webshit weekly

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

Container technologies at Coinbase: Why Kubernetes is not part of our stack
June 08, 2020 (comments)
Bitcoin Idiots, LLC proudly declare that they are the best at Numberwang because they don't hire systems administrators, and instead give real money to Amazon, which does not accept Fedoral Reserve Notes. Hackernews tells horror stories about trying to administer systems without any systems administrators, and then can't figure out whether knowing how computers work makes you a systems administrator, or if you're still a programmer with a filthy penchant for forbidden knowledge. Later, Hackernews argues about whether containers or virtual machines start faster. The rest of the comments are a discussion on which real company to hire to handle your webshit until one of them buys your startup.

New inline assembly syntax available in Rust nightly
June 09, 2020 (comments)
The Rust Evangelism Strike Force heralds the first real improvement to the Rust programming language: the ability to use a completely different programming language. Hackernews pretends to argue about the right way to use this powerful old tool, but as usual they're really just bitching about which punctuation marks they prefer to use. Everyone agrees that it's nice to finally be able to use real programming languages while still putting Rust experience on your resume.

Zoom closes account of U.S.-based Chinese activist after Tiananmen event
June 10, 2020 (comments)
Zoom (business model: "Uber for chaturbate") fiercely pursues the lucrative "indiscriminate bootlicker" market segment. In this episode, they decline to provide services to someone who remembers that China is a brutal dictatorship entirely controlled by murderous cowards. Some Hackernews are concerned that Zoom might be a pack of simpering ferrets, unable to uphold or even reliably identify a single civil right, but other Hackernews arrive to reassure us that it doesn't matter whether Zoom is a disgraceful moral void, bereft of a single shred of moral fiber, because sometimes their computer program is convenient. Most of Hackernews is divided into two camps: mewling pansies who tearfully await the Chinese domination they consider inevitable, and morons who think that knowing which browser extensions to install enables them to ignore decades of human rights abuses in the name of one-click meeting launches.

MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations
June 11, 2020 (comments)
MIT (business model: "Uber for klout") cuts out the middleman. Hackernews is keenly interested in determining who else can be cut out. Some Hackernews think that this is The End for the journal publisher with which MIT parted ways, but other Hackernews point out that printing academic papers isn't the only parasitic business model that company has developed. Most of the rest of Hackernews wants to whine about the academic publishing process, but a few show up to reprosecute the life and death of Aaron Swartz.

Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request
June 12, 2020 (comments)
Zoom (business model: "Uber for whatever makes Xi happy") publicly announces a total abandonment of any redeemable corporate leadership whatsoever, along with an intent to make their craven, indefensible failure less visible to the United States, so that they can continue collecting money from Western businesses without making anyone remember that Zoom has reached almost inhuman levels of debasement and shame. Hackernews is trying to figure out whether Zoom is really as cartoonishly evil as they appear or whether it's all just a big misunderstanding. There is no word on whether the Fraternal Order of Police has officially endorsed Zoom.

SQLite as an Application File Format (2014)
June 13, 2020 (comments)
An Internet wants us to use some software. Hackernews likes this idea because they can more easily fuck with some files, but this almost immediately turns into a debate about who actually owns the data on your computer. A non-trivial subset of Hackernews believe that answer might range from "not you" to "maybe you sometimes," with other Hackernews timidly suggesting that the answer might often veer into "you." The rest of the comments are people grateful to be outsourcing i/o to a library instead of having to understand how i/o works.

Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar
June 14, 2020 (comments)
Google (business model: "fuck you") decides that URLs are unattractive, and users would be better off with a giant unexplained blank space at the top of their web browser. Hackernews thinks this should be taken further, and browsers should do all kinds of dumb shit instead of just showing you what anything is. This creates a dilemma for Hackernews: what happens when one abstraction, such as breadcrumbs, collides with another abstraction, such as Windows Libraries? The answer turns out to be "nobody cares," because once either of those things breaks down users just do something else instead, no matter what postgraduate certificates your UI/UX envisioneers hold. The rest of the comments are Hackernews debating which arcane browser configuration flags to molest, and how long that might work.