webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of June, 2021.

Employees are quitting instead of giving up working from home
June 01, 2021 (comments)
Some white-collar workers decline to help justify some corporations' real-estate investments. Hackernews, as well, has had enough of extremely long games of hokey pokey. Some Hackernews who have been working remotely for a long time can't figure out why everyone else waited for a plague to start; the rest of the comments are people describing their ideal working environment, then other people disagreeing with them.

Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
June 02, 2021 (comments)
Flush with cash from having invested Apartheid propaganda profits in a corporate lapdog of the genocidal Chinese government, a money farm finally identifies a thematically appropriate purchase: a web forum started by a programming blogger and the person who inflicted Microsoft Excel upon the world. Industry analysts ask why, but their question is closed as off-topic. The first batch of Hackernews comments concern how old your account has to be for the Stack Overflow system to game itself on your behalf. The second batch of Hackernews comments tries to predict exactly when, due to interference from the new owners, Stack Overflow will transition from an almost-entirely-useless web forum to an entirely-useless advertising platform. The rest of the comments are from Hackernews arguing about who made the best posts on the web forum.

An Unbelievable Demo
June 03, 2021 (comments)
An Internet writes some software, then someone else tries to sell it back. Hackernews has also written some software, and then seen it again later, but all the comments just turn into Hackernews trading stories of internet celebrity sightings.

There are no results for tank man
June 04, 2021 (comments)
Microsoft, an American company located in the United States of America, has made a corporate priority of licking the boots of the murderous Communist Party of China, in front of God and everyone. Hackernews wigs out on the Hall Monitor, who assures us that any perceived downplaying of the story in question is due to the site's shitty software and inattentive operators, not because "Hacker" "News" is in cahoots with the unforgivably despicable Chinese Communist Party, who is responsible for killing and injuring thousands of people in and around Tiananmen Square on June 3rd and 4th, 1989. Microsoft assures the world that they only intended to help suppress this information in other places, not the one where you're sitting. For all you know.

G7: Rich nations back deal to tax multinationals
June 05, 2021 (comments)
Several governments from wealthy nations gather together to agree that they would like some more money. Hackernews has extremely strong opinions on this topic, but instead decides to endlessly incorrect one another about how treaties work. Other Hackernews debate why the governments even want the money; surely, muses Hackernews, if we let corporations keep it all, they will provide for us? The answer, it turns out, is three hundred comments full of fanfiction about land taxes. My favorite comment thread arrives when one particularly delightful Hackernews demands to know why governments are "allowed to collude."

Hundreds of fishing vessels vanishing along Argentina’s waters
June 06, 2021 (comments)
Some fishers are all up in Argentina's shit. A nonprofit called Oceana investigates and discovers it's in fact a massive industrialized Chinese fleet, which was to be expected, as Oceana had always been at war with Eastasia. An Argentinian flies an airplane over the fleet to capture footage; Hackernews gets distracted by the airplane. Later, a debate erupts over which economic labels best apply to the Chinese government; Hackernews is deeply concerned about property rights, whereas the Chinese government is focused primarily on ethnic cleansing.

Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
June 07, 2021 (comments)
An asshole cyberbullies a former employee. Half of Hackernews goes full-on Internet Tough Guy and demands to be allowed to fistfight lawyers. The other half of Hackernews nervously begs everyone to stop making so much noise in case some passing lawyers get upset. There are a thousand comments posted herein, a surprising number of which are earnestly defending the asshole, because this asshole is the CEO of a webshit company, and lots of Hackernews cannot possibly envision a world in which a webshit CEO is capable of error. Eventually the asshole shows up in the comments to double down, and various Hackernews shout angrily in the resulting thread.