that the government in question is completely devoid of human rights because they make the trains run on time. The rest of the comments are various Hackernews selecting an excerpt from the article, declaring it correct, and then getting angry that nobody is doing it right.

I Miss Microsoft Encarta
August 19, 2019 (comments)
A Microsoft advertises a product they don't even sell any more. Since the article is about playing with dead technology, the author playfully appends ".aspx" onto the URL. Hackernews succumbs to a nostalgia epidemic. Some Microsofts-in-exile arrive to reminisce about making the product.

IBM Open-Sources Power Chip Instruction Set
August 20, 2019 (comments)
IBM gives up. Hackernews struggles to understand why anyone would use this technology, because there are much better options: commonly-available processors at one tenth the cost, cellphone shitware affordable even by non-vested employees, and imaginary CPU fanfiction. Consensus is reached that IBM probably should have given up some decades ago. The Blue Gene team is convinced they did.

16M Americans will vote on hackable paperless machines
August 21, 2019 (comments)
A journalist reminds us that computers are terrible, even when we depend on them. The article is largely obscured by a pointless "read more" link, which when clicked just reveals more of the text that was already loaded, and which I am feverishly porting to this website as fast as possible. Hackernews spends some time wallowing in political-party conspiracy theories, then divides into two separate camps. One camp wants to argue about whether computers can ever be made less terrible, and all of the plans for doing so involve hiring Hackernews to do everything correctly. The other camp wants to argue about how all the other countries do everything better than America does, which is why the residents of those countries closely follow American politics, while Americans regard those countries as cheap sources of labor, if we regard those countries at all. (We do not.)