webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of March, 2021.

“ISO obstructs adoption of standards by paywalling them”
March 08, 2021 (comments)
The International Standards Organization attempts some damage control, but fails. Hackernews is mad about having to pay for access to standards, but some ISOs arrive to explain that they have to charge this money in order to pay for the accountants who manage the money they collect. Since there is no possible way for a committee of technical experts to collaborate without an army of bureaucrats charging for their work, everyone (both on Twitter and on "hacker" "news") continue to do nothing about the current situation.

Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building
March 09, 2021 (comments)
OVH, a hosting provider long derided as providing low-end, barely competent services available for next to no money, stops providing some of their services. Hackernews tells stories about fire suppression systems. It is exactly as interesting as that sounds.

Apple has gone to extraordinary lengths to make scroll bars invisible
March 10, 2021 (comments)
Some Internets have extremely strong opinions about GUI elements on their cell phones. Hackernews lines up to insist whatever GUI toolkit was endemic during their late puberty stages to be the obviously correct answer, and the reasons for deviating from these norms range from "deliberate corporate sabotage of human productivity" to "middle management hubris" to "incompetence." Of course, all the answers are flowing readily from the keyboards of Hackernews around the world, just waiting for an enterprising young software megacorporation to scoop them up and ride them to infinite riches. For some reason, this does not seem to happen.

I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service
March 11, 2021 (comments)
An Internet spends several thousand dollars on domain names, but is on track to recoup that money in several years, assuming the AWS bills don't go up and Kazakhstan doesn't fall over. Hackernews turns this into a discussion about how much money it's appropriate to allow your spouse to have. Opinions apparently vary but I had to stop reading this genre of post because it's clear that lots of Hackernews marriages are in fact mortgage trusts whose board members fuck on occasion, and envisioning these people's lives is utterly heartbreaking. The rest of the posts are people bitching about poorly-written email validators and/or bragging about their gimmick domain names.

Speed of Rust vs. C
March 12, 2021 (comments)
The Rust Evangelism Strike Force has strong opinions on writing high-performance code, which amount to "I have never done it but I bet Rust is better at it than C." Hackernews has a series of contradictory anecdotes from various hobby programs they've written to either support or debunk this opinion. Almost all of them are confused about at least one stage of the compilation process, so they're not much more helpful than the original content-free article. Obviously the only surefire comparison will come from close examination of the specifications of each language, but nobody seems to like Rust enough to treat it as a serious programming language worth documenting.

Dhcpcd Will Need a New Maintainer
March 13, 2021 (comments)
An Internet decides to hand off some work due to declining health. Hackernews has nothing to say about the matter, as far as I care.

Security.txt
March 14, 2021 (comments)
Some webshits are trying to help, but it isn't clear how. Hackernews votes for the link out of gratitude, but can't muster much enthusiasm to wax prosaic about it. One of the authors arrives in the comments to point out that a five-line text document is apparently worth enshrining as an IETF standard. Hackernews notes that in the rare event a website decides to implement this thing, they don't comply with the "standard" anyway, which is just as well since nobody reads this shit anyway.