webshit weekly

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

Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming (2018)
April 22, 2020 (comments)
Hackernews revisits some internet lies. Instead of mathematics, Hackernews recounts all the ways they've fucked with kids, or else gets mad about all the ways people fuck with kids. Later, Hackernews tries to ascertain whether kids actually give a shit about math.

Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
April 23, 2020 (comments)
The Wall Street Journal still thinks anything they have to say is interesting enough to hide behind a paywall. It is not; this week's nonsurprise is that Amazon is fucking everyone in reach. Hackernews wrestles with the idea that trust is a fundamental component of a business relationship. Some Hackernews posit that gargantuan faceless corporations are not trustable entities, but this clearly cannot be true because that would be awful. Accusations of paranoia are much simpler.

Seinfeld Adventure
April 24, 2020 (comments)
Some Internets want to waste other people's money, and hope that internet attention is the first step down that road. Hackernews recognizes the television show and has opinions about it. One Hackernews wants to know if there are any shows similar to Seinfeld, painting a stark, sobering portrait of the dire shortage of ensemble shows about rich people stepping on their own dicks.

In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms
April 25, 2020 (comments)
Slaves make useful test subjects. Hackernews crawls over one another to scream the loudest "insightful takeaway" they were clever enough to glean from the article. All of the armchair epidemiology remains unchanged from previous sessions. About a third of Hackernews has convinced themselves they have already recovered from COVID-19, based entirely on wishing.

Eloquent JavaScript 3rd Edition (2018)
April 26, 2020 (comments)
A webshit writes a book about a hammer. Hackernews works on listing the exact sequence of books to read to become a webshit. Then, Hackernews attempts to decide which programming abstraction is the "right" one, and which programming abstractions are the "wrong" ones. No conclusions are forthcoming.

Disney claims anyone using a Twitter hashtag is agreeing to their terms of use
April 27, 2020 (comments)
A massive corporate conglomerate marks its territory. Hackernews explores what words are, what they do, and how that happens. Eventually, they move on to "who the hell does Disney think they are" and "how can they get away with this shit." Later on, a Hackernews points out that "Hacker" "News" itself has a forced-arbitration clause in its terms of use. This would be concerning if anyone in the IT industry were subject to legal oversight.

“Amazon is holding over 4.2M dollars, suffocating our business”
April 28, 2020 (comments)
Amazon continues the war against its own users. Hackernews tries to invent from first principles a valid reason for Amazon to force its own clients over a table for weeks on end, even though those users are explicitly paying for the privilege of not being ratfucked by an algorithm. Several Hackernews report direct personal experience with similar accounts of highway robbery. Every participant in the comment thread has an Amazon Prime account.

SSH hacks – a little sanity for remote workers
April 29, 2020 (comments)
An Internet posts an annotated copy of the the ssh_config(5) manpage. Hackernews posts their annotated copies of ssh_config files.

Rules of thumb for a 1x developer
April 30, 2020 (comments)
An Internet makes a guide to decisions about programming. Hackernews disagrees with every single one, both singly and in bunches, except for the part where Agile Development is ritualized employee abuse. Some other Amazons show up to play a little inside baseball.