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webshit weekly

%operator-noreply@n-gate.com () — Sat, 1 Sep 2018 00:29:20 PDT

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the last week of August, 2018.

Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
August 22, 2018 (comments)
An Internet who whines about software licenses for a living whines about software licenses. Hackernews takes this trivial, meaningless event and spins it into a yarn about the impending death of an organization upon whose products almost every single major human endeavor is based. Hundreds of paragraphs of alternate-history fiction are produced to describe a reality in which there's any chance at all you can avoid giving Intel money. The majority of the escapism centers around buying the products of a competitor who sells an almost-identical product, primarily differentiated by a much smaller production capacity.

Craft: A simple Minecraft clone written in C using OpenGL shaders
August 23, 2018 (comments)
An Internet copied a game. Hackernews tries to figure out how the author produces computer software while also caring about things that are not computer software. The rest of the comments are either suggesting other copies of the game or bickering about how closely one must copy a game for the copy to be a copy.

Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System
August 24, 2018 (comments)
A computer toucher discusses working for a child. Hackernews has also worked for the child, but considers the lack of professionalism and sacrifice of dignity to have been worthwhile, because the child is very rich. Other Hackernews are taken aback by the idea that professionalism and dignity are even possible; these Hackernews are accustomed to working for children.

John McCain has died
August 25, 2018 (comments)
A politician dies. No technology is discussed.

Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning
August 26, 2018 (comments)
Some nerds program computers to resemble a stack of paper. Hackernews is desperate to cram as many context-free factoids into their brains as possible, so they are all in love with this idea. Everyone takes turns lecturing one another on the thousands of ways computers can display brief snippets of text.

Pandoc
August 27, 2018 (comments)
Flushed with exertion from yesterday's "brief snippets of text" orgy, Hackernews sets its sights on longer snippets of text. Every single markup conversion program ever written is namedropped, several new ones are postulated, and impromptu user-group meetings are held in the ensuing comment threads. The software described in the article is capable of converting almost every currently-used text representation format, but Hackernews mostly just uses markdown or latex, depending on whether the user is employed.

Go 2 Draft Designs
August 28, 2018 (comments)
Lifetime Bell Labs intern Russ Cox describes all the new shit Google wants to bolt to its pet programming language. Hackernews wavers between an instinctive drive to unconditionally praise all Google pronouncements and a conflicting reflex to decry anything made by someone else as rancid garbage. To avoid the resulting dissonance, Hackernews cleverly argues about analogous features in other, safer-to-hate programming languages. None of the described additions in any way address any of the actual failings of Google's pet programming language, but several of them introduce exciting new missteps to enjoy for years to come.

Bullshit Jobs
August 29, 2018 (comments)
A webshit is mad that other people's awful lives are slightly inconvenient. Hackernews, every single one of whom is professionally engaged in ruining society, ponders all the myriad ways that society deviates from optimal, none of which are in any way related to Hackernews. Other Hackernews take this as an opportunity to get angry at Stanford University, describe how much they hate free money, and question whether the original article was even written in good faith, even though the author stood to gain nothing from its contents.

Changing Our Approach to Anti-Tracking
August 30, 2018 (comments)
Mozilla assures us that they want to keep all our weird-ass internet habits a secret, so they are offering ways to protect our privacy, such as sending a complete log of all domain lookups to a third-party commercial partner. Fear not, however, as they will still by default send all of your search queries to a different third-party commercial partner, as well as asking Google (a third-party commercial partner) for permission to load every single thing you try to look at, ever. Hackernews reminisces about how bad advertising used to be on the internet, or at least how differently bad it was. Some Hackernews mourn Mozilla's failed cellphone outing, while others notice that rather than just sending your entire browsing history to Google, Mozilla has built Google's tracking software directly into Firefox.

EU to recommend that member states abolish daylight saving time
August 31, 2018 (comments)
The European Union plans to more closely align its schedule with its future headquarters in Moscow. Hackernews argues about cows, time zones, democracy, and the sun.

webshit weekly

%operator-noreply@n-gate.com () — Wed, 22 Aug 2018 02:00:13 PDT

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the third week of August, 2018.

Markov Chains Explained Visually (2014)
August 15, 2018 (comments)
Hackernews links to some cartoons about math, carefully noting the year they were made, in case math changed a lot in the last few years. The analysis in the comments comprises two camps; the louder group frothing at the mouth, overwhelmed at the amazing possibility implied by cartoons about math. The other group cannot seem to understand why javascript cartoons are the obvious vehicle upon which all human progress will soon depend.

NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students
August 16, 2018 (comments)
A medical school makes it slightly easier to go to medical school. Hackernews, armed with a keen insight into the fundamental workings of both economics and human society, dives into a thoughtful examination of why rich people who are good at standardized tests make the finest medical professionals. Anyone breathing a hint of a concept that perhaps someone might choose not to go to medical school because it's expensive is labeled a dangerous seditionist. Many lectures follow about how rich kids actually have it worse than poor kids, taxation is theft, and studying any subject not directly related to javascript makes you a selfish burden on civilization.

Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible?
August 17, 2018 (comments)
An academic, freshly escaped from corporate shackles, tells some assholes they're wrong. Hackernews ignores every single aspect of the lecture, and focuses on comparing themselves to medical professionals. Again. Anyone suggesting that any programmer take any responsibility for anything at all is immediately threatened with national economic destruction or Internet Explorer. The remainder of the comments are dipshits trying to whatabout their way out of looking in a mirror.

My dad’s resume and skills from 1980
August 18, 2018 (comments)
A webshit posts two photographs and three sentences to Github, which requires eleven commits and a pull request. There is one open issue. Hackernews bemoans how much nicer the information technology industry was before Hackernews fucked it all up. Someone tries to hire the dad.

Redux vs. The React Context API
August 18, 2018 (comments)
Some webshits write up a deep dive into the newest, fullest septic tank. The "Full Stack" you hear so much about has reached so high, and the lower layers ossified so quickly, that Hackernews is forced to bicker about which abstraction is appropriate as a simplified model with which to build business logic to control the next abstraction down the stack ... which may change depending on which AbstractionHandlerFactory you're targeting with your glorified web guestbook. Pedantic arguments break out about which abstractions represent which other, slightly-more-generalized abstractions. If you or someone you love has any positive opinions about any technologies discussed in this article, please contact your nearest tertiary education facility to determine if there is a path available to healthier living. I hear medical school is affordable these days.

Don’t Do This in Production
August 19, 2018 (comments)
A webshit takes a thousand words to say "don't paste random internet shit into your program." Hackernews nods sagely and reveals the hidden knowledge: it is possible to get higher quality results by hiring qualified workers. The conversation turns to which ebooks contain the best candidate evaluation to blindly step through, then which ebooks contain the best human resources practices to blindly mandate. No technology is discussed.

Docker cannot be downloaded without logging into Docker Store
August 20, 2018 (comments)
The internet gets retroactively mad about a slight change to some company's webshit. Hackernews meditates on the correct way to inform your users that your business model is shit and you're selling them up the river for cash. The rest of the comments are people bitching about other comments, bitching about the company who changed the webshit, and armchair lawyering.

Twenty-two states ask appeals court to bring back net neutrality
August 21, 2018 (comments)
Some bureaucrats bureaucratize. Hackernews decides this is either a sign that America has failed or a sign that America has succeeded. An argument breaks out about whether it is possible to survive without Facebook. Nobody is sure.

webshit weekly

%operator-noreply@n-gate.com () — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 23:26:33 PDT

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of August, 2018.

Google AMP – A 70% drop in our conversion rate
August 08, 2018 (comments)
A webshit is nervous about Google's shared-hosting free tier. Hackernews explains to one another that Google's AMP program is not a cynical consolidation of adtech power, but is in fact a deftly-engineered substitute for courage, since webshits apparently can't stand up for themselves or their work. Some Googles show up in the comments to defend their ~~land grab~~ beneficent community-empowerment tool, and to reassure everyone that despite the direct personal experience of literally every single person who has tried, Google is totally open to feedback and willing to care about bug reports from their ~~tenants~~ users.

Julia 1.0
August 09, 2018 (comments)
Some academics promise to try to hold it steady. Hackernews is cranky that the brochure doesn't look like other brochures and slightly afraid because people seem to be using the language to perform arcane rites with impenetrable magical symbols. The academics show up to reassure people that math is a normal, healthy hobby and anyway the language can also be used to do retarded things with garbage hardware if you want. Most of the comments are people complaining that languages don't provide enough handholding for people who failed to design their programs properly, or that languages don't provide enough handholding for people who failed to select their operating systems properly.

I don't trust Signal
August 09, 2018 (comments)
An asshole is pissed at some other asshole. None of the reasons are interesting. Hackernews draws lots to decide which asshole to defend unto death; the basic argument seems to be the set of Hackernews given to hero worship versus the set of Hackernews who thinks the world owes them (for free) flawlessly-implemented, perfectly-intuitive software capable of resisting concerted attack by advanced persistent threats. Nearly five hundred comments are posted, all of which stridently proclaim The Correct Opinions about software nobody uses except DEF CON cosplayers and journalists who followed bad advice on social media.

1/0 = 0
August 10, 2018 (comments)
A webshit gets wound up by a tweet. Hackernews does too. Most of the arguments involve the difference between mathematics and ALU design, but none of the discussion is interesting because none of the participants are meaningfully engaged with either topic. It doesn't help that the entire context of the debate is some webshit's disused toy language.

Worst Computer Bugs in History: Therac-25 (2017)
August 11, 2018 (comments)
An internet describes a time that bad software directly led to the deaths of actual human beings. Several "takeaways" are provided, absolutely none of which involve recommending anyone be held responsible in any way. Hackernews is gratified that so few deaths were all that was needed to distract people from all the other ways that software developers are failing civilization on a regular basis. Other Hackernews suspects the kill count is so low because only someone completely unhinged would put their safety directly in the hands of a computer programmer. When highlighting other, less severe failure stories turns out not to be fun, Hackernews explores ways they might blame someone else for the deaths.

Thank you HN
August 12, 2018 (comments)
A Hackernews thanks the rest of Hackernews for not advocating suicide. Hackernews lists all the terrible shit they did and/or had happen to them and, as usual, catalogs every single real or perceived solution to mental health issues they've ever tried or read about. The consensus is that exercise helps. No technology is discussed. An asshole violates the Prime Directive.

Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking tickets
August 13, 2018 (comments)
An internet is trying to help. With awk. Hackernews squabbles over whether or not it's even possible for most people to help, given the baseline requirement of "noticing things." The Hackernews contingent of Critical Mass shows up to bitch about cars standing in bike lanes. Inadvertently, the Hackernewsest possible sentence appears in the comments: "If it's not technically criminal then that's all that matters."

Serverless Docker Beta
August 14, 2018 (comments)
Some webshits celebrate minutiae. Hackernews is excited about the minutiae, except for the ones who actually do things with computers once in a while. A long discussion breaks out about the proper method to embed auto-playing video containing nothing but text. After a while Hackernews gets bored with the actual limitations of the garbage software described in the article and starts running thought experiments about what even worse software might look like. They don't reach consensus, but I'm pretty sure they're accidentally describing Sun software.