webshit weekly

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

3D Ken Burns Effect from a Single Image
September 15, 2019 (comments)
An academic creates a method for automatically making pictures less interesting. The author then shows up in the comments to argue with Hackernews about how many of them clicked on the video. Then, Hackernews nitpicks the terminology, resulting in a collaborative catalogue of all the various ways that filmmakers can make pictures less interesting to look at.

The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company
September 16, 2019 (comments)
A webshit goes on at length about the same tools all other webshits use. Hackernews is relieved to see that any website exists which was not created via résumé-driven development methodologies, so they recount the stories of their own failed résumé-driven development projects. Other Hackernews, horrified at the prospect of a programmer understanding how the entire program works, insist that actual full-stack development is the demesne of monks (after decades of study) or geniuses (after reading three medium.com articles like this one). Those of you who are reading this week's article to hear about the copyright cult ousting the pedo apologist will be disheartened to learn that this story received hundreds more votes than that one.

Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO
September 17, 2019 (comments)
A webshit company celebrates the acquisition of more debt, and looks forward to paying it back some day. Hackernews either loves the company's product or uses this article as a place to file bug reports. Either way, several Gitlabs arrive in the comments to bask in the adulation and/or make excuses for the shortcomings. A third of the comments are in threads complaining about other people not using the product enough. Some of the comments are complaints that Hackernews is not mean enough to the company.

Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
September 18, 2019 (comments)
Some assholes lost a bid for regulatory capture. Hackernews decides the important next step is for all of them to report what their internet bill is and how fast their connection is supposed to be. After a while that fails to turn into a conversation, so they decide to invent utility service markets from first principles, then move on to incorrecting one another about economics vocabulary.

Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B
September 19, 2019 (comments)
Stripe (business model: "Uber for PayPal") celebrates the acquisition of hundreds of millions of dollars of debt. One of the founders arrives in the comments, so Hackernews takes turns declaring that they use the product. The rest of the comments are bug reports.

ColorBox by Lyft Design
September 20, 2019 (comments)
Lyft (business model: "Uber for cars") runs out of useful webshit development tasks and just starts registering domains for dumb shit. Dumb shit is firmly in Hackernews' wheelhouse, so the link is upvoted to the heavens, but there's nothing useful or interesting about it, so nobody has anything to say. The result is a vote:comment ratio in excess of 10:1. All of the comments are enthusiastic bikeshedding from people who spend all their time caring about color science instead of working.

Why I Write Games in C (yes, C)
September 21, 2019 (comments)
An apostate gives the finger to received wisdom. Hackernews vacillates between insisting that the author is a moron who has never actually done any of the things in the article and competing for the title of Most Restrictive Runtime Target. Soon, it becomes possible to divide Hackernews into the ones whose software has been held accountable to some sort of quality standard and the web programmers. Especially entertaining in this comment thread are the Go aficionados who pride themselves in their knowledge of how to work around most of the language's features.