webshit weekly

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

Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)
February 15, 2020 (comments)
Webshit middle management worries you might not be artisanally curating joy in the garbage code you shit out for money. Hackernews trades italicized quotes regarding the importance of treating customers like retarded assholes. Other Hackernews take turns explaining to one another what the article meant to say, then explaining that what the article means to say changes based on where the reader works. The consensus is that large organizations work better when someone puts programmers in charge of them.

1-on-1 meeting questions
February 16, 2020 (comments)
Webshit middle management week continues, featuring some idiot who uses node.js to typeset a list of sentences. This week, Hackernews examines a shitload of vague questions you can use to waste your employees' time, cause them to question your motives based on the invasive nature of some of these questions, or report you to the Department of Labor. Hackernews isn't so sure it's a good idea to play Mad Libs with your staff's performance review, but they can't decide if treating people like human beings is the right answer. About a third of the comments are Hackernews discussing a shared workplace hobby, wherein they make wild-ass assumptions about the ways other people might want them to act, and then force themselves to comply with these unfounded beliefs for years or decades.

Pay up or we’ll make Google ban your ads
February 17, 2020 (comments)
Google customers get what they pay for. The Hackernews comments fall into two categories: people who think that it is functionally impossible to access the internet without Google's blessing, and people who Google financially dry-gulched and left for dead. The latter try to warn the former, but their words fall upon deaf Airpods.

Larry Tesler Has Died
February 18, 2020 (comments)
A computer scientist passes away. While most of the comments are Hackernews remembrance of the deceased, they do manage to take a short break to discover that ASCII exists and can be represented in hexadecimal form.

Explorabl.es
February 19, 2020 (comments)
A webshit invents Hypercard, complete with leaving all the decks unfinished. Hackernews thinks the missing piece is either a GUI toolkit or a programming language that encompasses a GUI toolkit. The rest of the comments are links to similar webshit toys.

Real-time, in-camera background compositing in The Mandalorian
February 20, 2020 (comments)
Disney rips off the 'black hole' scene in Ok Go's 'Obsession' music video, only with a great big fucking TV instead of a shitload of printers. Hackernews doesn't have much to contribute to this discussion, so they ask how hard it is to get a job as a video game programmer, then stage a halfhearted argument about how bad Star Wars has become. The extent of the discussion of this technology on Hackernews reaches "how big are the pixels" and "how much does that cost, I bet a lot." But Hackernews likes the show, so this gets voted up.

How to Write Usefully
February 21, 2020 (comments)
The Absentee Father of "Hacker" "News", who has never written a single word of any use to anyone, achieves new heights of narrative irony. Since Hackernews is forbidden by charter from public disagreeing with the Prophet Paul, they hastily construct parallel arguments amongst themselves, so that if the loser happens to have been aligned with holy doctrine, the church will not suffer a direct loss of face. One Hackernews relates a story about reading the Word, and rejecting it; reading the Word, and disdaining it; and finally, reading the Word, and accepting it as the Ineffable Truth. Others are still lost in the wilderness, but in time the shepherd will tend unto them. No technology is discussed.