webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the third week of January, 2021.

Signal is having technical difficulties
January 15, 2021 (comments)
Signal (business model: "Uber for texting") falls over. Most communications protocols are federated, and would survive one company's servers eating dirt, but Signal's owner/operator has decided this would degrade the user experience, presumably worse than the entire service shitting the bed out loud. Hackernews assumes that Signal is incapable of paying its hosting fees, and comes to the rescue by sending their money to a company that can't spin up cloud nodes fast enough to serve text messages. Other Hackernews bemoan the fact that once again they look like idiots, since they just conned half their friends and family into signing up for this mess.

Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup
January 16, 2021 (comments)
A webshit learns a hard lesson about keeping all your eggs in someone else's basket. Hackernews can't decide whether the problem lies with Google's entirely absent customer service or with the fact that Google does not give a demonstrable fuck about anything except e-stalking the planet to sell ads. An Elder Webshit arrives to narrate the origin story of the abuse vector Google is currently mismanaging, which results in a lengthy dialectic seeking to identify the proper arbiter of online assholery, the better to protect the poor unwashed morons who can't even type javascript into a computer. Along the way, Hackernews informs us that disabled people should fuck off to some other internet and stop trying to use theirs.

HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
January 17, 2021 (comments)
An Internet helps transmit the ancient wisdom to the next generations, but strangely limits the context of the epistle to one department. In reality, no aspect of any corporation is your friend. Your friends are your friends; anyone who has to be paid to be in the same room as you is at best a disinterested third party. Hackernews takes this concept to its ludicrous extreme, and declares that all professional relationships are lies, the concept of a job is a fleeting illusion, and you are minutes away from being a godforsaken starveling at all times.

I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea
January 18, 2021 (comments)
A webshit attempts to start a business machinesplaining medicine to doctors. We are subjected to the emotional journey of discovery in which the webshit learns that most professionals are unwilling to pay for information they are already ostensible experts on. Only programmers, it turns out, desire such a service, and since Stack Overflow already exists, there's not much of a market for it there either. Hackernews plods around trying to figure out if there's a way this idea could be salvaged, then realize that scraping webshit databases maybe isn't the best foundation upon which to construct the edifice of human healthcare. No, decides, Hackernews, some things require more than just React and some statistics. Maybe Tensorflow?

Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
January 19, 2021 (comments)
A small boat has been swallowed by a fish so large they haven't even noticed they're in the belly already. Hackernews debates the legality and morality of the business plan Amazon has deployed in this situation, and eventually come to the correct conclusion: Elastic is a hosting provider who thought they were a database vendor, and now they will be digested by hosting providers who are large enough to underwrite a database engineering team as a rounding error. Hackernews digs around for previous examples to compare this process, but loses interest after a while and just starts whining about how nobody really believes in open source any more. Worry not, reader, no executives were harmed.

Select a muscle and it provides the exercises to workout the selected muscle
January 20, 2021 (comments)
Some webshits produce a really boring coloring book. The site purports to advise exercises, but I was unable to cause it to teach me to strengthen my face. Interactive javascript toys about exercising are more accessible to Hackernews than exercising, especially when the javascript results in looped video of fit people straining at things. The creator of the webshit arrives in the comments and is immediately attacked by hordes of Hackernews who have each embraced a different trademarked exercise regiment as the unassailable law of the gym.

AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
January 21, 2021 (comments)
Amazon drops the first shovel of dirt into Elastic's grave. Hackernews repeats the previous round of arguments on the topic, to wit: "If Elastic doesn't like it why did they license the code to enable it" versus "Amazon should be nicer to the poor millionaires." Nobody asks why the CEO sold three quarters of a million shares last month.