webshit weekly

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

Disclaimer: This week sucks. It's like Hackernews went on vacation and wasn't trapped in a FAANG cube forced to clockwatch their way through the day. No refunds.

Save .org
November 22, 2019 (comments)
Some Internets decide to Make a Difference. Hackernews is convinced they could rebuild DNS from first principles, but get bogged down deciding whether it's most appropriately implemented at the browser layer or the United Nations layer. Other Hackernews are convinced they already have rebuilt DNS from first principles, but they can't seem to get any traction with people who don't give a shit about Bitcoin. Most of the rest of Hackernews are outraged that someone is rat-fucking the internet to make a ton of money and nobody invited Hackernews.

The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
November 23, 2019 (comments)
A delusional asshole rambles into a text editor. No coherent thoughts are expressed, but we are treated to ringside seats as a dimwit attempts to understand intelligence. Hackernews tries to figure out what life might be like for people who are not completely consumed by whatever topic happens to impose itself upon their lives. Later, the conversation turns to a search for methods to prevent human life from interfering with obssessive behavior. The most common answers involve paying other people to do things so you can spend more time with your derangement. Finally, the conversation arrives at the natural terminus for the topic: can Hackernews get rich playing video games? Why not?

Beating C with one line of Brainfuck
November 24, 2019 (comments)
An Internet plays with computers. Hackernews votes for the link because they enjoy the hipster flex involved, but they don't post comments because there's nothing interesting to discuss. Since anyone mentioned C, most of the comments are people whining about C.

Interactive Linear Algebra
November 25, 2019 (comments)
Some academics learned javascript. There is a shitload of javascript present, so Hackernews votes for the link, but it's all about math, so there are roughly half as many comments as about the previous story, which discussed a programming language called Brainfuck. The few comments which are not recommendations for other books are from Hackernews desperate to demonstrate that they know at least one more Math Thing than the authors.

Psilocybin for major depression granted Breakthrough Therapy by FDA
November 26, 2019 (comments)
The Food and Drug Association declares war on the Drug Enforcement Administration. Because this story is about drugs instead of mathematics, it recieves ten times more comments, most of which are from Hackernews effusing about the Life-Changing Experience they underwent at a Phish concert. The rest of the comments are just your typical day of rich people publicly discussing the best ways to break federal law because it's faster than meditating. Half of all United States Federal prison inmates are there on drug convictions.

Lessons learned building an ML trading system
November 27, 2019 (comments)
A machine learning charlatan has a hammer. Hackernews also has that hammer, and has spent a lot of time listening to podcasts about nails. No technology is discussed, except for literally one comment that ballparks the colocation cost for an entry-level high-frequency trading system.

Firefox Replay
November 28, 2019 (comments)
Mozilla continues its war against Mozilla. Hackernews stumbles upon an upcoming feature for webshit programmers, which Mozilla immediately hides. The resulting comment threads are people trading links to the Internet Archive and trying to deduce what this feature does and why they don't need it. Most of the comments are asking why people would use a Mac or else rushing to the defense of Mac users.

ISOC sold the .org registry to Ethos Capital for $1.1B
November 29, 2019 (comments)
The Internet Society continues its war against the Internet. Hackernews has no new information since the last time this got discussed, so they just post all the same comments again (or, in some cases, they just link to their previous comments instead).

Calculus Explained with GIFs and Pics (2014)
November 30, 2019 (comments)
An Internet posts some math. There's an image macro with Will Ferrell in it, which I assume makes it different enough from "some rando's high school notebook" that Hackernews finds it voteworthy. I'm not sure any of them are even paying attention any more. There are even fewer comments than there were about the last math story, and half of them are a discussion of how wrong the article is. The author shows up and asks for tips on making Chinese people care.