webshit weekly (2017/04/14)

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of April, 2017.

Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons
April 08, 2017 (comments)
Some internets upload software to github. Hackernews links to a celebrity's tweet about it, which is just as well since nobody on Hackernews is qualified to analyze the software. Instead, they attempt to reverse-engineer the meaningless blog post that accompanied the software. They're not qualified to do that, either.

Semantic UI
April 09, 2017 (comments)
Someone wrote a metric fuckload of javascript to create a fragile, overengineered framework that uses other fragile, overengineered frameworks to build massive fragile, overengineered CSS files. "Semantic" is a Latin word that means "wrap every word of content in its own div tags." Hackernews whines that this particular abuse of CSS classes isn't in line with their preferred pattern of abuse. Most of the comments are bug reports, all of which are blamed on the users.

Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards
April 10, 2017 (comments)
Climate scientists continue to panic. Hackernews vomits forth hundreds of thousands of kilobytes of useless, uninformed bickering. Nothing of value is posted, but the shit proceeds to flow until every last URL is mined from the references sections of all relevant Wikipedia articles.

Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
April 11, 2017 (comments)
An internet notices that programs built on single-purpose browser instances are criminally wasteful of resources. Hackernews declares that nobody ever listened to music or talked to other people before the advent of browser-based programs. The insistence on driving in every conceivable nail with the same javascript hammer is defended on the basis that programmers' time is more valuable than literally everything else on earth, pending the next "Ask HN: How to beg for work" thread. The Rust Evangelism Strike Force attempts to promote Rust by likening it to Java.

Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support
April 12, 2017 (comments)
Google updates their browser to optionally eliminate the pesky "user" part of the browsing experience. Hackernews kindles a pyre for the ten thousand half-assed github projects they've been using for this purpose, eager to give Google as much control over their businesses as possible.

How We Built r/Place
April 13, 2017 (comments)
Some webshits jerk off over the cleverness of their multiplayer painting program. Hackernews debates whether this tremendous waste of effort warrants an erection.

A Competitive Programmer's Handbook
April 14, 2017 (comments)
Someone writes an "intro to algorithms" textbook aimed at undergraduates. Hackernews is excited to see another huge list of shit they can memorize for their next opportunity to perform like trained monkeys during the degrading hiring rituals they all profess to hate. A few Hackernews begin to suspect they are being paid far less than their cohorts. Most decide to argue about the definition of "competition," despite the article's explicit explanation of the intended meaning.

webshit weekly (2017/04/07)

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of April, 2017.

Why Japan’s Rail Workers Point at Things
April 01, 2017 (comments)
Hackernews reads an article explaining one of the ways Japanese rail employees enforce a specific process. Hackernews can relate, since they use similar practices to medicate themselves, feed themselves, carry things, and blog. The few comments exploring the idea of process improvements in programming mostly revolve around copying and pasting lists, or shilling phone apps to copy and paste lists for you.

0.30000000000000004
April 02, 2017 (comments)
An internet buys a domain to host one page of minimally-informative content, the ignorance of which should preclude anyone from pretending to be involved with the information technology sector. Hackernews divides into four groups: those who have exerted a large amount of energy reinventing the wheel, those who exert a large amount of energy explaining wheel technology to people who are not really interested, those who exert a large amount of energy defending inappropriate deployment of wheels, and (the majority of Hackernews) those who believe that the compiler they use is a natural law... and then set about exerting a large amount of energy proclaiming that all wheels must be modified to resemble those handed down by the tribal elders.

Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value
April 03, 2017 (comments)
A financial website documents Tesla's overvaluation, while explicitly noting that Tesla cannot compete with real automakers in any sense. The company's valuation is recognized to be so high purely because Elon Musk is our lord and savior. Large swaths of Hackernews understand that Tesla is not even close to being the same real value as Ford, but are unable to make an impact on the thundering hordes of Muskovites convinced that Tesla will save them with solar-powered self-driving cars, with no reasonable defense of the theory besides "I want it to happen."

Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award
April 04, 2017 (comments)
An academic is given money as a reward for inventing things that share names with the individual bricks of waste that comprise the modern web, even though he's spent the remainder of his career attempting to undo the horrible garbage pipeline set up to feed the resulting trash fire. Hackernews argues about why Facebook doesn't have RSS feeds, the proper way to address theoretical members of the peerage, the historic inevitability of Das Spinnennetzreich, the impossibility of improvement on the current state of practice, and Tim Berners-Lee's ass heat.

Build Your Own Text Editor
April 05, 2017 (comments)
An internet posts a C programming tutorial, in which the reader is taught how to build a toy text editor for unix. Hackernews trades examples of favorite toy text editors and favorite toy programming languages. A particularly haunting comment is posted by one Hackernews: a Haskell program that translates C to Rust, which gives us a brief peek into the grotesque Godless painscape where the Rust Evangelism Strike Force plans its webshit-brigading operations.

An off-grid social network
April 06, 2017 (comments)
A webshit brags about the number of atrocities his friends have committed with javascript. The latest atrocity is a facebook clone as implemented by Bitcoin Idiots, LLC. Hackernews rambles about social networks gone by before settling down into the usual wheelspinning about how we could solve every problem with the blockchain if the adults would just stop laughing long enough to install these six thousand npm libraries on all their devices and stop using any other method of communication.

New York City bans employers from asking potential workers about past salary
April 07, 2017 (comments)
Some lawyers retire the tradition of lying to recruiters about how much money you used to make. Hackernews, all of whom live in the same ten-mile radius as their entire employment market in the midst of a massive tech bubble, cannot figure out what the big deal is.

webshit weekly (2017/03/31)

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the last week of March, 2017.

Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
March 22, 2017 (comments)
Microsoft continues the war against their own users. A Microsoft shows up to paste a boilerplate fauxpology, then immediately contradicts it in followup apologetics. A small phalanx of Hackernews is angry this 'bug' sat untouched for months prior to gaining social media notoriety; their whining is used to kick off several dozen pages of pointless bickering about "New Microsoft," Linux being too hard, and the proper way to inform your customers you don't give a shit about them.

US Senate votes to undo FCC internet privacy rules
March 23, 2017 (comments)
The United States Senate continues the war against their own users. One Hackernews suspects some kind of massive federal conspiracy to censor comments on reddit.com. Another suddenly realizes that people might disagree about things for reasons other than ignorance, and becomes distressed. The rest of the comments are people arguing about technical methods to work around the user-tracking they implement in their day jobs.

Google Talk Is Being Discontinued
March 24, 2017 (comments)
Google continues the war against their own users. The XMPP Memorial Society trades barbs about whose fault it is that a misdesigned overengineered shitshow of a protocol failed to gain traction amongst non-erlang enthusiasts. Every single messaging platform in current existence is held up as Obviously The Future. Hackernews tries to figure out what Google's master plan is, and why Google is working so hard to make it look like aimless poorly-managed floundering. IRCv3 continues to be a retarded pile of solutions to the wrong problems.

Deep Photo Style Transfer
March 25, 2017 (comments)
Some academics figure out how to make pictures look like other pictures. Hackernews is super-excited about the day this functionality will be built into their cameras, continuing the tradition of using other people's code as a substitute for competence. One subthread breaks up into the "I can always tell/No you can't" teams regarding pitch correction. Maximum Hackernews is achieved as the sentence "I am too stupid to understand the context of academic research" is expressed as "now if you implemented this as a web app, i'd be sharing it with everybody"

How much your computer can do in a second
March 26, 2017 (comments)
An internet posts a series of pointless questions. The conditions of the quiz are left deliberately vague with the sole exception of the gcc optimization flag. One Hackernews points out that computers are almost entirely wasted by programmers, which of course leads to a chorus of insistence that Electron is great and software sucks because project managers are stupid. The rest of the comments consist of useless bickering over implementation details in the quiz. The Rust Evangelism Strikeforce speculates on when they can move on to shitting up web development.

Next.js 2.0
March 27, 2017 (comments)
Some webshits continue the war against their own users. They post a product announcement for their new webshit. Loading the page in a browser comprises over a hundred megabytes of traffic; eighty megabytes of useless video and nearly twenty megabytes of json. lynx --dump output contains all the same pertinent information in 20kb. Hackernews is very excited about this amazing new technology, except for those who are fans of a competing product. Several pages of partisan bitching ensue.

The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections
March 28, 2017 (comments)
The United States House of Representatives continues the war against their own users. Hackernews is outraged, presumably because the rules will now enable other companies to compete with Google in the lucrative Fuck Everybody's Privacy market sector. The entire comment thread is just Hackernews arguing about political shit and deciding which elected officials are betraying the American people. Not a single goddamn Hackernews makes the obvious connection to the shit they do at work all day for a living. The tacit consensus: Hackernews isn't bad for creating the tools of surveillance capitalism; Congress is bad for letting people use them.

Explain Shell
March 29, 2017 (comments)
An internet makes a website to help lazy people understand things. Hackernews has discussed this exact site at length several times over the years; the only new fold is that one Hackernews wants it to use TLS, the better to paste passwords into it without feeling bad. Another one ran a forkbomb. The words "man page" do not appear anywhere in the linked discussion or the vocabulary of its participants.

SES-10 Mission
March 30, 2017 (comments)
The Muskonauts post their latest launch on Youtube. Hackernews thinks their kids will give a shit whether Elon recycled rockets. The hilarity of Hackernews expectations of the near future is not outweighed by the repetition of the typical Hackernews output on space travel: space is not worth exploring, yes it is, nobody will use this, yes they will, and then six thousand pages of bad economic theory.

Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks
March 31, 2017 (comments)
Some academics figure out how to make shit in pictures look like shit in other pictures. One Hackernews notices that the machine learning papers have largely stopped relying on mathematics or any other scientific endeavor; the others are ready with reassurances that someone will get around to formal research sooner or later. All this stuff is super worthwhile in the meantime because we can just keep passing around training sets verbatim and treating them as infallible, just like we do with node.js libraries! Both the machine learning community and the web development community are completely free of charlatans! Scout's honor!