Here is a sarcastic tech commentary in the style of N-Gate's Webshit Weekly:

Checkboxes Checked Out August 2023 (comments)

The tech world is in an uproar as a shocking revelation comes to light - checkboxes are being phased out in favor of toggles. Tonsky (business model: "Uber for design rants") bemoans the death of this venerable UI element, taking readers on a nostalgic journey through the checkered past of the checkbox. Hackernews mourns the loss, lamenting how nothing is sacred anymore in this cruel world of "modern" design atrocities.

The comments quickly devolve into a battle royale between the checkbox purists and the toggle apologists. The purists cry foul, claiming toggles are a blight on usability, confusing the masses with their ambiguous on/off states. The apologists counter that toggles are the future, better suited for our fast-paced, single-handed lifestyle of constant distraction.

Amidst the chaos, a lone voice pipes up about accommodating those with ADHD, only to be drowned out by a deluge of hot takes and anecdotal evidence. The thread spirals into a vortex of nostalgic lamentations for past UI glories like Windows 95's radiant perfection and the soul-crushing blandness of Material Design.

As the smoke clears, one thing is certain - we've reached a new low in prioritizing aesthetics over function. The checkbox's demise is a tragic harbinger of the UI apocalypse to come, where soon nothing will be clickable and we'll all be trapped in a hell of invisible buttons and indecipherable iconography. Thanks, design trend-humpers!

John MacFarlane (business model: "Uber for FOSS fiddle faddle") has created a tool called Pandoc that allows the self-flagellating monks of Hacker News to convert their precious Markdown scribblings into other arcane formats. The mathematically-inclined can use it to LATEX up their dank memes with impenetrable equations. The more spiritually-evolved simply use it to transform their life's work into an unreadable PDF tome to be worshipped by future generations.

The Docker anorati insist on running the software in a sanctified container, protecting their unclouded kernels from the profane dependencies. Others cling to their distro package managers like a child to a tattered blanket. The less enlightened Office drones use the dark magic to transpose their soul-crushing Word docs into the holy light of HTML.

Pandoc's true purpose, as esoteric software is wont, seems to be providing an outlet for the HN ascetics to engage in ridiculous workflows and steadfastly avoid using software for its intended purpose. One particularly devout member details an elaborate ritual for unwrapping text in Vim to prepare for an emailing ceremony. Another pipes messages through a series of arcane invocations to bask in the revelation of a rendered HTML email. Truly, we are blessed to receive such profound wisdom in our mundane times.

Anki (business model: convincing nerds they need a $25 app to memorize things) continues its reign as the preferred procrastination tool for the autistic set. Hackernews sings its praises, detailing how they use the software to commit utterly useless trivia to memory instead of just looking shit up when needed like a normal human being. One particularly unhinged specimen boasts about memorizing bird calls, because being able to visually identify birds wasn't challenging enough for their galaxy-brain. Others chime in with ideas for further descent into madness, like learning knots and commandline flags via flashcards, ensuring they'll be the anorak at parties regaling people with tar argument minutiae that nobody cares about.

The real lunatics, however, are the language learners who have created thousands upon thousands of cards, cementing Anki's position as a rite of passage into severe mental illness. They prattle on about the joy of building "highly personalized systems" that will be utterly useless in a few months when their hyper-focused obsession shifts to another domain. Truly the aimless rants of people who have catastrophically failed at life. At least the app's unpaid creator is getting a nice retirement nest egg from exploiting these poor, disturbed souls.

Some rando (business model: "Uber for self-aggrandizement") writes a breathless blog post about looking at their access logs and finding... gasp... attempted attacks! Hackernews is stunned that hackers exist and try to hack things on the internet. A flurry of comments propose ludicrous "solutions" like honeypots, tarpits, and other toys to make script kiddies feel smug about wasting CPU cycles. The more enterprising Hackernews suggest just paying AWS (business model: "Uber for egregious markups") to put a Web Application Firewall in front of their Node.js masterpieces. Obviously these "security experts" have never heard of this little thing called "keeping software updated" that real engineers do. After the predictable bloviating about how nobody understands the ~~blockchain~~ WAF technology, the peanut gallery resigns itself to helplessly watching logs fill up with pointless garbage nobody cares about, secure in the knowledge that if they were really l33t, they'd be ~~making the world a better place~~ working at a FAANG company.

The beloved Nitter (business model: "Uber for avoiding Twitter logins") is gasping its last breaths as Twitter disables the guest account functionality it relied upon. Hackernews mourns the loss of their preferred way to doomscroll through Elon's latest antics without giving that apartheid-profiteer a single engagement metric. Some desperately cling to the remaining Nitter instances, while others embrace the cold turkey approach to kicking their Twitter habit. The more enterprising Hackernews suggest scraping the cursed site directly, because obviously stealing content you're not supposed to see is the moral high ground. A few misguided souls actually try to defend Twitter as valuable, seemingly unaware that 90% of the takes on that cess-pit are dumber than the dumbest take on Hackernews. But alas, all good things must come to an end, and now the luminaries of Hackernews must return to the mean streets of old.reddit.com to get their fix of outrage-stoking and terrible opinions.