webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the third week of April, 2018.

H&R Block and Intuit Lobbying Against Simpler Tax Filing (2017)
April 14, 2018 (comments)
The United States Congress continues the war against its own users. Hackernews can't decide if the politicians involved are liars or just idiots. A handful of Hackernews can't tell the difference between trade associations and individual companies. Most Hackernews seem to believe that bribery is fine when it's in small doses: say, a couple million here or there. Most don't believe that lobbying is bribery, since these miniscule amounts seem too sweet a deal to be true.

ReactOS releases 0.4.8 with experimental Vista/7/10 software compatibility
April 15, 2018 (comments)
Some Internets are still building a scale model of a pile of dogshit. After proclaiming a barely-functional Windows knockoff "one of the most important software projects in history," Hackernews settles in to bicker about which Windows releases were less terrible than others.

Vipassana for Hackers [pdf]
April 15, 2018 (comments)
An Internet satirizes college-student pseudomysticism mixed with terminal Dunning-Kruger exhibitions so well that the result is almost indistinguishable from the ramblings of a pompous nutcase. The document comes complete with meaningless charts and a "References" section half-full of Wikipedia links. Hackernews, renowned experts on pompous douchebaggery, spend several hours congratulating each other on paying money to nap while someone grunts at them over loudspeakers. Readers are cautioned that while paying attention exclusively to yourself comes naturally, shutting the fuck up for a while was a harrowing experience, not for the weak. The satirist arrives in the comment section to continue the jest, but takes it too far with lines like "very painful meditation" and claiming to have spent damn near two months on this shit. Nobody could be that ridiculous.

Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
April 16, 2018 (comments)
Some Canadian bureaucrats accidentally dumped everyone's purse on the table, and are lashing out at a teenage data hoarder. Hackernews debates whether the government fucked up because Canadians elected too many old people or if it's because Canadians elected too many stupid people. Several dozen shitty analogies are invented as the rest of Hackernews attempts to convince each other that manually typing in URLs should be punishable by death, because that's simpler to implement than proper access controls.

Facebook Container for Firefox
April 17, 2018 (comments)
Hackernews revisits Mozilla's efforts to cripple non-Google ad agencies. Comments complaining about the draconian measures taken by webshits to punish anyone who uses surveillance countermeasures are fielded by corporate representatives assuring everyone that such antisocial assholes deserve what they get. Hackernews then spends twelve hours whining about Reddit's user interface: all Hackernews are livid about how terrible it is, but not angry enough to find something else to do. One Hackernews snakes my joke from the last time this thing was discussed. I see you, fucker.

No boundaries for Facebook data: third-party trackers abuse Facebook Login
April 18, 2018 (comments)
Some webshits enumerate all the ways a surveillance company sells its reconnaissance. Hackernews can't decide whether this obvious betrayal is a problem; after all, Facebook documented the API, and they are rich, which are the only two things upon which Hackernews is capable of basing an ethical evaluation.

Apple open-sources FoundationDB
April 19, 2018 (comments)
Apple signs up for free labor. Hackernews is over the moon, since about 70% of them seem to have worked on this particular software for a living. Several are puzzled and disappointed that Apple only released the core component and not any of the parts that make it useful. Others keep showing up to brag about running "petabyte-scale clusters" on other people's computers ("all kinds of aws instances"). Dozens of comments enumerate all the amazing things you can do with this software, all of which involves recreating existing software. The project in question is distributed fault-tolerant key-value store #8,605, which uses SQLite to actually store the data.

Smugmug Acquires Flickr
April 20, 2018 (comments)
Some webshits loot Yahoo!'s corpse. Hackernews is happy that someone had enough money to keep their photo archive from falling off the internet. All of the comments are people asking the CEO for tech support and the CEO promising they'll get it.

A journalism student who found out she won a Pulitzer in class
April 21, 2018 (comments)
A newspaper accidentally put their interns on a byline, leading to the bizarre circumstance of a journalism grad student with a resume someone might notice. Hackernews' takeaway: programmers in the advertising industry should get more prizes. One of you linked this website in a comment on this story mere minutes ago. Please remember that this is a violation of the Prime Directive. Criticism of this policy may be directed to ombudsman at n-gate.com.