webshit weekly

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

How Norway spends its $882B global fund
September 22, 2016 (comments)
Norway is doing it wrong and a nonce collection of web programmers have the solution.

Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?
September 23, 2016 (comments)
One hundred people answer this question with "go look what colleges recommend." One hundred more people respond by claiming colleges don't make good recommendations. Sixty people repsond with podcast-related merchandise. In accordance with Hackernews tradition, the longest posts contain the least information, presented by the least-qualified individuals.

Upgrade your SSH keys
September 24, 2016 (comments)
Hackernews decides this is great advice or mediocre advice, based on which blog posts formed their opinions for them. Nobody has useful input, but at least one Hackernews is coherent enough to win Crypto Buzzword Bingo. Some time is spent hating each other's Reddit accounts. Nobody upgrades their SSH keys.

Google Web Fonts Typographic Project
September 25, 2016 (comments)
A useless person spends some time making a collage without resorting to actual magazines. Hackernews is deeply appreciative but not sure what the actionable intelligence is. Everyone agrees that all websites need more dynamically-loaded binary dependencies. A few Hackernews wistfully expound on their desire for an easy-to-read chart telling them what emotions should occur when presented with specially-shaped letters.

Bidirectional Replication is coming to PostgreSQL 9.6
September 26, 2016 (comments)
Hackernews is terrified of their upcoming ability to write data to multiple endpoints without adult supervision. Some rebellious elements claim they can handle it. The term 'sharding' is revisited, but it no longer has a definition.

Exponent – Build native apps in JS that work across both iOS and Android
September 27, 2016 (comments)
In the olden days, before Paul Graham invented programming, this sort of project would be called a 'binding,' and it would be an essential feature for any library that expected to see regular use. Today, it is called a 'revolution' and is the sole source of praise in a cold, ugly world. A Hackernews is culled upon saying this sort of software is not good enough to make Javascript good and reveals himself to be a Java programmer. Nobody looks up from the feast long enough to wonder what was meant.

YouTube Go: YouTube reimagined for the next generation of YouTube viewers
September 28, 2016 (comments)
Google realizes that it is too hard to give them money directly from your telephone, so they produce an application designed to ease this process. The headline feature is the ability to sell professional wrestling videos to people in central India. The secondary exposition of glee involves the program's innate ability to recommend other things to give Google money for. Hackernews spends a long time talking about youtube-dl, a program that has nothing to do with Google's eternal quest to get money from central India. A Turing-complete client-side bytecode interpreter is required to render the plaintext product announcement. Nobody notices.

On Phone Numbers and Identity
September 29, 2016 (comments)
A Bitcoin idiot working at Bitcoin Idiots, LLC has a cellphone number stolen. Bitcoin Idiots, LLC is praised by Hackernews for having 'on-point' security features such as two-factor authentication, thanks to which the attacker was able to steal one factor and recover the other. Another 'on-point' security feature is having configuration management capabilities entrenched in advance to shut down your entire business and allow you to spend days poring over server logs, in the inevitable event your retarded funbux party gets snaked.

Modern Functional Programming: The Onion Architecture
September 30, 2016 (comments)
Functional programmers, realizing that their entire discipline is rendered inconsistent and useless the instant it is faced with herculean tasks such as "I/O" and "users", finally admit for the record that it's better to do literally anything else when these tasks arise. Satisfying termninology like 'free monad' and 'applicative functors' are bandied about as Hackernews tries to decide if you want imperative nougat with functional candy shell, or functional fruit filling with a flaky imperative pastry surrounding it. Nobody stops to wonder if the functional wizardry compiles to imperative code, or whether the processor gives a shit if your source code looks good in LaTeX. One Hackernews admits not knowing what these people are jabbering about; all Hackernews in agreement are ritually downvoted. In accordance with federal law, someone asks how this compares with Rust.