webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the third week of June, 2021.

GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell
June 15, 2021 (comments)
Some Internets invent the repl, fuck up pipes, and call it a new type of shell. "New type of shell" here means it's a command-line program that doesn't ship on your Macbook. Hackernews debates whether it is appropriate to use software at work. Other Hackernews want to know the purpose of a shell that requires other shells to operate, but we're soon informed the purpose is "we don't like the shell that shipped on our Macbooks." The misguided mass of Powershell enthusiasts shows up and whines about not being taken seriously, and a couple dozen weary Hackernews explain to them, again, why nobody will ever care.

Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”
June 16, 2021 (comments)
An Internet bitches about a product that isn't yet available. Hackernews is interested because they're going to have it when it comes out, but since there's nothing meaningful to discuss, the topics of conversation focus on other, similar products, or complaints about Apples other software.

I wrote a children's book / illustrated guide to Apache Kafka
June 17, 2021 (comments)
A webshit makes some cartoons about woodland creatures inventing social networks, thereby achieving civilization and laying the groundwork for its collapse in one children's book. Hackernews is excited to find industry literature consumable in one Peloton session, so the link receives many votes, but the subject is Apache Kafka, so the comments are confusingly written, hard to maintain, and constantly crashing with illegal state exceptions.

80% of orgs that paid the ransom were hit again
June 18, 2021 (comments)
Some crime victims learn about operant conditioning. Hackernews regards ransomware as a social problem, to be blamed on the idiots who use their software, and so the discussion focuses on what can be done to rein those assholes in, except when the cryptocurrency people show up to pretend they can fix anything.

Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge
June 19, 2021 (comments)
A whole shitload of people discover who actually owns their cellphones. Hackernews is computer-literate, so they can provide logs of the software being installed on their cellphones against their will. There follows a ranging debate on the exact boundaries over which the company who provides their phone software must not step. When the mice are done voting to bell the cat, the status quo remains in effect, and none of the affected devices are in any way under the control of the people who paid for them.

Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
June 20, 2021 (comments)
Some Internets discover that the faceless global corporation who hired them does not consider them to be family. All of Hackernews has also worked at Amazon, and all have conflicting anecdotes they're all too ready to shit into the comment field. Once Hackernews posts an anecdote, the next step is to patrol the other anecdotes and accuse them of lying.

Git undo: We can do better
June 21, 2021 (comments)
An Internet thinks we can fix git by bolting more shit onto it. Hackernews comes back from the code mines each day stinking of git, so they all have strong opinions on the topic, ranging from "if the entirety of git is not immediately obvious to you then you should never use a computer" to "git is the worst thing ever to happen in the IT industry." Most of the comment threads are some Hackernews recounting git fuckups of the past and the rest of Hackernews taking guesses as to which sequence of arcane shit might have fixed the problem.