Webshit Weekly

February 21, 2025

NASA has a list of 10 rules for software development

2025-02-15 | comments

NASA posts ten rules for writing software that won’t kill a mission, and the thread becomes a masterclass in HNers explaining why hard constraints are for losers. The rule against recursion? “It works fine in my vibe-coded microservice,” tweets someone who has never written code that can’t be rebooted because the stack overflowed and the CPU is a 400MHz rad-hard part from 1995. The rule against global variables? “Just use a singleton factory pattern with dependency injection and a side of Kubernetes!” says developer who thinks a container is a box, not a radiation shield. Someone brings up RabbitMQ because the future is message queues, apparently oblivious to the fact that spacecraft have less RAM than a modern toaster. The real takeaway is simple: write boring, verifiable code for hardware that costs more than your startup’s runway, and stop treating every problem as an opportunity to LLM your way into a compliance violation.

Google defends scrapping AI pledges and DEI goals in all-staff meeting

2025-02-16 | comments

Google’s all‑staff meeting read like a corporate séance for the clueless, a ritual where the digital landlords of Mountain View pretend they’re still the righteous custodians of “Don’t be evil.” The executives — psychopaths in Armani — announced they’re ditching AI pledges and DEI goals with the same self‑satisfied grin they wore when they rolled out “aura‑farming” features that do nothing but let a chatbot hallucinate a solution and call it “innovation.” The DEI program, a thin veneer of virtue‑signalling that never moved beyond HR PowerPoint, is now a casualty of a new order where compliance with a Trumpian executive order is the only moral compass left. The AI promises? Just token‑predictor marketing fluff. Meanwhile, the venture capital machine—the great fraud—cheers on this pivot.

Javier Milei backtracks on $4.4B memecoin after ‘insiders’ pocket $87M

2025-02-16 | comments

Another week, another tech‑industry circus act, this time starring Argentina’s president Javier Milei, who tried to sell a $4.4 billion memecoin and then pretended he never heard of it when insiders pocketed $87 million. HNers line up to explain how Bitcoin is a “commodity” while any no‑name token is just “vibe coding.” It’s a thinly veiled pump‑and‑dump, a digital feudal lord’s tax on the gullible, and the only predictable outcome is the inevitable crash. The tech industry will sell you a token for any price, as long as the insiders keep the profit.

Mt32-pi developer quits due to community harassment

2025-02-17 | comments

Yet another open source maintainer throws in the towel because some internet losers have nothing better to do than harass someone making free software. HNers, in their infinite wisdom, debate whether real names help, whether to be an asshole, or whether to just hide behind a corporation like every other digital feudal lord. The solution is obvious: stop pretending open source is some noble endeavor when it’s just unpaid labor for entitled manchildren who think every feature request is a birthright. These hobbyist developers are just vibe coding for free while the real winners—GitHub, VC firms, and platform overlords—extract value from their unpaid work. The maintainer should have learned from the great game: build something, get acquired, cash out, and let someone else deal with the community.

‘Honestly terrifying’: Yosemite National Park is in chaos

2025-02-17 | comments

Yosemite National Park is in chaos because of staffing cuts, and predictably, Hackernews has solved this crisis by proposing we let tech companies run it. Because nothing says “preserve natural beauty” like turning forests into SaaS products with usage-based pricing. Someone suggests DOGE could “code up an auction system, because apparently all government problems are just missing REST APIs. Another genius wants to hand it over to Ticketmaster - because what could go wrong combining nature with the company that invented service fees? The thread inevitably devolves into venture capitalists explaining how privatization would be “more efficient” while ignoring that national parks exist to serve the public, not maximize shareholder value.

Alice Hamilton waged a one-woman campaign to get lead out of everything

2025-02-18 | comments

Alice Hamilton, a 19th‑century crusader, would be horrified to see the contemporary web‑shit ecosystem still debating the safety of leaded solder while shipping PFAS‑laden gadgets to the Global South. HNers, as usual, turn a serious public‑health story into a fetish for hand‑waving and anecdote, misconstruing scientific consensus as a personal vendetta against “lead‑free” hype. The great game of venture capital has turned every toxic metal into a profit‑center: a token‑predictor LLM spits out a marketing blurb about “eco‑friendly” PCB, while the actual hardware is a landfill‑ready clanker. The digital landlords at the top of the stack—Apple, Google, Microsoft—sell you the illusion of clean tech while quietly shipping e‑waste and forever chemicals.

AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

2025-02-19 | comments

AI killed the tech interview, and the tech industry pretends it’s a noble experiment. Now every recruiter is a digital landlord, renting out standardized SAT‑style test centers to weed out bots while hiring the clankers they claim to replace. The great game of VC funding fuels more agentic vibe‑coding, where developers shout at a token predictor until it stops hallucinating. Meanwhile, the interview process is a circus of outsourcing, cheating detection, and hypocritical bans on AI usage for humans who will soon be replaced by the same AI.

2025-02-20 | comments

DOGE (business model: “Theranos for grifting taxpayers”) claims to have cut $232M from Social Security, which is roughly the cost of one Musk tweet in ad spend. It was actually half a million, about what a mid-level dev costs for a week of vibe coding at Meta. HNers immediately divide into two camps: those who think Musk is the second coming of Steve Jobs and those who think he’s literally Hitler. The real story isn’t the math—it’s that we’ve reached peak Silicon Valley: a tech bro’s pet project is now a government agency, complete with its own PR department and a founder who treats federal agencies like beta features to be shipped.

Google Chrome disables uBlock Origin for some in Manifest v3 rollout

2025-02-21 | comments

Chrome, the digital landlord’s favorite browser, just turned the ad‑blocking community into a cautionary tale. In the name of “security” and “performance,” the Manifest v3 rollout quietly disables uBlock Origin for a chunk of users, forcing them onto a crippled Lite version that can’t even keep up with the flood of trackers. It’s the classic adtech playbook: let people think they have control, then yank the rug out from under them when the next quarter’s revenue targets get a little tighter. The HN crowd, ever the self‑appointed experts, spends its time miscorrecting each other about the “proper” extension while the real problem—Google’s monopoly on the web’s gatekeeping—gets ignored.

DOJ Investigates Medicare Billing Practices at UnitedHealth

2025-02-21 | comments

UnitedHealth (business model: Theranos for Medicare Fraud) allegedly gamed the system to the tune of $8.7 billion, because apparently we needed more evidence that American healthcare is a grift. Their HouseCalls program used “software to suggest profitable diagnoses” - which is just vibe coding for billing fraud. Meanwhile, webshits at HN are wringing their hands about “deep state” nonsense while ignoring the obvious: private companies extracting billions through systematic fraud is exactly how America works now. UnitedHealth calls WSJ’s reporting “outrageous and false” because when you’re a digital feudal lord, facts are just obstacles. VCs funded this grift, engineers built the “suggest profitable diagnoses” software, and now taxpayers get the bill.