webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of January, 2021.

Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump
January 08, 2021 (comments)
Twitter begins oppressing the most vulnerable and defenseless segment of society: the President of the United States. Hackernews is outraged at every aspect of this action; not only is it wrong to kick an asshole off a chat website, the chat website didn't write a good enough essay about kicking the asshole off, and having the kicked the asshole off, the chat website did not immediately kick off a handful of other people Hackernews thinks are assholes. The users of "Hacker" "News", a website which regularly bans users, predict that banning users from chat websites is the surest sign of a global failure in government.

Amazon, Apple and Google Cut Off Parler
January 09, 2021 (comments)
Several extremely popular information technology service companies decline to do business with a pack of shitheads. The "Hacker" "News" hall monitor announces that more users than ever before are being banned from the site at an unprecedented rate. Nevertheless, Hackernews posts three and a half thousand comments, which surprisingly boil down to two basic types: Hackernews who hold opinions so strongly that they can no longer tell them apart from facts, and Hackernews who are convinced that the only proper ethical compass is one you build from first principles; a consistent moral code, asserts Hackernews, is based entirely on pedantic adherence to logical structure. If the resulting construct directly leads to human misery, at least you're not a hypocrite!

GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked
January 10, 2021 (comments)
An Internet is still mad at some programmers. Hackernews decides they know the real reason the programmers are wrong, and over a thousand people take turns explaining their extremely specific pet peeve. Each niche complaint is described as a symptom of the deeper disease: programmers are still writing programs without consulting Hackernews! The sooner we put a stop to this, we are assured, the sooner these meaningless complaints will stop circulating. The rest of the comments are from Hackernews who like things the way they are and threaten to start complaining if anyone changes anything.

Stealing Your Private YouTube Videos, One Frame at a Time
January 11, 2021 (comments)
A webshit gets paid for using an API. Hackernews is extremely interested in getting paid to use an API, but does not have anything significant to discuss on the topic, so they argue about the size of the paycheck instead..

Signal community: Reminder: Please be nice
January 12, 2021 (comments)
The administrators of a web forum tell their users to stop being assholes, and along the way conflate violent hate speech with being rude. The web forum in question is dedicated to a chat app so bad that its users had to make a web forum to talk to one another. Hackernews, of course, knows exactly how to handle asshole users, and is happy to lecture on the topic at length. Meanwhile, other Hackernews try to blame rude users on a specific country, for some reason.

Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”
January 13, 2021 (comments)
An Internet is mad at some software on Christmas. Weeks later, Hackernews decides to notice and/or care. The resulting comment thread is Hackernews' recurring "walled gardens are bad" versus "walled gardens are the only reason to live" debate. Since Hackernews is still angry that their favorite cryptoracist fuckwits got chased off the Internet, Apple and Google take more of a beating than usual. Later, Hackernews argues about which computers or telephones they would buy if they lived in an alternate universe where non-Apple products are sold.

We don't need data scientists, we need data engineers
January 14, 2021 (comments)
A webshit bikesheds some job ads. Hackernews pays close attention so they can use just the right buzzwords when they push their 50,000-line node.js resume template to Github. It would be embarrassing if they changed terminology between pushing to the repo and blogging about it on Substack!