webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of July, 2018.

How to get kids to pay attention
July 01, 2018 (comments)
Some scientists explore the idea that people focus better when given a reason to give a shit. Hackernews considers that maybe children are human beings. Hundreds of comments are devoted to determining whether toilets are cleaned because that is the driving passion of individual toilet-cleaning aficionados or because of the invisible hand of the market deterring janitors from operating commercial aircraft. Other Hackernews assume that Mayan culture is still in the hunter/gather stage and declare the studies in the article suspect. Everyone agrees that the kids these days are just rotten and it's everyone else's fault.

Founder to CEO: How to build a great company from the ground up
July 02, 2018 (comments)
A parasite compiles buzzwords into a Google Docs text file. In response, a Hackernews apostate suggests that perhaps building a lasting business at a sustainable pace is within the realm of possibility. The Hackernews Re-education Squad parachutes into the resulting panic to firmly explain that hockey-stick growth followed by acquisition or IPO is the only acceptable path forward, and that making a low-six-figure income in an affordable community is a dangerous myth. The real question is: during your normal, necessary, not-excessive twelve-hour work day, are you more productive before dawn or after dusk?

Italy Wikipedia shuts down in protest at proposed EU copyright law
July 03, 2018 (comments)
The Italian branch of Wikipedia throws a temper tantrum. Nobody notices, but the temper tantrum was about the European Union, an entity Hackernews knows everything about and on which is willing to deliver lectures ad infinitum. Hackernews doesn't know much about Italy, but whenever they hear "european union" they remember the six thousand thinkpieces they read about Brexit, so that's what all the comments are about. Sadly, the Italian branch of Wikipedia returned to normal operation the next day.

Youtube-dl: Command-line program to download videos
July 04, 2018 (comments)
A video scraping tool gets a new release. Hackernews is grumpy because the tool, which downloads videos from Google but does not display ads, isn't trivially available on their Google-powered advertising-supported phone operating system. Hackernews argues about the best options to pass to the tool. One Hackernews is furious that someone has the audacity to play music from Youtube at parties, and fervently defends the professional tradecraft of playing music at parties.

EU copyright law proposal rejected
July 05, 2018 (comments)
Europe caves to Big Wiki. Hackernews doesn't think this is over; they suspect that people whose entire job is to pass this legislation may somehow be motivated to continue trying to pass this legislation. The armchair lawyers arrive and form up battle lines to decide whether people should have any say in what laws are passed by their rulers.

Vue.js: the good, the meh, and the ugly
July 05, 2018 (comments)
A webshit shits webshit about webshit. Hackernews has tons of opinions about the webshit in question, since it was the de facto alternative to the other webshit du jour when Facebook threatened to throw its toys out of the crib. An argument immediately breaks out about whether it is appropriate for software developers to develop software, or if their real job is bolting together random shit they found on the internet. Instead of phrasing the argument in these terms, Hackernews communicates in the only way they really know how: namedropping javascript libraries and hoping the other party has heard of them and can infer a position statement from the set of libraries selected. "React and Flux at the state machine!" "VueX, when the DOM fell." Only one Hackernews dares to ask the really important question: what syntax highlighting color scheme is used by the article author.

MacOS Mojave removes subpixel anti-aliasing, making non-retina displays blurry
July 06, 2018 (comments)
Apple makes a slight change to font rendering. Millions die in the resulting apocalypse. Hackernews lashes together otherwise-worthless 1080p monitors to form a rampart around their 300-dpi enclave, the last remaining bastion of enlightened civilization, under constant assault from the mindless quasi-chordates whose reprobate "culture" is so degenerate that they don't even care if they edit text on a screen with less than 120Hz refresh rates. To keep up morale, they entertain one another with obvious fiction regarding modern so-called people willing to purchase and deploy computer screens that cover less than 120% of the Adobe RGB color gamut.

Learn C and Build Your Own Lisp (2014)
July 07, 2018 (comments)
An Internet has a hobby. Hackernews likes to watch. The hobby involves Lisp, whose evangelists are so ancient and terrifying that the Rust Evangelism Strike Force declares the entire comment thread a no-fly zone and produces new maps marking the area as lost territory, impenetrable to the faithful.