webshit weekly
An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the third week of November, 2019.
Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival
November 15, 2019
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Some blogspammers write a clickbait headline. The actual situation is that a Wikipedia-related news business failed, so Wales fired all the actual journalists and now charges idiots money for the privilege of Speedy Deleting each other's posts. Hackernews debates what the ideal discussion website might look like. No conclusions are reached, so they start arguing about whether this Wikitwitter costs too much, how important it is to keep poors out of your website, and what the correct amount of money is to make that happen.
Joplin – a note taking and to-do application with synchronization capabilities
November 16, 2019
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Some webshits invent the text editor. Hackernews lists all of the other webshit text editors. The Cult of Org-mode hands out pamphlets.
Writing userspace USB drivers for abandoned devices
November 17, 2019
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An Internet uses some computer hardware. Hackernews is impressed with this demonstration of technical effort, but doesn't have much use for the results (or intentions of replicating the results) so there aren't many comments. Most of them are complaints that some device Hackernews bought in 1997 does not work well with the Macbook they bought fifteen minutes ago.
Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank
November 18, 2019
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An Internet dumps a bank's purse on the table. Hackernews is extremely interested in this news, because if they can find common threads between the breached software and their work product they may have a shot at convincing management to let them fix some of the more egregious bugs they have to live near. The vast majority of the comments are solemn predicitons of the new and unrecognizable world which will be heralded by the enormity of the released data, or else the speed with which the world will ignore all of it.
How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]
November 19, 2019
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An academic points out that Tensorflow might not immediately solve all our problems. Hackernews does not have time to read all twenty slides, but has time to tell us a story about a bad ML product. This story is the springboard from which we hear about every time Hackernews was smarter than a machine learning program. Eventually, some Hackernews directly address the talk in questions, and the author arrives in the comments to thank them.
Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible
November 20, 2019
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An Internet doesn't like the new version of a webshit IRC client. Hackernews, and I am not exaggerating here, posts an actual thousand comments about the input field of a webshit IRC client. Most of them appear to be angry at the management of the company, pictured here. The bulk of the complaints appear to be whining that specific keystrokes which worked last week do not work this week. At first, Hackernews reports that the company refused to reverse course on the matter. After some time goes by, the company decides that alienating the only cadre of people who give a shit about their product might not be a foolproof business plan.
1000fps image projection on deforming non-rigid surface
November 21, 2019
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Some academics finally deliver the decades-old dream of humanity: animated GIFs on t-shirts. The effect is striking, but the technology is difficult, so Hackernews has about one-tenth as much to say as they had for the slightly-different chat window the day before. Most of the comments are suggestions for applications of the technology based almost entirely on a complete misunderstanding of how it works. Those Hackernews who do understand how it works have nothing substantive to say, so they stick with polysyllabic variants of "wow!"