webshit weekly

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

A warning about Glassdoor
October 15, 2020 (comments)
A Reddit points out that some webshit will say whatever you like if you give them enough money. Hackernews takes turns relating the sobering tales of the time Hackernews discovered that random unattributable internet comments were not sound bases for career guidance. The real warning about glassdoor is never revealed, so I will say it here: put decorative objects on your glass doors so birds and other wildlife don't conk into them and die.

AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
October 16, 2020 (comments)
A webshit applies a copyright license to some software, posts it on the internet, and then whines when someone else complies with the terms of the license. Some Amazon Community Management Operatives deploy to the resulting comment thread to assure the world that they do indeed plan to send the webshit a t-shirt or whatever else will make this idiotic non-problem blow over. Since half of Hackernews works for Amazon already, they are gratified to see this timely and considerate lip service on a web forum.

We deleted the production database by accident
October 17, 2020 (comments)
A webshit writes a blog about not understanding how a program works. The surprise twist: the webshit wrote the code and still doesn't know what's going on. Hackernews' initial reaction is that this is a stupid problem which only a stupid person would have, which is true, and then later Hackernews come along to point out that there's no sense in being an asshole about it, which is also true. The rest of the comments constitute a debate regarding whether and why a programmer should actually know what the hell is going on at any given time, and the overwhelming consensus is that this is not possible and that's the way it ought to be.

Chrome exempts Google sites from user site data settings
October 18, 2020 (comments)
A webshit is shocked to discover that Google wrote a web browser that serves Google's interests. Hackernews marvels at the degree of user-fucking Google continually seems to get away with, and wonders if there's ever going to be a limit. Since the only entities on Earth capable of producing any stimulus sufficient to provoke a reaction from Google are all nuclear-armed nations, the answer is a resounding "no."

This page is a truly naked, brutalist HTML quine
October 19, 2020 (comments)
A webshit thinks 'brutalist design' includes soft, pastel colors. The program being described as a quine is in fact some typesetting markup which requires several operating systems working in concert to render, and could just as well have been plain text with a different Content-type: header. It also bizarrely contains an external link to its source code, which seems extraneous for a quine. Hackernews lists every program whose output they consider to be pretty.

U.S. Accuses Google of Illegally Protecting Monopoly
October 20, 2020 (comments)
The United States Government declares war on its own contractor. Hackernews writes eight hundred comments incorrecting one another about internal Google advertising policies to which they have absolutely no access, reverse-engineering a bureaucrat's intentions regarding the timing of this case, whining about presidential candidates, and accusing Google of giving a shit which political party is sucking up to them at any given time.

Facebook Container for Firefox
October 21, 2020 (comments)
Mozilla shakes down a social media startup by blocking its advertising technology. Why Facebook is subject to this interference and Google is not is not explained in the documentation, except possibly by the Google Analytics deployment in the product page's source code. Hackernews links to other Firefox extensions, which will presumably work until the next minor release of Firefox, which will remove key APIs, implement whatever Google thinks should be next week's HTML standard, and include a sad-face emoji alongside the announcement of further layoffs. The CEO of Mozilla earned over $85 for every line of code in the extension's repository.