webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of October, 2018.

Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
October 08, 2018 (comments)
Google left your shit out in the rain, and has prepared an interpretive security dance to distract you. Hackernews solemnly praises the terrible unwanted trash product at the center of the latest mishap, and writes some fanfiction about which other trash products might copy parts of Google's failed attempt.

How to Get Things Done When You Don't Feel Like It
October 09, 2018 (comments)
A bureaucrat pontificates about getting work done when you don't care about it. All of the suggested approaches are based on pop psychology and buzzwords; the term 'self-discipline' does not occur once in the entire article. This omission makes it extremely attractive to Hackernews, who gleefully detail all of the grotesque habits they've ritualized in pursuit of the ability to emulate fully-functional human beings. The party continues until one weirdo shows up and complains that the only successful approach is engaging with other human beings, so Hackernews convenes an intervention panel to diagnose what disgusting malfunction could possibly have led to this bizarre behavior.

Microsoft Joins the Open Invention Network
October 10, 2018 (comments)
Microsoft sneaks into the henhouse. Hackernews is torn between excitement at the prospect of being able to clone software they wrote at their last jobs and a creeping unease whenever the memory surfaces of the last eight hundred times someone tried to cooperate with Microsoft. The former group is pleased with the extensive list of half-assed standards they are now free to port to node.js, and the latter group starts a fistfight about some guy who landed in the pokey for selling copied Windows discs.

Astronauts escape malfunctioning Soyuz rocket
October 11, 2018 (comments)
The Soyuz campaigns to be renamed Pаспускать. Hackernews has nothing of value to contribute to this event, so they spend the afternoon constructing narratives of the proceedings based on Twitter posts. When that gets dull they start mining Wikipedia for trivia to report in the manner of baseball commentators reading player stats during a slow game.

Every Byte of a TLS Connection Explained and Reproduced
October 12, 2018 (comments)
An Internet documents a commonly-used protocol, then shows up in the comments to announce the use of a CDN to serve a single static page of HTML. The vote-to-comment ratio on this article is in excess of ten to one, which means Hackernews bookmarked this page but has not yet actually read it.

Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound
October 13, 2018 (comments)
An Internet has a plan to make children even more noisy and clumsy than they already are. Interpol is dispatching teams to haul the author back to The Hague to answer for this crime. Hackernews takes a break to reminisce about old websites, trading links to a few on the grounds that there is no search engine worth a shit. The rest of the Hackernews discuss how important hearing is, as though that is surprising information which needs explicit mention. A few Hackernews are extremely excited about date calculations.

How I’ve Attracted the First 500 Paid Users for My SaaS
October 14, 2018 (comments)
A webshit announces a breakthrough plan to acquire customers: talk to people and find out what they want, then sell it to them. Hackernews scoffs at this naive and ridiculous approach. They don't have any real reason to believe it can't work, but this is the only medium.com thinkpiece advocating it, so it is Obviously Wrong. The author shows up and only engages with Hackernews asking productive questions, which further enrages the rest. Buried within the bottom third of the comment page are the posts from other people who have taken similar approaches and met with success. Nobody replies.