webshit weekly

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

Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked
February 08, 2021 (comments)
Google's callous lack of human-operated customer service finally provokes dire consequences: the forfeiture of tens, possibly even hundreds, of dollars of hypothetical revenue. Hackernews has strong opinions on video game streaming services, including about whether video game streaming services should even exist. Some Hackernews wonder if perhaps government regulation can mitigate some of the life-ruining damage that large companies can accidentally do to their users, but other Hackernews carefully construct from first principles an airtight justification for the fact that only God can judge Google.

Github1s – One second to read GitHub code with VS Code
February 09, 2021 (comments)
A webshit combines a webshit text editor with a webshit FUSE implementation and causes Hackernews to weep with joy, until they wipe their eyes and start demanding additional features. Somewhere deep in the bowels of Redmond, a Microsoft prepares to whine about trademark infringement.

Dependency Confusion: How I Hacked Into Apple, Microsoft and Other Companies
February 10, 2021 (comments)
A webshit writes two thousand words to describe the process of "looking at what internal package names are in use and then uploading packages with those names to package repositories." Hackernews feels that the proper solution is to port OpenBSD's pledge(2) system call to every single computer program. Hackernews is unwilling to lift a single finger to achieve this goal, but will type hundreds of angry words about any other approach. The rest of the comments constitute a lively debate regarding who is to blame for the shitty state of language-based package managers: it is either the fault of the language designers or the managers of the programmers who use the language, but which?

Beej's Guide to Network Programming (1994-2020)
February 11, 2021 (comments)
An Internet blogs about network programming. Hackernews likes the blog, but since it doesn't even mention javascript, Hackernews doesn't have much to say, except for the handful of Hackernews who would like some attention for their inferior but similar writing. The author shows up to accept gratitude.

“I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure”
February 12, 2021 (comments)
Microsoft accidentally exposes a gap in their otherwise-integrated sales loop, having failed to buy Canonical (so far). Hackernews is entirely unsurprised by the corporate information-sharing, and considers possibly marketing an artificial-intelligence chat app to replace the sales representative who had to type the LinkedIn message. After some confusion about whether Microsoft was ratting on users or Ubuntu was phoning home (since both are fairly likely), Hackernew settles down to argue about software packaging.

Statement on New York Times Article
February 13, 2021 (comments)
A shift supervisor at the Mistakes-Blogging-For-Education branch of the Shitty Opinion Factory is angry on the internet again. Hackernews, naturally, is outraged as well: just because the comments section of some asshole's blog happens to be a place where technolibertarians cross-pollenate with white supremacists, says Hackernews, doesn't mean it's fair to focus on that instead of on how smart that blog's readership has convinced itself it is. So smart, in fact, that to criticize them at all is tantamount to an admission that you're up to something. This sort of censorship, concludes Hackernews, should never have been allowed to be published.

K-9 Mail is looking for funding
February 14, 2021 (comments)
A computer programmer would like some money. Hackernews is unsatisfied with the avenues made available to provide that money, and would like the computer programmer to spend even more time and money to make things simpler for Hackernews' accountants. Once these minor gripes are dealt with, Hackernews moves on to declare this application to be best-in-class, except for its user interface, backend code, underlying protocols, host operating system, users, advertising, and monetization efforts.