webshit weekly
An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of June, 2021.
Fastly Outage
June 08, 2021
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Fastly (business model: "Uber for Varnish") manages to ratfuck half the internet, including companies who should have known better. Hackernews catalogues all of the websites that are currently offline, invents from first principles what went wrong, and declares this shit would never have happened if Hackernews were behind the wheel.
iOS 15 Humane
June 09, 2021
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Some assholes write an open letter to Tim Cook, begging for their company to be bought by Apple. Apple is not listening. Hackernews also writes wish lists for Apple to ignore, and then swings back around to tell everyone else that their wish lists are stupid. Sometimes it's because the wish list is a series of Android features, sometimes it's because Hackernews believes that social media is the sole underlying purpose of owning a smartphone, and usually it's because computers do not work the same way they did when Hackernews was a child, even if a given Hackernews is currently still a child.
Stripe Tax
June 10, 2021
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Stripe (business model: "Uber for Paypal") helps people do math. Hackernews has a load of recommendations of other companies standing by to do your math for you, but other Hackernews wonder if, when that math is the core source of most of your worldly wealth, you might want to keep a hand on the till just in case. The rest of the comments, as usual, are Hackernews incorrecting one another regarding tax law.
Do you really need Redis? How to get away with just PostgreSQL
June 11, 2021
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Some webshits want you to like the software they like. Hackernews arrives to explain how all of these things are trivial to solve using whatever software Hackernews likes. A fistfight breaks out -- comprising fully half the comments on this article -- wherein Hackernews argues over which software it's appropriate to like, and when, and when you need to stop liking it and like something else instead.
Gooey: Turn almost any Python command line program into a GUI application
June 12, 2021
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Some programmers port the 1990s Rapid Application Development paradigm to Python. Hackernews loves the idea, but only a handful of them would ever actually touch this code with a ten-foot pole, so the comments are muted and scarce.
Doom Running on an IKEA Lamp [video]
June 13, 2021
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An Internet ports a computer game to a computer built into a lamp, but then falls into an info hole. The article itself and the video to which it links have both been Trotskyed, so I've provided an Internet Archive link above. Hackernews is angry that the lamp has a computer built into it, angry that the computer is different from what Hackernews thinks it should be, and angry that, having produced a computer Hackernews doesn't want, IKEA has failed to give full access to Hackernews to the computer they don't want.
Stripe Identity
June 14, 2021
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Stripe (business model: "Uber for Palantir") would like everyone on earth to scan their government identification into a giant database that they promise will be extremely well-taken-care-of, and not haphazardly shared with grim suit-clad people or public EC2 browsers. Hackernews immediately expresses some concern at the contents of this database, and a Stripe shows up to explain that matters are more complex than you think, which means you should stop worrying about this and just leave it to the experts who are serving us all by helping people around the world respond to one of the oldest questions humanity has ever faced; specifically, the question "may I see your papers, please?"