webshit weekly (2017/03/07)

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

Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
March 01, 2017 (comments)
Jack Dorsey posts incognito as phase one of his search for Twitter's next part-time CEO. One Hackernews suggests maybe not flushing two billion dollars a year down the toilet, and is immediately attacked as unreasonable. The rest of Hackernews debates the merits of charging monthly fees, which nobody would ever pay, or else suggests approaches taken by failed companies in the past.

Nintendo Switch review: pure potential
March 02, 2017 (comments)
An internet posts an entirely content-free assesment of a brand-new product based on six hours of use. Hackernews is pissed that this video game console isn't an ipad, a phone, a laptop, or a different, older video game console. Some idiots take this opportunity to rekindle the SNES vs Genesis flamewar.

Why we are not leaving the cloud
March 03, 2017 (comments)
Some internets retract a previous blog post, based on blog comments. This would not normally be interesting, except in this case the blog post in question was corporate policy. Given that this company is the same one that accidentally shitcanned customer data and thus discovered none of their five backups worked, customers may want to consider migrating away from this service unless they see a CTO posting in their "Careers" page. Hackernews copies and pastes all the previous blog comments into this thread.

How we secretly introduced Haskell and got away with it
March 04, 2017 (comments)
Some idiots replace an overbuilt, needlessly-complicated cron replacement written in Python with an overbuilt, needlessly-complicated cron replacement written in haskell. Their claimed advantages boil down to "compiling." Hackernews immediately realizes two things:

1. Any time you rewrite an existing system you will have fewer bugs, since you are more familiar with implementation details in its context.
2. Since there's nothing interesting in this article about functional programming, this is a perfect opportunity for the Rust Evangelism Strikeforce to circle up and get lubed.

A Programmer’s Introduction to Unicode
March 05, 2017 (comments)
Indistinguishable Unicode Primer #4,592 is posted to the internet. Hackernews trades implementation trivialities they encountered while they each implemented all of typography from scratch in javascript. One particularly dense Hackernews unironically recommends something Joel Spolsky wrote, but even Hackernews knows that guy is a dipshit. The rest of the comments are entertaining, if you like watching professional programmers confuse each other about the differences between bytes, characters, and code points.

Akiyoshi's Illusion Pages
March 06, 2017 (comments)
Hackernews considers some optical illusions. Half of them pine for the days of HTML 3, the other half wonder if androids dream of electric Escher. One guy posts his undergraduate thesis in computer vision. Nobody replies.

World’s richest doctor gave away millions, then steered the cash to his company
March 07, 2017 (comments)
A reporter catches some rich guy laundering money through a university, but not in time to stop him, or have any other effect. Hackernews spends some time being nonprofit fiduciary experts, until someone reminds us that Beatus Graham publicly espoused the holy virtue of Naughtiness, at which point the wagons are circled and the Doublethink Cavalry defends the pioneers. Meanwhile, the money launderer is being considered for Federal office.

webshit weekly (2017/02/28)

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

Bash and Windows Subsystem for Linux Demo [video]
February 22, 2017 (comments)
Microsoft posts a low-quality video attempting to get Hackernews to boot Windows on their Macs so they can have bad implementations of modern Linux tools instead of the bad implementations of outdated Linux tools that ship with MacO's. Hackernews is excited about docker and disappointed their esoteric Debian shit isn't yet working. This is the right time to get Hackernews on board; nothing graphical works correctly and even simple things crash due to the poor implementation, which perfectly matches Hackernews development and operations efforts.

The Impact Github is Having on Your Software Career
February 23, 2017 (comments)
An internet thinks Github will take the place of basically every step of the hiring process throughout the IT industry. Even Hackernews knows he is full of shit, but they never pass up an opportunity to misinform each other about relevant employment law.

Missing $10,000 package of PAL SNES games recovered
February 24, 2017 (comments)
Some guy found his box. Hackernews dimly begins to suspect that the government services they're focused on 'disrupting' should probably be reliable. They're concerned, which in Hackernews parlance means they'll probably retweet something. A few arguments break out wherein half of the comments blame the guy receiving the package and the other half insist that the sender should have mailed multiple boxes, presumably to reduce any motivation the USPS might have had for finding a lost one.

SHA-1 collider: Make your own colliding PDFs
February 25, 2017 (comments)
Hackernews resumes a previous thread, wherein they admonish each other never to 'roll your own crypto', but rolling your own public-facing internet service, database backend, programming language, kernel, messaging protocol, orbital launcher, autonomous war robot, or legal document is completely fine.

Annotation is now a web standard
February 26, 2017 (comments)
Some nerds pushed some useless shit through a nerd hive. Hackernews has a low opinion of the nerd hive in question, since it was mean to them once. The rest of the comments are mostly jerkoffsmanship about how hard this particular useless shit is, despite the fact that it amounts to hypertargeted blog comments, which amount to hypertargeted guestbook programs.

A solution for enabling UDP in the web
February 27, 2017 (comments)
An absolute asshole decides that TCP over HTTP is not enough, and sets about inventing UDP over HTTP, without even the courtesy of pretending it has useful applications. Hackernews opines that this is a wonderful goal, since just using UDP is clearly insane. One Hackernews wonders why we even separate the transport layer and the application layer, given that HTTP is literally the only thing anyone uses, ever. Nobody really knows. Nobody ever will.

Who Needs GPS? The Story of Etak's 1985 Car Navigation System
February 28, 2017 (comments)
Before the government launched a free location service for the entire world, some nerds figured out how to put a compass and an odometer on a car to guess where on a map the car went. Hackernews focuses on how hard maps are to read, and decides that having your phone shout instructions at you probably saves millions of lives.

webshit weekly (2017/02/21)

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the third week of February, 2017.

Inferring Your Mobile Phone Password via WiFi Signals
February 15, 2017 (comments)
Some nerds port Van Eck phreaking to wifi. Hackernews is amazed that RF attacks still work, provided your smartphone unlock process is retarded. (Unless you use Blackberry OS 10's picture/number unlock, your smartphone unlock process is retarded.) The attack requires complete control of the wifi access point, and people who connect to random-ass networks deserve what they get.

40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
February 16, 2017 (comments)
A blogspammer posts an amazing finding: immigrants hang out with other immigrants. Hackernews is frantic to post about how uninterested they are in stupid things like sports and music, and how that lack of interest hasn't stopped them from making friends with other hipsters.

Master C++ Programming with Open-Source Books
February 17, 2017 (comments)
An idiot recommends learning C++ by starting with Boost and a book about Qt that's over a decade out of date, among other terrible wastes of paper. Hackernews spends some time shitting on Stroustrup, then some more time shitting on K&R. Sample quote: "The best place to master c++ is StackOverflow." In accordance with Federal law, the Rust Evangelism Strikeforce stages a sortie, but meets resistance.

LLD is included in the upcoming LLVM 4.0 release
February 18, 2017 (comments)
The LLVM compiler suite finally gets around to having a linker. Hackernews experiences pants-wetting glee despite having no clear understanding of the matter at hand. The Rust Evangelism Strikeforce shows up to party. Half of the comments are people misunderstanding how linkers work.

Detection of radioactive iodine at trace levels in Europe in January 2017
February 19, 2017 (comments)
Someone noticed trace radiation in northern Europe, which is where Russia sinks all of its broken nuclear reactors. Hackernews is utterly terrified -- far more than the reporting agency -- and demands to know why ISRN did not personally reach out to the web programming community regarding this incident.

Dear Apple
February 20, 2017 (comments)
Some shithead whines to Apple. Apple does not care. Hackernews thinks it's weird that a company as rich as Apple doesn't care what Hackernews thinks, but they suspect it's better this way. Apple knows best.

How we built a back end system for Uber-like maps with animated cars
February 21, 2017 (comments)
An internet implements a phone toy so nerds have something to stare at while waiting for their jitney cabs. Hackernews sets about comparing a phone map to a first-person shooter. One Hackernews is pissed it can't track random non-taxi vehicles. The rest of the comments are just people throwing out GIS- and database-related product names to seem knowledgeable.