webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of April, 2019.

Warp – Mobile VPN
April 01, 2019 (comments)
The idiots who ported DNS to HTTP would like you to beta-test their next rental property. Leery Hackernews demand to know why anyone should trust this company, which all of them already trust. Most of Hackernews tries to guess which programs the company is running, while others try to divine the reason this company wants all of the packets on the internet to route through their servers. The rest of the comments are Hackernews listing similar products they already use or company employees defending the honor of their employer.

I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me
April 02, 2019 (comments)
A webshit lacks sufficient funds for Google to care. Hackernews compiles a massive list of people whose fault this is, none of whom work in the information technology industry, because that's where Hackernews works. Debates break out regarding which service comprises the best opportunity to pay money in order to not access data. The rest of the comments are Hackernews prognosticating what a world might look like in which people could pay money for art and then decide for themselves how to consume it.

Ex-Mozilla CTO: I was grilled for three hours at US airport by border cops
April 03, 2019 (comments)
The United States law enforcement community continues its war against everyone who is not a cop. Hackernews accidentally notices this time, because one of the casualties happens to touch computers for a living. The usual bravado shows up in the comment threads, as Hackernews pretends to have all sorts of solutions for police abuse. A steadily-increasing percentage of Hackernews finds it simpler to just declare they'll never visit America again in their lives, as though a life spent outside the United States of America was ever truly lived.

You Are Not Google (2017)
April 04, 2019 (comments)
An Internet reminds us to solve the problems we have, as opposed to solving the problems we aspire to have. Hackernews roundly rejects this advice, because there are so many FOSDEM talks to be given if you adopt a strict policy of resume-driven development.

CityBound – An open source city simulation game in Rust
April 05, 2019 (comments)
A webshit clones SimCity, then arrives in the comments to receive applause. The game claims to be built from many concurrent behavior models, and Hackernews' love for oversimplified views of society, built from arbitrary first principles, ensures the result is extremely popular. When it arises that someone who does not work for Mozilla used Rust, the Rust Evangelism Strike Force tries to throw a party. Compile times piss in the punch bowl.

Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize
April 06, 2019 (comments)
Three academics have opinions on electricity. One of them is qualified to. Hackernews isn't, but they're going to anyway; as with all of the "strongly-held and poorly-understood opinion" debates Hackernews gets into, the vote-to-comment ratio approaches parity. All of the comments are Hackernews declaring Obvious Facts, and then arguing with the flood of demands for definitions and Wikipedia links. Sample quote: "I'm not so sure I'd pick Democracy over nuclear power."

I Lied When I Said We Did Everything We Could
April 07, 2019 (comments)
A medical professional celebrates April Fools Day by reminiscing about the agonizing, prolonged death of a patient and lying to the surviving family. Hackernews recounts all the deaths and illnesses they've experienced or read about. No technology is discussed, but Hackernews has fun lecturing one another about sectarian differences among religions. Elsewhere, Hackernews struggles to identify nebulous concepts like "fact."