webshit weekly

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

When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number
September 15, 2020 (comments)
An Internet discovers some awful webshit; the reward is a conversation with a politician who attempted to secure personal information by destroying the national internet infrastructure. Hackernews has also discovered, been affected by, or written similarly awful webshit and we are treated to a comprehensive list thereof.

This electrical transmission tower has a problem
September 16, 2020 (comments)
A Twitter provides the backstory for the murder weapon of a serial killer. Hackernews is not comfortable with the Twitter's ascription of responsibility, as holding any California-based institution responsible for lax engineering and shitty maintenance practice would set a dangerous precedent and place most Hackernews at severe risk of exposure to adulthood. The thing about forest fires, says Hackernews, is that they're the fault of the forests.

Cloudflare and the Wayback Machine, joining forces for a more reliable Web
September 17, 2020 (comments)
A library makes Faustian deal with some webshits. Only time will tell if Cloudflare will manage to stay online for a long enough contiguous block of time that the agreed-upon functionality will take effect. Hackernews is relieved that the library has a chance to live through this deal, which causes the rest of Hackernews to angrily declare a free CDN the most important thing any massive corporation could ever have done for society.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died
September 18, 2020 (comments)
A judge has passed away. No technology is discussed.

DuckDB – An embeddable SQL database like SQLite, but supports Postgres features
September 19, 2020 (comments)
Some Internets release some software. The download page detects the user's operating system and, based on this information, presents download links to a different operating system. Hackernews is enthused by this software's similarity to whatever database they have a crush on, unless the database they have a crush on is PostgreSQL, in which case they are angry that this database is insufficiently similar to PostgreSQL.

On the Use of a Life
September 20, 2020 (comments)
An Internet explains that research is for losers and cool people write computer programs. Hackernews thinks so too. The only evidence provided to back up this claim is vague gesturing at lists of computer programs written by people who like writing computer programs, which explains why the people holding this opinion declined to pursue research careers.

I no longer build software
September 21, 2020 (comments)
A programmer escaped. Hackernews is fascinated by this eventuality, and the programmer arrives to narrate the process of digging a tunnel out of computer hell and emerging in the peaceful woodworking career by the time the credits roll. I did not search the comments to see if anyone else made the joke before I decided the title of this story should have been changed to "The Saw Shank Redemption."