webshit weekly

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

Unbricking a $2k bike with a $10 Raspberry Pi
August 01, 2020 (comments)
A webshit upgrades an iPad accessory. Hackernews lines up to explain why paying a company to tell you to ride a stationary bicycle is unassailably superior in every way to just riding an actual bicycle like some kind of dipshit would.

Laws of UX
August 02, 2020 (comments)
A webshit lectures us on "user experience." The website is almost completely inaccessible to visually-impaired users. Even if you can see the text, some of it is sideways. Hackernews doesn't like how it looks on their iPhones. There are two primary avenues of discussion: "I am smarter than this author, so I will complain about this website," and "I am smarter than you are, so I will tell you how to interpret this website." None of the information presented in the website or the Hackernews commentary is of any use to anyone.

A ride that takes 10^20k years to complete in Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 [video]
August 03, 2020 (comments)
An Internet reports a bug in a video game. The developers fix the bug. Hackernews tries to tell us that they know a lot about mazes, but they can't agree on what a maze is. The original video has all of the relevant mathematics, but Hackernews decides to tackle the problem from first principles anyway.

In spite of an increase in Internet speed, webpage speeds have not improved
August 04, 2020 (comments)
Webshits can ruin the internet faster than the internet can keep up. The report includes a long list of verified evidence that this is bad for everyone. Some Hackernews ask why webshits absolutely refuse to learn any problem-solving approaches that do not involve adding compute cores to every client device on Earth. The only believable answer boils down to "because it's easier for the programmers that way," and the rest of the discussion devolves into Hackernews talking past each other based on whether they hold the assumption that there is no more valuable resource on the planet than a person who knows how to type javascript into a computer.

Moved a server from one building to another with zero downtime
August 05, 2020 (comments)
A Reddit goes to great lengths to enable an abusive asshole. Hackernews can think of way better ways to enable abusive assholes, and has tons of personal anecdotes to demonstrate it. We are then treated to a list of every dumb thing Hackernews has been paid to do to a computer, and some dumb things they did for free.

Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects
August 06, 2020 (comments)
Germany tries to repair its damaged insect ecology, at the risk of endangering its existing Laser Floyd ecology. Hackernews has all kinds of weird-ass opinions about environmental conservancy, but they're all drowned out by the lunatics who are only interested in ranting about the deleterious effects of electricity, light, sound waves, and whether or not members of Home Owners Associations are free citizens.

I'm Open Sourcing the Have I Been Pwned Code Base
August 07, 2020 (comments)
A webshit couldn't get any money for a hash table with a search box and suddenly cares about 'betterment.' Not 'betterment' in any sense that means useful data could be had for free, but 'betterment' in the sense that other people should write a lot of software to enable future profits from this data. Hackernews briefly notes that no code has actually been released, then sets about reverse engineering it.