webshit weekly

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

Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
October 01, 2019 (comments)
An Internet accuses a clod of being a secret genius. Hackernews is skeptical that anyone could possibly derail the almighty Google search results, despite half of them spending a significant portion of their lives trying to work out how to do exactly the same thing. Everyone here involved (Boris Johnson, Google, and Hackernews) has their degree of competence massively overestimated, and then Hackernews goes deep trying to divine the moral compasses of people thousands of miles away and uninterested in the opinion of Hackernews.

Hong Kong protest safety app banned from iOS store
October 02, 2019 (comments)
Apple maintains its title of "most courageous computer vendor" by immediately capitulating to the despots who control their industrial supply line. In line with this principled bravery, they cement their legacy of fearlessness by immediately reversing their policy the instant someone criticizes it. Hackernews delights at the opportunity to overlay Chinese anti-insurrection laws atop Apple's App Store policies and attempt to discern the shortest path to publishing a cellphone program that complies with the letter of the resulting policy while completely ignoring its intent. A few Hackernews point out that neither the Chinese dictators nor the App Store executive vice presidents are beholden to their own regulations, but they're distractedly hushed by those engrossed in the game.

Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption
October 03, 2019 (comments)
Some government bureaucrats, who possess no understanding of encryption, networks, computers, or telephony, attempt to concern-troll a corporation with a track record of never being held accountable by any government. The bureaucrats seem convinced that being able to talk to someone else without some cops eavesdropping will somehow hurt children. Hackernews isn't sure if this is true. That is to say, some Hackernews are unconvinced that the safety of children is the primary concern of the bureaucrats, and other Hackernews are unconvinced that privacy will necessarily cause harm to children. Nobody in the respective governments or the corporation in question is interested in the opinions of any other party in this conversation, but Hackernews has a good time trying to reverse-engineer everyone else's intentions. Later, Hackernews tries to decide if jerking it to pictures of naked kids emboldens sickos to move on to actually interfering with alive kids, or if there's just a basic percentage of child-fucking that we just have to accept is going to happen in human society.

Pricing niche products
October 04, 2019 (comments)
Some nerds with a specific hobby spend a lot of money on it. Hackernews, experts on economics and associated psychological treatises, weigh in on the correct methods for charging money to do things. When considering the method of determining optimum price for a consumer product relative to the market for that product, nobody remembers to suggest raising venture capital to overpay for the entire production run, then writing a cellphone program to allow people to rent the products while you file for an IPO and hope you can pay back your investors with the resulting stock sale. Sadly, this omission may be due to the entirety of Hackernews yelling at each other about which keyboard is best, whether any keyboards are even good, and what kind of an idiot even needs a keyboard, given that your Macbook Pro already came with one.

Google, Xiaomi, and Huawei affected by zero-day flaw that unlocks root access
October 05, 2019 (comments)
The Gros Michel operating system experiences a resurgence of Panama disease. The main producer advises distributors to switch cultivars, but most stores are just going to have to rely on existing stocks until the supply line catches up or the bottom falls out of their stock. Hackernews experiments with blaming the people who noticed the infection, but mostly just gripes about the fact that the farmers aren't very good at their jobs. Other Hackernews suggest switching to a different fruit. A Rust Evanglism Strike Force member, disheveled and lost, feebly waves a banner, but is bowled over by a light breeze of downvotes and does not get back up.

Stack Overflow Inc. Fiasco: Timeline
October 06, 2019 (comments)
An Internet who is obsessed with a web forum types eighteen hundred words about the web forum operators continuing the war against their own users. The web forum in question is extremely important to Hackernews, since it serves as a substitute for an actual education. It's not possible to tell if Hackernews is mad that people have opinions about how they are treated on the internet or if Hackernews is mad that someone is threatening the Codex Decuplus, from which all nodeledge stems. The argument is determined to be a perfect platform from which to announce an utter disinterest in "politics," which is a word that Hackernews understands to mean "any issue that does not directly affect a meaningful percentage of the FAANG companies' boards of directors." The reasoning is that if those boards are unaffected, Hackernews is unlikely to be directly affected now or in the foreseeable future, so the people who are raising this issue are irrelevant twerps. The users of the web forum are urged to ignore this distraction and get back to cataloging the text that Hackernews will be pasting into VS Code next week.

Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong
October 07, 2019 (comments)
Apple continues dauntlessly to stand up for its corporate values: Accessibility (the Chinese government has access to Apple's product management), Education (we'll teach you to stand up for yourselves), Environment (these changes should result in a marked decrease in tear gas canister expenditure), Inclusion and Diversity (Apple will equitably narc on dissidents from all walks of life), Privacy (Apple will do its utmost to assist you in keeping your beliefs to yourself), and Supplier Responsibility (never has a computer vendor been more responsible to the nation of its suppliers). Hackernews is infuriated by the idea that there may exist an entity with enough power to dictate terms to a tech company, since only tech companies are possessed of the divine right. The resulting freakout calls into question the rule of law, the practice of sovereign treaty, how powerful a country must be before it's worth taking their government seriously, who should be in charge of reinventing statehood from first principles, and which companies are best suited to standing up to oppressors. Apple takes no note of this dialogue; its policy remains steadfast. Whether an old person falls over or a young person stands up, Apple will call the cops.