webshit weekly

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

Awk in 20 Minutes (2015)
May 01, 2020 (comments)
An Internet describes an experience with some kind of practical extraction and reporting language. Hackernews describes other similar languages, dimly recalled from some kind of electronic bronze age when people used tools to perform work without any git hooks. An Executive Hackernews declares mystification at the existence of such artifacts, confusedly ruminating on the sufficiency of interactive text editors. Other Hackernews note sagely that the language is useful when applied to the tasks for which it was designed, but other tools may be better for other tasks.

Medium-hard SQL interview questions
May 02, 2020 (comments)
An Internet hands you a hammer and lets you practice identifying nails. Hackernews learns a lot about using a query language where a sane person would use a programming language, gets distracted by a minor matter of linguistics, and then gets back to a serious debate: exactly which parts of SQL are worth knowing? Which parts should people be shunned for not knowing? Which parts are good for replicating the tool you actually wanted?

Startup financial models – Templates compared for SaaS
May 03, 2020 (comments)
An Internet reviews some bullshit factories you can use to convince morons that you have a business plan. Hackernews votes for the article because they would like to convince morons they have a business plan, but the content is so utterly devoid of even the slightest interesting qualities that almost nobody has anything to say. Some of the hucksters arrive in the comments to hobnob with the marks. A Hackernews wonders how you're supposed to build a five-year financial model of a business that does not yet exist, and is instructed by everyone in earshot to make shit up until a resulting graph convinces a patron to lavish the mark with debt.

Bye, Amazon
May 04, 2020 (comments)
A webshit leads by example. Hackernews posts one thousand comments, which mostly fall into three buckets: "this person is a hero and Amazon should be ashamed," "unions are scams designed to give power unjustly to non-rich people," and "everyone at Amazon should stop whining because some third-world dirt factory is worse." Along the way, much economic theory is hastily dug out, nebulously understood, and inexpertly applied to the people who actually do the shit that Amazon is famous for doing.

Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce
May 05, 2020 (comments)
AirBnB (business model: "Uber for toilets") cancels nearly two thousand reservations. Hackernews thinks the severance package is quite kind, or possibly inhuman and cruel, or definitely wrong in some direction, because America. Two-thirds of the comments on the article are in a thread bickering about how much money a company should pay someone whilst shitcanning them. The rest of the comments are Hackernews attempting to divine the future progress of the COVID-19 pandemic based on AirBnB's business practices. No technology is discussed.

GitHub Codespaces
May 06, 2020 (comments)
Microsoft ports their webshit text editor ... to the web. Hackernews is ecstatic that they can finally use their favorite text editor without leaving The Only Application. Dozens of Microsofts flood the comments to use Capitalized Brandnames of Important Products. A substantial subthread breaks off where Hackernews enthuses about networked text editing features which have existed in other software since the Reagan administration. Some Gitlabs show up to crow about how they got here first. The rest of the comments are comparing VS Code to other text editors, or comparing Microsoft to other assholes.

Zoom Acquires Keybase
May 07, 2020 (comments)
Some webshits get bored and decide to work on software that anyone actually uses. Hackernews is furious; if only the webshits would have accepted money from Hackernews, says Hackernews, this never would have happened. Instead the webshits accepted a tremendous amount of debt from a high-class loan shark and now are scuttling the whole project to repay that debt. Hackernews discusses alternative software to replace the impending loss of all Keybase functionality, but since Keybase itself is a rambling mess of desultory, incoherent functionality it's impossible to eat just one.