webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of September, 2016.

Amazon Launchpad for Startups
September 01, 2016 (comments)
Amazon would like to sell your shitty kickstarter products. Hackernews cannot decide if they're concerned enough about this centralization of power to post on medium about how dangerous it is; doing so would take away from the time they need to write android apps and monitor their adsense income and check their gmail accounts to make sure they're not missing a hangout. One-third of them complain that the images on the program website are not huge enough. Others are disgruntled because someone may compete with them.

Canadian surgeons urge people to throw out bristle BBQ brushes
September 02, 2016 (comments)
Hackernews is mortally terrified of small pieces of metal, because Canadians cannot stop eating them. One person suggests actually paying attention to how you clean your grill, and is hailed as a hero. Another is disappointed to own the only grill spatula ever made that does not have a bottle opener built in. There is no discussion of technology.

Chrome is warning users about insecure pages
September 03, 2016 (comments)
Google, furious that ISPs are able to compete with Google Analytics at all, configures Chrome to bitch at people who use unencrypted http. Self-signed certificates are still regarded as worse than no encryption at all. Tim Berners-Lee, unsatisfied with having ruined the internet to the current degree, wants to add STARTTLS to http. Hackernews is deeply impressed by this idea, as it gets them one step closer to being able to outsource frontend to Bootstrap, backend to Heroku, security to Google, and accounting to Stripe, leaving them free to decide which market sector's laws are insufficiently ignored (i.e. "ready for disruption").

People in Los Angeles Are Getting Rid Of Their Cars
September 04, 2016 (comments)
The richest, most childless demographic on earth cannot figure out why everyone doesn't just take Uber everywhere. None of them will remember this conversation during the process of buying their third minivan, or during the process of moving out of downtown into a place that children can live. Some of them instead spend a lot of time pretending their decision to eradicate their own genetic line was financial in nature.

Tor’s Branding Pivot Is Going to Get Someone Killed
September 05, 2016 (comments)
A post on medium.com misunderstands the purpose of Tor; Hackernews responds by deciding Tor usage was just going to make them look like terrorists anyway. They spend a while reminiscing about the good old days, before Tor was used for anything at all. Someone mentions Jacob Appelbaum; Hackernews dutifully replays the same conversation they always do.

Insomnia 3.0 – A simple and beautiful REST API client
September 06, 2016 (comments)
An idiot produces a web browser that does not browse the web. Hackernews becomes inflamed with desire, and shares the pornography they have acquired that satisfies this particular fetish.

How we unnecessarily burned 20k with Facebook Ads
September 07, 2016 (comments)
An inexplicably perceptive Hackernews realizes that Facebook is not a very good ad agency. Hackernews decides it's the commenter's fault, and suggests some possible fixes: