webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of January, 2020.

Broot – A new way to see and navigate directory trees
January 08, 2020 (comments)
The Rust Evangelism Strike Force, using a mere five thousand lines of code (not counting the twenty remotely-imported libraries), implements a version of ls(1) that is not good at listing files. Hackernews has been looking for a file explorer with a complicated user interface for a very long time, and is extremely pleased. The author shows up, and to demonstrate their gratitude, Hackernews bickers over the Github etiquette, then lists all the other programs that have had the same functionality since the Reagan administration.

BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
January 09, 2020 (comments)
An Internet tries to convince us that a dead operating system was good by comparing it to a bad one. Hackernews experiences a devastating nostalgia storm, which gives way to dozens of minor skirmishes about who was a better middle manager or which 1980s computer processor could do a specific trick. Later Hackernews assert that the industry has progressed far since then, and hold up as evidence a pile of reimplementations of the 1990s software, but with webshit.

VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now
January 10, 2020 (comments)
A computer game gets naked. Hackernews tries to understand how the computer game attained popularity despite not adhering to received programming wisdom. Later, Hackernews mourns the death of Adobe Flash, and investigates the sixteen thousand half-assed replacements that have popped up over the years.

Goodbye, Clean Code
January 11, 2020 (comments)
A webshit seizes the means of abstraction. Having just read an article on the topic of inappropriate rigor in software design, Hackernews sets about generating an inappropriately rigorous metric for deciding when rigor may be inappropriate. In the rest of the discussions, Hackernews debates whether it's appropriate to spend company money duplicating a colleague's work because you didn't like the shape of the text.

Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run
January 12, 2020 (comments)
A webshit enthusiastically emits fifteen hundred words describing Google's reimplementation of CGI, which works absolutely wonderfully as long as nobody uses any of your websites. Hackernews is excited about the possibilities of CGI++, but concerned because (like all cloud services) there's no way to cap expenditures and nobody at the hosting company gives a shit about you or your problems. The cloud apologists arrive to assure everyone that neither of these are problems and you should just relax and move your products into this service ASAP. It's 2020, after all.

iOS 13 app tracking alert has dramatically cut location data flow to ad industry
January 13, 2020 (comments)
Apple successfully reroutes the digital oil pipelines to their own refineries. Hackernews declares that Tim Cook is the chosen one, foretold to defend us from their day jobs. Some light Android astroturfing occurs in response, but is blown away in the relentless gale of hot air about how much Apple cares about us on an intimate, familial level.

Patch Critical Cryptographic Vulnerability in Microsoft Windows [pdf]
January 14, 2020 (comments)
The National Security Agency, for the first time in recorded history, contributes as an Agency to the Security of the Nation. Hackernews is always delighted at the opportunity to be seen in public trying to understand cryptography, even if the lispy webshit they're using isn't really up to the task. Other Hackernews realize, with creeping horror, that Let's Encrypt did not, in fact, protect them against advanced persistent threats, despite the repeated whining from peripheral security-theater hucksters. When will these assholes learn that the only way to respond to a hostile government is to overthrow it? Stay tuned to find out.