webshit weekly

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

Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap
August 22, 2019 (comments)
An Internet writes three thousand words that amount to "hiring people is expensive", then arranges them in a three-inch strip down the center of a web page. Hackernews erupts into civil war wherein the people who like video games fight people who like graphic design. Those Hackernews insufficiently enraged about the central conflict settle for a group session explaining to one another that their memories are wrong, their nostalgia misplaced, their preferences corrupted by the march of progress, and that game you liked in the 1990s was bad.

Introducing nushell
August 23, 2019 (comments)
A Rust Evangelism Strike Force commando, on secondment from Microsoft, pretends that Powershell is worth aping. Hackernews, unwilling or unable to acknowledge the forty years of history behind these concepts, declares this product to be of insufficient vision, and suggests instead discarding all computing interfaces except Chrome's development console. The six people who are impressed by Powershell do not convert any new acolytes, the three people who care about this knockoff remain the only three, and Hackernews continues using zsh or fish, depending on the age they were when they first bought a Mac.

Software Architecture Guide
August 24, 2019 (comments)
Thousands of unsubstantiated lectures are posted on the topic of typing computer programs into computers, but the author completely fails to account for the horrible behavior we've all had to put up with since the author received some kind of face transplant, came back to Walford with basically no notice, and started ruining Sonia and Stacey's lives for no good reason at all. The author spent so much time being so controlling of Stacey and pressuring her into marrying, and then of course when confronted with a problem not solvable by punching someone, the divorce papers come back out. Such a coward. I'm not saying Stacey is a saint (and of course Sonia had her own problems) but nobody deserves this. Hackernews completely ignores all of these important issues and just talks about the right way to type computer programs. Hackernews is such a Poppy.

What happens when you launch Google Chrome for the first time?
August 25, 2019 (comments)
A webshit notices that some software provided by the world's richest surveillance network sends a shitload of information to its authors. Hackernews whatabouts all the other browsers and their vendors, declares the only way users will find privacy is if we have more web browsers, and then complains about the webshit's choice in communications vendor. Sadly, and with great reluctance, several Googles are forced to report the dissidence of their peers to the Office of the Vice President of Knowledge.

Let's build houses for people, not cars
August 26, 2019 (comments)
A webshit takes on Big Asphalt. Hackernews can't tell the difference between government regulation and market incentives, has never heard of demand-responsive transit, and would like everyone to please shut up while Dara Khosrowshahi fixes all transportation-related issues in the United States, preparatory to Brian Chesky fixing the housing crisis.

Please Add RSS Support to Your Site
August 27, 2019 (comments)
A webshit has opinions about webshit. Hackernews organizes themselves into two groups: those who interact with the web on a computer, all of whom would like some manner of syndication, and those who interact with the web on a mobile phone, all of whom think this functionality belongs in whatever messaging application their friends use. The Children of 3GPP are eventually victorious, as the Vested Elders of the Hinge and Switch tear each other apart arguing over whether web browsers should be responsible for browsing syndication feeds. After all, that's not the job of a web browser -- the web browser is there to render HTML, display pictures, play sounds and videos, render 3D graphics, provide a platform for interactive video games, support your virtual reality headset, provide enough operating system primitives to support an entire JITted language capable of being used to write email clients, realtime GIS packages, CAD/CAM operations, and manage radio communications with hardware peripherals. Asking it to also render one XML document is, according to Hackernews, unreasonable.

Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app
August 28, 2019 (comments)
An Internet is evicted from Eden. The problem is swiftly resolved by the usual method of acquiring customer support from Google: whining on social media until someone in Mountain View is bored enough to notice. Hackernews can't decide if Google has reached the point where the federal government should interfere with a mobile phone package repository. Since no progress in this matter is forthcoming, Hackernews recounts all the times they hung their jacket on a shaky nail. In no case is basing your income on someone else's advertising business regarded as worth reconsidering. Instead, other people should build massive world-spanning empires of cash, and if they don't let Hackernews ride along, they should be crushed by whoever Hackernews votes for last. It's the only way to level the playing field.

A deep dive into iOS Exploit chains found in the wild
August 29, 2019 (comments)
Google takes potshots at a competitor's product. Presumably Google's security team started with a "deep dive" into iOS because the suit has yet to be made that can withstand the pressure at the depths to which Android regularly sinks. Hackernews upvotes the story because it's a perfect confluence of Google lecturing people and Apple products being improved, but the content is far too technical to have strong opinions about, so the comments are sparse. Hackernews spends some time trying to Tom Clancy their way into blaming whatever country they're afraid of for the malware, then moves on.

The Baseline Interpreter: A Faster JavaScript Interpreter in Firefox 70
August 30, 2019 (comments)
A Mozilla manages to publish an entire article about the desperate crusade to improve Firefox speed without mentioning Chrome even once. Hackernews, correctly interpreting this to mean that Mozilla is working hard to make Firefox even more exactly like Chrome, upvotes approvingly, but doesn't have much to say about the content of the article, because it is technical in nature. Instead, everyone bitches about which websites are slow and which browsers they don't like; excruciating detail is provided, but no insight, advice, or improvement is found. The rest of the comments are Hackernews identifying keywords in the article and then name-dropping the projects where they first learned those keywords.

The design of littlefs: A fail-safe filesystem designed for microcontrollers
August 31, 2019 (comments)
Some ARM engineers justify their paychecks by providing a survey course on filesystem concepts, then a rationale for spending a tremendous amount of money and energy making a resilient filesystem for devices about whose data designers did not sufficiently care to provide adequate resources for processing. Hackernews has strong opinions on each section of this document, but really prefers to incorrect each other about electrical engineering topics.