webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the last week of February, 2020.

More bosses give four-day workweek a try
February 21, 2020 (comments)
Some bureaucrats take some time off. Hackernews is mostly interested in avoiding traffic. Other Hackernews try to rationalize the innate natural laws that lead to a forty-hour workweek, which immediately turns into a one-sided pissing match. As the people who prefer to work longer hours over fewer days dickwave about their indefatigable work ethic, the people who have lives express a deep and fundamental unwillingness to give a shit.

Does memory leak? (1995)
February 22, 2020 (comments)
An Ada mailing list contains the origins of the Android development model, wherein the software is carefully calibrated not to crash until the hardware suddenly ceases being supported. Instead of taking the message of the original story, Hackernews tells stories of memory allocation strategies they heard about in bars. Later, the Rust Evangelism Strike Force shows up and demands access to weapons platforms, nuclear reactors, and aircraft. Finally, Hackernews holds an ethics seminar wherein we are told that the only indefensible use of computer programming is weapons systems. Writing software to track how much time a warehouse picker spends pissing is fine, though.

Mathematics for the Adventurous Self-Learner
February 23, 2020 (comments)
A webshit writes a book report. Hackernews is mad that people take it for granted that everyone went to high school; upon asking for advice, other Hackernews provide every possible response. The complainer never returns. As usual with math-related topics, Hackernews votes the link into the stratosphere, but doesn't have much to say about it, so the vote:comment ratio exceeds 6:1.

“We found PayPal vulnerabilities and PayPal punished us for it”
February 24, 2020 (comments)
Some webshits discover that bug bounty programs are in fact extortion honeypots. Hackernews can't decide if the evil comes from within PayPal or from the bureaucrats they hired to maintain the illusion of interest. Each Hackernews takes a turn whining about the time they broke some software and were insufficiently rewarded for their ingenuity. Then, of course, the webshit Hackernews show up to claim that none of the problems are actually problems and the article authors got what they deserved.

Smithsonian Releases 2.8M Images into Public Domain
February 25, 2020 (comments)
A museum dumps its purse onto the internet. Hackernews is glad it happened, but struggles to find anything meaningful to say about it, so they resort to bitching about the style of the website and the license applied to the data.

Tailwind UI
February 26, 2020 (comments)
Some webshits have managed to completely remove any advantage of CSS while simultaneously making it an even bigger percentage of a given web page. This sort of counterproductive wheelspinning is right up Hackernews' alley, so they immediately get elbow-deep in pedantic arguments about the most aesthetically pleasing and ethos-expressing methods of putting a drop shadow on a modal newsletter-nag dialog. In the end, the only real problem with this software that Hackernews correctly identifies is that some asshole has the temerity to demand payment for having produced it.

Let's Encrypt Has Issued a Billion Certificates
February 27, 2020 (comments)
Quantity over quality, in all things webshit, but most of all in ephemeral certificates. One Hackernews wants to know which certificate was the actual billionth certificate, and a LetsEncrypt arrives to provide a high-quality, technically-excellent answer: there's no way to know, because Let's Encrypt's monitoring and accounting is for shit. Hackernews loves free certificates and is not very picky about reliability, so after the party dies down they sit around the fire and incorrect one another about how certificate trust is implemented on the web.

Freeman Dyson Has Died
February 28, 2020 (comments)
A scientist has passed away. Hackernews has a handful of personal anecdotes about the deceased, but mostly prefers to politicize opinions about climate change. A handful wonder why the site administrators ignored the passing of a mathematician (who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a Congressional Gold Medal) but noted the passing of a scientist who did not. They are instructed to fuck off.