webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the last week of April, 2021.

Tiny Container Challenge: Building a 6kB Containerized HTTP Server
April 21, 2021 (comments)
A webshit figures out the most complicated possible method of running a single process. Hackernews spends a lot of time running operating systems in their operating systems, so they have plenty of tips on how to throw away 90% of the bytes they downloaded in the process. A few Hackernews focus on the process-isolation features of containers rather than the ridiculous construction mechanisms involved, while other Hackernews wonder why you might not want a program's memory use to grow in an unbounded manner.

Why Lichess will always be free
April 22, 2021 (comments)
Some Internets run a website as a hobby. Hackernews is enthusiastic about the idea, but doubts it can be replicated. One Hackernews notes the refreshing change of pace from the typical wealthy-techbro point of view, and the "Hacker" "News" Hall Monitor shows up to insist that Hackernews are generally the salt-of-the-earth randos. We're told to just trust everyone with an account, and the Hall Monitor reflects "How can we function as a community" otherwise, failing to note the established answers: banning dissidents, spiking political stories, steadfastly refusing to espouse any ethical structure except "don't call people mean names," and other fundamental tenets of healthy community-building.

The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered
April 23, 2021 (comments)
Some scientists make progress toward controlling an awful disease. Hackernews dusts off recently printed virology diplomas from the University of Youtube, and tries to reckon whether malaria is worse or better than COVID-19; after all, millions of people die every year of malaria, but on the other hand, they are far away.

Dan Kaminsky has died
April 24, 2021 (comments)
A person passes away. Hackernews remembers other times.

Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
April 25, 2021 (comments)
We are treated to career advice on how to avoid burnout: just be a genius with a stable income and plenty of free time to pursue your interests. Hackernews are all geniuses, so they set about tackling the other two conditions. An early theory to achieve them ("be old") is bandied about but lost in the subsequent bickering about continuous deployment tools. Later theories are left unconsidered while Hackernews tries to convince themselves they can do math.

My Current HTML Boilerplate
April 26, 2021 (comments)
A webshit shits web, and then lectures us about it for a while. Hackernews is always interested in a new way to fuck users over with javascript feature gating, but the real fun comes when each Hackernews selects one line of HTML to target for ultra-pedantry, and then holds forth about whatever the hell it does. In one such lecture, we're cautioned that failure to set a proper lang= attribute on the html tag can cause problems; this has not been the experience of the Webshit Weekly editorial board.

Google have declared Droidscript is malware
April 27, 2021 (comments)
Some Internets got kicked out of Google's shopping mall, and post an angry blog entry about it on Google Groups. Lots of bold text is involved, but none of it has motivated me to find out what the hell DroidScript is, why it got the boot, or who cares whether it gets back in. Hackernews is mad at the phrasing of one of the emails Google sent to the excommunicated nerds. Other Hackernews are outraged to discover that Google is willing to stop doing business with people Google suspects of fraud.

Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
April 28, 2021 (comments)
The world loses another astronaut. Hackernews leafs through some records and remembers.

Yayagram
April 29, 2021 (comments)
An Internet keeps in touch. Hackernews wants a switchboard-based contacts list available immediately. Most of the rest of the comments are pedantic whining about which specific decade switchboards belong to, recommendations for 'similar' products that are completely unrelated to the product in the article, or complaints about iPhones.

Internal Combustion Engine
April 30, 2021 (comments)
A webshit continues a brutal and relentless spree of javascript animations. Hackernews wonders whether they've earned the title "engineer" but decide it's fine as long as your five-line webscraping shit earns you credit for the programming language you wrote it in, the networking libraries you invoked, and the hardware architecture that executes the resulting instructions. Having glanced at some of the illustrations in the linked article, Hackernews spends the afternoon incorrecting each other about the rest of the automobile.