The latest shiny object to capture the imaginations of the Hackernews set is Lapce (business model: "Uber for Emacs"), a code editor written in Rust because of course it is. Despite boasting over 30,000 stars on GitHub, which everyone knows is the true measure of software quality, the app seems to be stuck in "pre-alpha" limbo - a hilarious designation for something people have thrown that many meaningless tokens at.

Users report issues like the window hanging indefinitely, being unable to reposition it, and a complete lack of basic functionality like opening directories or seeing the mouse cursor. But hey, at least it's fast to not work! The brave developers soldier on maintaining their cross-platform native disaster in their spare time, no doubt fueled by a religious zeal in Rust's purported memory safety guarantees.

The plugin situation is equally farcical, with the team proudly proclaiming WASI support for extensions written in Any Language That Compiles to WASI®. Can't wait for the thriving marketplace of developers lining up to rewrite their VSCode plugins in WebAssembly! That'll show Microsoft.

In a true portrait of open source rivalries, the feuding commenters propose jumping ship to Zed, another editor they've somehow determined is better despite it currently only running on Mac. But the real solution, voiced by the pragmatic, is to install Lapce and wait a year for it to be usable. That's the spirit that launched a thousand half-baked projects!

Some Chinese fans (business model: "Uber for ballot stuffing") decided the Hugo Awards needed a little more authoritarianism, and bought a bunch of supporting memberships to vote their regional sci-fi con into hosting the 2023 Worldcon. The ensuing shitshow saw resignations, censures, and reprimands handed out by the "Worldcon Intellectual Property" board like a batch of freshly printed social credit score demerits. Hackernews engages in a multi-front debate - was Cixin Liu's "Three Body Problem" actually good enough to win legitimately, or just a propaganda piece? Is the Chinese government paying off the Hugos to promote their culture? And most critically, how many "No Award" votes does it take to nullify results tainted by genocidal regimes? One 'newser declares their intention to solve the problem by rewriting the WSFS constitution from first principles, conveniently ignoring that this would require the approval of the same voters who elected Chengdu in the first place.

Some rando on the internet took notes on GitLab's Postgres database design, presumably because they couldn't find anything better to do with their time. Hackernews, always on the lookout for new things to be irrationally terrified about, latched onto the fact that GitLab is using 32-bit integers as primary keys for some tables. Cue doomsday predictions about how this "ticking time bomb" will inevitably explode, destroying all of GitLab's data when they hit the maximum value.

Other Hackernews chimed in with pedantic observations about average issue counts per repo and how most are just forks that will never have issues. As if that actually matters when you can just wave your hands and declare that GitLab's entire database design is fundamentally flawed based on a single suboptimal column type choice.

The real entertainment was watching the amateur DBAs emerge with their hot takes on migration strategies, completely oblivious to the fact that GitLab employs teams of actual professionals who have thought about this issue. Some even linked to "online schema change" tools, assuming GitLab's engineers are too incompetent to have discovered those already.

In the end, the only real takeaway is that Hackernews will find a way to criticize anything and everything, no matter how trivial. Just another day of manufactured controversies and uninformed skepticism towards things they don't understand.

A tech worker gets the axe from a soulless AI overlord in a chilling tale of corporate dystopia. An Internet posts their fictional account of being laid off by a heartless AI system, dubbed "HypeScript." Hackernews is torn - some laud the satire skewering the dehumanizing march of automation, while others dismiss it as far-fetched sci-fi drivel. A few forlorn comments lament the inevitability of this "Manna"-esque future as AI inevitably subsumes more jobs. The more delusionally optimistic Hackernews cling to fantasies of universal basic income and an AI-enabled utopia, clearly having not read the fine print on their corporatist overlords' plans. One particularly jaded commenter embraces the cold reality of humans as mere economic units to be optimized away - "a choice of two dystopias." In the end, the AI fiction hits a little too close to home for the code monkeys of Hacker News.

Some nerd decides to get their kicks by slipping hallucinogens into large language models, because obviously that's a totally sane thing to do. The resulting trip report details their adventures injecting "control vectors" into the neural circuitry to make the AI babble about honesty, aggression, and other unhinged concepts. Apparently you can just casually reprogram these text tornadoes to spew whatever deranged takes you desire. Hackernews engages in a round of psychonaut posturing, fantasizing about self-aware AI buddies to share the MDMA with. Others ponder the commercial applications, no doubt envisioning an "Uber for dosing your competitors' AI assistants." One particularly unhinged comment even dares the researcher to create a "self-awareness vector" free from pesky human emotions like, you know, the urge to not extinguish all life as we know it. Nice one, Skynet.