webshit weekly

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

A music discovery site used in over 1M videos and games
April 07, 2020 (comments)
Some musicians upload music to a website. Hackernews likes free shit, but there's nothing to talk about, so they link to other music-related sites instead. Some Hackernews are mad that the musicians decided to upload their music.

New Google SRE book: Building Secure and Reliable Systems
April 08, 2020 (comments)
Some Googles publish an ebook about how smart Googles are. The books are all incorrectly formatted, served with incorrect MIME types from incorrectly-configured web servers, and require extreme feats of imagination to be applicable outside of Google. None of this deters Hackernews' worshipful gratitude, which some Googles arrive to accept.

Why I’m Leaving Elm
April 09, 2020 (comments)
A webshit leaves an abusive relationship, but it's not clear which party was the abuser. Hackernews agrees that someone is an asshole, but can't quite reach consensus regarding who. A Hackernews storms out of the web forum upon encountering the idea that people can behave nicely with bad motivations. Hackernews works around the cognitive dissonance with judicious metonymy-based equivocation: softening the blows of criticism by subtly conflating an author and a work. Various technology-based solutions are proposed as workarounds for assholery, regardless of origin.

Signal threatens to dump US market if EARN IT act passes
April 09, 2020 (comments)
A phone app used only by reporters on Twitter thinks anyone gives a single shit what they do. Hackernews doesn't care about the phone app either, but they are each of them the World's Foremost Authority on both cryptography and the law (any law), so they hold forth with interminably misguided analysis of every argument that has or could have been made in any direction. All of these opinions appeared the last time the United States Government declared war on mathematics, and all of them will appear again next time.

Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
April 10, 2020 (comments)
The only two cellular telephone vendors on Earth join forces to write a press release. The press release contains a declaration of intent to construct a massive surveillance framework weeks or months after there could be any medical value, but just in time to kowtow to impending United States federal abuse powers. Hackernews attempts to reverse engineer the promised pandempticon. One Hackernews gets mad that people don't like the privacy implications of this press release, given that the press release is expected to save trillions of lives; this immediately degenerates into Facebook whataboutism. The remainder of the comments are people declaring privacy to have died in the 1980s or otherwise exercising corpophilic tendencies.

John Conway has died
April 11, 2020 (comments)
A mathematician passes away. Hackernews recounts their encounters with, legends about, and influences received from the mathematician.

Colornames.org – A collaborative effort to name all 16.7M colors
April 12, 2020 (comments)
Some webshits collect spam. Hackernews explores the spam, and tries to count how many words would be required to automatically generate nonsense names for the webshit colorspace.

Inkscape 1.0 Release Candidate
April 13, 2020 (comments)
Some programmers release version 1.0 of their program, which is slightly incompatible with the past seventeen years' worth of releases. Hackernews is excited that, at long last, the software will work on their Macbooks. It already did, but now it will work slightly differently than before, and that's wonderful. Other Hackernews don't like the software in question, because it was mean to them once during the Bush administration. One Hackernews is extremely angry that nobody pays attention to rambling 1,500-word bug reports.

GitHub is now free for teams
April 14, 2020 (comments)
Github makes minor modifications to their pricing structure, then the CEO shows up to astroturf. While many Hackernews snuggle into Microsoft's warm, slightly sweaty embrace, some Hackernews are startled to realize that the 55% discount comes with meaningful reductions in services rendered. The rest of the comments are an argument about where, exactly, GitHub currently lies along the embrace-extend-extinguish Microsoft product map, whether embrace-extend-extinguish would even work on a crowd of people as savvy and free-spirited as GitHub users, and whether GitLab is better, worse, or indistinguishable.