webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of June, 2019.

Boeing Built Deadly Assumptions into 737 Max, Blind to a Late Design Change
June 01, 2019 (comments)
The New York Times reviews Boeing's Full Self-Driving project. Discussing a pair of crashes that killed almost three hundred and fifty people, Hackernews can't decide whether the failure was one of user experience or branding. Other Hackernews think that this plane would have worked better if it were designed by programmers with a tendency to work late for free. A majority of the comments are Hackernews incorrecting one another about FAA regulations, avionics, and lift.

Google Cloud Is Down
June 02, 2019 (comments)
SRE is what you get when you treat operations as if it’s a software problem. Hackernews whiles away the downtime by trying to guess which aspect of Google's network went tits-up. Another popular pastime involves trying to figure out if Amazon Web Services might be more reliable than Google Cloud. The rest of the comments are complaints about Google's (hypothetical) customer service and (extremely real) billing. Nobody considers the obvious root cause: Google, being unable to embed ads into TCP packets, has discontinued the product.

Apple Sign In
June 03, 2019 (comments)
Apple invents single sign-on and disposable email addresses in one fell strike. Hackernews writhes in ecstasy, joyously praising Tim Cook's selfless devotion to the plight of the commoner. Some seditious apostates complain that Apple is not tithing sufficiently to app programmers, but since the only permissible dissembling is criticism of the laptop keyboard, the apostasy is banished from the halls of "Hacker" "News." Aside from Macbook Testaments and delirious gratitude, most of the comments are Hackernews wondering how they're supposed to port their webshit into compatibility with actual security practices.

Firefox Now Available with Enhanced Tracking Protection by Default
June 04, 2019 (comments)
Mozilla continues the war against its own sponsors. Hackernews likes all the words in the post but none of them are particularly interesting or novel, resulting in a 4:1 vote:comment ratio. Just about all of the comments are people telling us what web browser they prefer. Since there are only three web browsers, the comments get a bit repetitive.

“Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”
June 05, 2019 (comments)
Apple pretends to share the reasons it approves or disapproves of software in its repositories. Hackernews focuses on the part where Apple disapproves of tracking and manipulating children, struggling with the relative morality of tracking and manipulating ... you know, anyone at all. Various alternatives to personal-data mining and advertising are discussed, but nobody really takes the idea seriously. A few Hackernews can't understand how it could be possible to write and maintain a program that doesn't constantly send all collectable usage information directly back to the programmer.

The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness
June 06, 2019 (comments)
Some rando gets paid by the word. We get five thousand of them, all pretending to explain why some people are sad and alone. Hackernews is frequently sad and alone, so there is intense interest in this particular article. Because it insists that bad people are making wrong decisions and ruining society, Hackernews is 100% sold on this wall of text. The sadness and loneliness, in other words, should not be ascribed to wearing toe shoes, spending eighty-five percent of their income on studio lofts, drinking Soylent products in their open-plan offices eighteen hours per day, or spending every waking moment attempting to lure rich people into paying them to undermine worker protections on a global scale. Nope, it's just the zeitgeist. Nobody's fault!

Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer
June 07, 2019 (comments)
After a decade in the ad mines, a webshit relates some valuable lessons, which fall into a few categories:

  1. Computer Science is not software engineering
  2. All software-related text and speech contain lies
  3. Everyone sucks at software engineering
  4. You should voluntarily suck at it too
  5. Nobody cares, so half-ass it

Hackernews organizes a humility tournament, then breaks up into teams to bikeshed whatever part of the article stung the worst.