webshit weekly

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

A Conspiracy to Kill IE6
May 01, 2019 (comments)
The last remaining Svbtle user recounts the time Google started the war against its own users. Hackernews discusses when is the correct time to sidestep your entire business model in order to force your meaningless software preferences upon strangers. (The answer, apparently, is "always.") The rest of the comments are people reminiscing about how hard it used to be to execute bad ideas in HTML.

Self Studying the MIT Applied Math Curriculum
May 02, 2019 (comments)
Some rando intends to read some books. Hackernews has also read books. The upvotes come in an avalanche, since talking about learning things is something Hackernews strongly approves of, even if actually learning things isn't something they tend to get around to. All of the comments are Hackernews competing for first prize in the Talking About Learning Math contest.

All extensions disabled due to expiration of intermediate signing cert
May 03, 2019 (comments)
Mozilla opens a new front in the war against its own users. Instead of wasting money on useless side projects nobody wants, they decide to torpedo their own primary product. The only mechanism Mozilla has to restore functionality is to repurpose user-spying malware-distribution pipelines. In the process of trying to unfuck the only program any of them run on their computers, Hackernews is startled to discover that the configuration window in Firefox does not have any predictable correlation to the configuration of Firefox. Many of them declare they are giving up and switching to alternative software from Google, a company widely regarded for respecting the privacy of anyone at all.

Negotiations Failed: How Oracle Killed Java EE
May 04, 2019 (comments)
An Internet learns a hard lesson about nailing someone else's colors to your mast. Hackernews thinks the answer, as in all things, is to switch to javascript. The tattered remnants of the Knights of Enterprise Java Middleware arrive to namedrop some development projects that nobody has cared or thought about since 2003. Every other language partisan with a "Hacker" "News" account gathers in the town square to throw fruit at the die-hards.

Canada Border Services seizes lawyer's phone, laptop for not sharing passwords
May 05, 2019 (comments)
Some Canadian cops emulate their better-armed and less-accountable neighbors to the south. Hackernews unleashes days' worth of pent-up armchair legal theory, eager to explore edge cases in a topic whose common cases they don't understand. Multiple technical solutions are offered (offloading private data, regularly wiping devices, etc) to a problem which is not technical in nature (police can just take your shit). Several Hackernews appear convinced that the cops will leave them alone if they can recite relevant statutes, like magical wizards casting warding spells. I look forward to their outraged thinkpieces after they test their theories.

.NET 5
May 06, 2019 (comments)
Microsoft shovels some more platform garbage out the door. In the process, they've managed to make a pointlessly-confusing marketing scheme even less understandable, with the result that Hackernews gets to drag out the easels and bikeshed Microsoft project management practices ad infinitum. Those Hackernews not in on the project management hijinks choose instead to whine about Linux. Microsoft claims the new platform garbage will work across several operating systems, but does not disclose how they intend to pop up a dialog box demanding yet another redistributable runtime installation for each program the user attempts to launch.

Css-only-chat: A truly monstrous async web chat using no JS on the front end
May 07, 2019 (comments)
A webshit demonstrates the hubris and folly of cascading style sheets. Hackernews is only interested in how to make their spam campaigns report more information about their victims.