webshit weekly

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 a 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 some 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.