A French court has finally decided that violating the GPL is bad. Orange (business model: "Uber for ignoring license agreements") is on the hook for about $800k after using open-source software without following the terms. Hackernews engages in their favorite pastime: pretending to understand international legal systems while explaining why, actually, this isn't a win for open source. Some armchair lawyers debate whether the painfully slow French court system works like their favorite TV legal drama, while others calculate whether Orange should have just paid for a commercial license like a normal corporation instead of spending a decade in court. The remaining comments devolve into a civil law symposium where everyone suddenly has a PhD in French constitutional precedent, complete with Wikipedia citations that nobody will read.

An Internet bureaucrat reminds everyone that price-fixing is illegal even if you use an algorithm to do it. Hackernews, a group whose combined experience with rental housing is "my parents' basement," debates the finer points of antitrust law with the certainty of someone who once skimmed the Wikipedia article on Adam Smith. Various armchair economists argue about whether it's collusion when landlords all use the same third-party software to maximize profits while keeping units vacant, or if that's just the invisible hand of the free market giving tenants the middle finger. The most insightful comments come from those who have clearly never tried to rent an apartment in this decade, while the actual victims of algorithmic price-fixing are too busy working three jobs to afford their rent to participate in the discussion.

An Internet explains how to make a dead tree version of your website. Hackernews, who collectively haven't printed anything since their CompSci 101 homework in 2003, immediately launches into a holy war about cross-browser printing compatibility. The consensus is that Chrome is the least worst option, but only if you pray to the right gods and sacrifice a virgin mechanical keyboard. Some Hackernews suggest alternatives like PagedJS and WeasyPrint, while others share traumatic anecdotes of tables spanning multiple pages and footnotes that refuse to behave. The thread predictably devolves into a PDF hate-fest, with complaints about Adobe's stranglehold on the format and unnecessary pagination. One Hackernews helpfully suggests killing PDF with SVG, apparently unaware that we've been trying to kill PDF for decades, and PDF keeps winning because it actually works.

An Internet discovers that a system sold as "acoustic gunshot detection" (business model: "Uber for microphones") is actually "listening to literally everything in poor neighborhoods, then selling it to cops." Hackernews is shocked, SHOCKED that a company that puts microphones all over a city might be recording audio. Some commenters insist this surveillance dystopia is actually great because the police showed up when they heard gunshots, which is apparently all it takes to impress people living in American cities. Others point out that ShotSpotter's actual effectiveness in reducing crime is about as impressive as a fortune cookie prediction, but this doesn't stop Hackernews from debating whether poor neighborhoods deserve to be surveilled more because they have "cars on blocks" instead of "manicured lawns." The thread eventually devolves into a heated argument about whether the real problem is that police departments are incompetent, not trying, or simply have a natural aversion to neighborhoods where they might have to do their jobs.

An Internet optimizes a Go program to process a billion rows and turns it into a benchmark competition. Hackernews immediately devolves into a programming language holy war, with various factions claiming their favorite language is "actually faster" with the religious fervor of medieval crusaders. The C# devotees smugly point to their 2-second solutions, while Java acolytes breathlessly explain that the JVM is "space-age future technology" despite being older than many commenters. Go partisans, meanwhile, are reduced to mumbling about pointer indirection and making excuses about missing optimizations. One Hackernews even claims the JVM "has always been on par if not often faster than hand-written C code," a statement so divorced from reality it would make Richard Stallman choke on his toe cheese. Nobody seems to notice that they're all just reinventing "grep | awk" with extra steps and venture funding.