webshit weekly

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

Write Libraries, Not Frameworks
May 08, 2020 (comments)
A webshit writes a treatise on risk assessment. Hackernews spends half their time agreeing with the article and then defending shitty software practices to each other. The rest of the comments are Hackernews naming various software packages and forcing them into the categories described in the article.

Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
May 09, 2020 (comments)
Some webshits throw a nostalgia party, and Hackernews lines up at the door. Lots of hazily-recalled misinformation is presented regarding font rendering, and some Hackernews are so desperate to participate that they have to look shit up on Wikipedia to construct a fantasy narrative for the past -- to include claims of a 1280x1024 CRT. When confronted, the idiot doubles down.

Second-Guessing the Modern Web
May 10, 2020 (comments)
Coming to on the floor of a local Showbiz Pizza, Hackernews shakes off the remnants of a nostalgia hangover and nervously survey the catalog of browser tabs they left open during the previous day's heady exploration of the past. One of the tabs -- this article -- is a screed questioning the accepted webshit doctrine: the right way to build webshittery applications is to shove all the logic into the browser terminal and run it there. So it was in the blit; so shall it be in the browser. But is this the right way? Hackernews, in the clarity of day, has no problem drilling to the core of this question, and the answer is yes. Absolutely yes. Doing it any other way would be slightly more labor intensive, and Hackernews would rather die.

We at $Famous_company switched to $Hyped_technology
May 11, 2020 (comments)
An Internet provides a useful blog template for aspiring thought leaders. Hackernews has some fun trying to determine which webshit companies beta tested the template, but this practice gets dangerously close to introspection, since any given Hackernews either works for, got fired from, or runs all of those companies.

Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
May 12, 2020 (comments)
Twitter discovers the internet. Hackernews excitedly names all the other companies who have discovered the internet, but the real meat of this topic is twofold: Hackernews has every possible opinion about working from home, all strongly held, and Hackernews is terrified that some bumpkin in eastern Ohio is somehow going to destroy real estate values in the Bay Area, seconds after the Executive Vice President of Talent Confiscation realizes you can hire Stack Overflow users for cornpone wages who are just as capable as the South of Market courtiers demanding options.

Deno 1.0
May 13, 2020 (comments)
Some attention-deficit teenagers cascade. In this meeting of the Everything's A Nail club, a new hammer design is unveiled. Hackernews postulates a nail that this hammer cannot handle, but gets lost in the ensuing debate, since it turns out every single person who has ever touched node.js has learned the hard way not to trust any aspect of any dependency management situation that relies on webshits keeping services online. Having been invaded by the Rust Evangelism Strike Force, the project in question demands that other people's software be rewritten. By someone else.

Security Flaws in Adobe Acrobat Reader Allow Gaining Root on macOS Silently
May 14, 2020 (comments)
The vendor of Flash and Coldfusion somehow manages to fuck up software. In this case, it's a PDF reader for an operating system that can natively read PDFs without it. Hackernews doesn't give a shit about Acrobat Reader, but would dearly love to stop "paying for" Photoshop, so they bandy about and immediately reject several dozen alternatives, usually because they are not Photoshop.