webshit weekly
An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the third week of August, 2017.
Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
August 15, 2017
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The High Priests of Hackernews weigh in on sexism. Hackernews weighs in on several related topics; this trainwreck of a peanut gallery includes deep thoughts like "incoherent ranting should have a place at the table" and "everyone but me is misunderstanding this issue." No technology is discussed.
Why We Terminated Daily Stormer
August 16, 2017
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Cloudflare's CEO explains the decision to shitcan some Nazis because Cloudflare's CEO didn't like them, but doesn't think that's the best policy going forward. Hackernews gets into a massive screaming festival about how free speech is dead because some webshits won't host a Hitler fanclub message board.
Essential Phone, available now
August 17, 2017
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A company releases a completely unremarkable cellphone. Even Hackernews can't bring themselves to pretend to give a shit. Most of the comments are about how great the iPhone is, except for the ones about the Pope's opinion on climate change. If you would like to spend seven hundred dollars on a black rectangle that runs Android in exactly the same manner as every other black rectangle that runs Android, this is the story of the week for you.
Explaining React's license
August 18, 2017
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A Facebook makes excuses for being an asshole about software. Hackernews is furious that Facebook has better lawyers than they do, and sets about making a list of similar shitware they can use instead. Several dozen Hackernews spend some time arguing that all of Facebook's lawyers are wrong. Nobody listens. The rest of the comments are people telling each other ghost stories about patent indemnification.
Vue.js vs. React
August 19, 2017
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A webshit compares itself to other, almost identical webshit. Hackernews suddenly cares about this comparison because they got scared by yesterday's ghost stories. The comments are a cesspit of trivial minutiae of interest only to the most reality-detached webshit plumbers. If you're interested in watching six thousand interns argue about whether <button :disabled="isButtonDisabled">Button</button> is more "intuitive" than <button disabled={isButtonDisabled}>Button</button>, then this is the story of the week for you.
Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t
August 20, 2017
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A bureaucrat advertises a book. The Hackernews administrators manually excluded this advertisement from their usual spam filtering. Hackernews is aghast that there are people on earth richer than Hackernews. One Hackernews points out that someone described in the story acted like an asshole; the rest of the debate focuses on whether acting like an asshole is the right thing to do. No technology is discussed.
Android Oreo
August 21, 2017
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Google shits out this week's version of its pocket surveillance platform. This release contains a big new feature, which will allow Google to patch publicly-known security problems and introduce newer, subtler security problems at an unprecedented rate of speed. Hackernews doesn't like how the emojis look. All major functionality regressions are dismissed as something only "power users" would need, and the relative dearth of supported platforms is used as an opportunity to instruct readers to send more money to Google.