webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of January, 2020.

Software Disenchantment (2018)
January 01, 2020 (comments)
A webshit gets blacklisted from Google I/O. Hackernews spends several hours bikeshedding a car analogy, with an eye toward making excuses for the idiocies outlined in the article. Another Hackernews decides to paste year-old Reddit comments. The rest of the comments follow a general pattern: Hackernews disagrees with the premise, regards it as unrealistic, but whatever software pissed a given Hackernews off recently is the exception and should be eradicated.

Which Emoji Scissors Close?
January 02, 2020 (comments)
An Internet is either bored or salaried. Hackernews posts links to similar obsessions about cellphone cartoons.

EA is permanently banning Linux players on Battlefield V
January 03, 2020 (comments)
Some idiots give money to assholes and get what's coming. Hackernews discusses the core of the problem (people are assholes) and the only possible response to the situation (deal with it or else fuck off). Many Hackernews list the computer games they have played, and reminisce about solutions that worked in the past, but each of them in turn is told that none of those solutions apply any more, or are not worth implementing, and the market dictates that "deal with it or else fuck off" is really best for everyone.

Building a BitTorrent client from the ground up in Go
January 04, 2020 (comments)
A webshit annotates a barely-functioning implementation of a popular piracy tool via Microsoft Paint. Hackernews is unsatisfied with merely getting cartoons about the important parts of the tool; they demand access to the software bureaucracy as well. A discussion breaks out about whether tools like this are doomed to be replaced by webshit reimplementations. The rest of the commenters want to learn Python.

Ask HN: Are books worth it?
January 04, 2020 (comments)
A Hackernews tries to figure out if there's anything important locked away behind arcane NoSQL implementations. Hackernews proceeds to teach one another to read. Not the mechanics of translating linguistic symbols to ideas and information, but the actual practice of identifying, selecting, and reading physical objects. Most of the comments are not contained in threads; instead, Hackernews decided to reply to the original question with over two hundred top-level replies, almost none of which garner a single response. Digging to the bottom of that barrel surfaces a fascinating collection of troglodytes who consider books to be actually dangerous. Finally there's the idiot who complains that phone apps which present ten-minute abstracts of entire books "condensed too much."

Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level
January 05, 2020 (comments)
Some webshits dish about scratch. Venture-backed money incinerators vastly overpay junior engineers, while advertising-cum-surveillance networks overpay senior engineers. Pinterest appears in the resulting charts, demonstrating that spamming Google image search results remains a steady source of salaried income for assholes. Hackernews argues about whether any of the numbers are real and how to get someone to give them that much money. No technology is discussed.

Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
January 05, 2020 (comments)
A Google wants to get a real job. Hackernews recommends against this, instead advising the Google to continue grifting corporate money and fornicate more. One Hackernews strongly supports this method, as actual work is apparently to blame for alcoholism and impending suicide. A gratifying number of other Hackernews reach out to offer moral support to this individual. The next comment thread is full of hints and tips at how to snow disinterested managers into thinking you're worth promoting, despite being a net drag on productivity. Each of these threads are nearly three hundred comments long, chock full of Hackernews asking and answering how to be a total piece of shit and still skate through personnel reviews. The rest of the comments are Hackernews struggling with the concept of "meaningful work," and whether that idea is something even remotely possible in real life.

Products I Wish Existed
January 06, 2020 (comments)
Some rich asshole posts a TODO list for someone else to use to make the asshole richer. Almost all of the things on the list exist; a better title would have been "Markets I Wish I Had Invested In." Hackernews selects entries from the list and agrees with them. Along the way, Hackernews invents Lockheed, Friendster, Scratch, Digg, call centers, "premium" tech support, and Mrs. Grundy.

The first chosen-prefix collision for SHA-1
January 07, 2020 (comments)
Cryptographers continue to cryptographate. Math is here, and so Hackernews spends several hours incorrecting one another about the contents of the article, even though it was written in plain English at a high school level (presumably the authors have encountered the internet before). Hackernews tries to muster up some optimism regarding their industry, but then the analogies show up, and several hours are lost trying to navigate back out of that quicksand. The rest of the comments are Hackernews asking each other if the two or three programs they actually use are subject to the described attack. Hackernews thinks they are not. They're not sure. But they're pretty sure.