webshit weekly

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

JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised
December 15, 2019 (comments)
An Internet is excited about selling text editors. Hackernews list all the software they would use if it were sold slightly differently, and get distracted along the way by an argument about whether git is simple. Inevitably, the rest of the comments are from vim and emacs users insisting that mice are for losers, followed by mouse users insisting that vim and emacs users are assholes.

Nebraska farmers vote overwhelmingly for Right to Repair
December 16, 2019 (comments)
The mice vote to bell the cat. Hackernews holds a seminar on intellectual property laws surrounding genetically modified crops. The rest of the discussion centers around expressions of sympathy for the average person, who is not lucky enough to be a Hackernews (and thus able to magically overcome draconian patent laws).

Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud
December 17, 2019 (comments)
Google deprecates another service. Some Googles arrive in the comments to declare that there's nothing to see here, but Hackernews is not so sure, since Google has discontinued or ruined every Google product Hackernews has ever relied upon. The most common argument is that Google would never dare to discontinue a service aimed at businesses; it is only mere customers who are kicked to the curb. Presumably these people are still extremely satisfied with their Google Search Appliances.

Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard
December 18, 2019 (comments)
The leading manufacturers of personal surveillance furniture decide to get together and make one another's job easier. Hackernews is pleased, and proceeds to invent device security protocols based on what's sitting in their house at the moment.

This Page is Designed to Last
December 19, 2019 (comments)
An academic pisses into the wind. Hackernews has strong opinions regarding bookmarking; primary among them is that the more complicated your bookmarking system is, the better. Better than bookmarking is just saving every character that passes through your browser. Better still is paying someone else to do that for you, remotely. The rest of the comments are Hackernews identifying which aspects of modern web development are irrevocably necessary. Chief among them: web fonts.

Fast
December 20, 2019 (comments)
A rich person is angry that building a bus lane is taking too long. Hackernews takes issue with some of the comparisons the author draws, but then gets into the real meat of the issue: Western civilization is no longer sufficiently nimble, and Hackernews has the solutions. They include fascism, being more willing to die, working to exhaustion, and all the other things China does to achieve meaningless political goals at the expense of human life and dignity.

The Deep Sea
December 21, 2019 (comments)
A webshit breaks new ground in low-density information transmission. Despite being, essentially, an extremely tall static page, it manages to use more compute resources than watching Netflix, so Hackernews is super excited about it and votes for it in droves. The only thing Hackernews would do differently is link each picture to Wikipedia, but since that feature is missing, they manually paste Wikipedia quotes about animals for a few hours.