webshit weekly

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

AirPods Max
December 08, 2020 (comments)
Applie introduces a new brand, Beats by Tim. Since this product is wholly uninteresting and Apple-branded, Hackernews posts almost two thousand comments about it, almost all of them turgid with praise for Apple finally inventing headphones, which did not exist before. The rest of the comments express mild confusion at the elation with which this product announcement has been greeted, and in response Hackernews happily describes the precise juggling pattern of devices they switch between every five minutes.

Cameras and Lenses
December 09, 2020 (comments)
A webshit wants to teach you about optics. Hackernews enjoys interactive webshit sliders, but takes a break to announce that they already know everything. We're then informed that this webshit might be a good resource for someone who is not as smart or well-educated as Hackernews. Since it's basically just an introduction to a physics-class segment on optics, there's not much else to discuss, so the article lands right on the traditional 10:1 vote:comment ratio, which indicates that Hackernews is enthusiastic but not interested.

Facebook being investigated in Germany for tying Oculus use to Facebook accounts
December 10, 2020 (comments)
After reading the terrifying headline, Facebook is relieved to discover the lawsuit in question is in Germany. Hackernews is mad that the data-mining company who owns their video game accessories wants to mine their data. Even more Hackernews are angry that at any moment some faceless corporation has the power to arbitrarily forbid them from using the toys, because someday, Hackernews is sure, they're going to find a good reason to strap computer monitors to their faces. The rest of the comments are from Hackernews trying to blame the lawsuit on various politicians.

Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course
December 11, 2020 (comments)
An institute for higher learning turns out to have resources amenable to higher learning. Hackernews idly argues whether compilers are something that programmers should be able to write, whether this course contains any information anyone should have, whether hiring managers at computer companies are qualified to evaluate their own hiring needs, and what exactly a compiler is. Later, a crackpot shows up to write way too many details about translating Excel macros to javascript. Finally, Hackernews has the weekly meeting where they explain to one another that higher education is a scam perpetrated by so-called experts trying to make a buck off vulnerable phone app programmers.

I Hacked into Facebook's Legal Department Admin Panel
December 12, 2020 (comments)
Facebook, a company whose entire revenue comes from or through various forms of webshit, turns out to be bad at webshit. Hackernews argues about why people who are smarter than Facebook are not as rich as Facebook.

Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing API keys
December 13, 2020 (comments)
Amazon continues the war against its own users. Hackernews, eight years late, enumerates all of the alternative products that can service in place of the one Amazon is slowly knifing. Half the comments are Hackernews speculating on all the ways that a poor under-resourced webshit megacorp is at a serious disadvantage at this stage in history, and spitballing which massive societal upheavals will be required to smooth out the road for Amazon to maybe reach some success one day.

Google outage – resolved
December 14, 2020 (comments)
Google, publisher of many, many books on the topic of site reliability engineering, developer of bespoke hardware for maximum datacenter efficiency, and renowned source of the most cutting-edge cloud orchestration software on the planet, shits its pants in front of God and everyone. Hackernews toys with the idea that maybe Google owes them something for the fuckup, but this idea is laughed off as inane. Hackernews relates what it feels like to accidentally shit your pants on the public stage and at various scales, and it turns out that Hackernews has vast and varied experience in pants-shitting. Later, Hackernews debates whether it is better to shit pants you own or to rent pants and hire someone else to shit them for you.