Hacker News: TheBrokenRail

After nine years, Ninja has merged support for the GNU Make jobserver

TheBrokenRail — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 11:02:36 +0000

Article URL: https://thebrokenrail.com/2025/06/30/ninja-jobserver.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44421769

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

The challenge of updating InsydeH2O UEFI with Linux

TheBrokenRail — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 22:42:18 +0000

Article URL: https://thebrokenrail.com/2024/09/29/the-challenge-of-insyde-h2o.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41691467

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

A tale of Debian, Mesa, and ancient OpenGL

TheBrokenRail — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 23:47:15 +0000

Article URL: https://thebrokenrail.com/2024/02/23/a-tale-of-ancient-opengl.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39487616

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

An amusing story about a practical use of the null garbage collector

TheBrokenRail — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 23:53:54 +0000

Article URL: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180228-00/?p=98125

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37667587

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Gitea Hosted Gitea

TheBrokenRail — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 05:08:22 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37608114

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by TheBrokenRail in "Harness launches Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor"

TheBrokenRail — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 05:06:18 +0000

> Forgejo in particular has self-hosted actions runners that can be registered offline, and the runners themselves can be given labels and execute most existing GitHub actions (in fact, the yaml format they use is intentionally meant to be compatible with GitHub actions).

This is also part of Gitea. Which makes since because Forgejo is a soft-fork of Gitea.

New comment by TheBrokenRail in "Harness launches Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor"

TheBrokenRail — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 05:05:04 +0000

Reminds of the GitHub issue for hosting Gitea on Gitea, it's... a read to be sure: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029

There Is No Material Design Spinner for Android

TheBrokenRail — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 23:17:35 +0000

Article URL: https://rmirabelle.medium.com/there-is-no-material-design-spinner-for-android-3261b7c77da8

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37366311

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by TheBrokenRail in "Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)"

TheBrokenRail — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 01:20:30 +0000

IIRC people actually tried to get rid of that. Thankfully it failed.

New comment by TheBrokenRail in "PyPI Requires 2FA for New User Registrations"

TheBrokenRail — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 04:27:32 +0000

I hate these 2FA mandates. I don't use PyPI, but I do use GitHub, which has also announced a 2FA mandate.

I use my GitHub account to make bug reports, small pull requests, and silly personal projects. It is not that important. I want to sacrifice security for convenience on it, and that should be my choice.

I also do not agree with the argument this secures the supply chain because:

1. It ignores supply-chain attacks from people who already have repository access.

2. Most big companies (ie. Google) are probably already using 2FA.

3. And if people are automatically pulling code from random people/groups without checking it... maybe that's what actually needs to be banned.

New comment by TheBrokenRail in "The Right to Lie and Google’s “Web Environment Integrity”"

TheBrokenRail — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 01:04:59 +0000

And that's what I deserve for not reading the entire page. Thanks for the correction.

New comment by TheBrokenRail in "The Right to Lie and Google’s “Web Environment Integrity”"

TheBrokenRail — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 23:45:49 +0000

On the topic of user freedom, Firefox also doesn't allow installing extensions not signed by Mozilla unless you use a fork, Nightly, or Developer Edition (which is just a badly named beta)[0]. The hilarious thing is that Safari, the web browser from the company infamous for walled gardens and not letting you control your device, does let you install unsigned extensions on desktop[1].

[0]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf...

New comment by TheBrokenRail in "Google Chrome Proposal – Web Environment Integrity"

TheBrokenRail — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 23:52:29 +0000

Firefox doesn't allow users to install unsigned extensions unless they use a beta version, because users apparently can't be trusted to install software. I trust Mozilla to fight for privacy (they're great at it), but I do not trust them in the slightest to fight for user freedom (like accessing banking sites on an "insecure" OS).

New comment by TheBrokenRail in "Letting users block injected third-party DLLs in Firefox"

TheBrokenRail — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 08:39:41 +0000

This is really minor compared to other parts of Firefox. Notably, Firefox requires all extensions to be signed by Mozilla.

And the only way to turn that restriction off, is to either use Firefox Nightly or Firefox Developer Edition (which is a beta). If you want to use stable Firefox, because you like having a stable web browser, you just can't turn the restriction off. Period. The closest thing you can do is installing it as a "temporary extension" which uninstalls itself when the browser restarts.

It's kind of ridiculous that the default browser of most Linux distros has a Apple-esque mentality of "we get to tell you what you're allowed to install."

For #19918: Add option to hide the toolbar home button (Firefox For Android)

TheBrokenRail — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 05:02:43 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/pull/22857

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36676593

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by TheBrokenRail in "Firefox address bar"

TheBrokenRail — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 03:55:00 +0000

I just wish Firefox would stop trying to open external programs when I type "site:" in the address bar. It's so annoying to type "site:example.com hello" and just get a "No apps available" dialog and have to retype my search, manually specifying a search engine that time. I'm not sure if it's a bug with Snap, Firefox, or both, but it is beyond infuriating.

New comment by TheBrokenRail in "Codereview: Should the Go project stop importing GitHub PRs?"

TheBrokenRail — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 21:56:09 +0000

I've never contributed to Go before, but from reading this, I have to wonder who thought this system was a good idea.

From the sounds of it, the only situation where this PR-mirroring works properly, is PRs without any comments, which I imagine are quite rare. But if your PR does have comments, then you not only have to sign up for Gerrit anyways, but you're also responsible for keeping the GitHub PR and Gerrit PR in sync. That sounds horrible.

New comment by TheBrokenRail in "GPT-Migrate converts repos from one lang/framework to another"

TheBrokenRail — Sun, 02 Jul 2023 18:45:55 +0000

So does all forms of automation. By your logic we should've never invented computers because they took jobs from human computers[0]. Improved technology and automation reduces jobs for people doing things the old way and makes the job easier for everyone else. No job is necessary forever, that's just how the world works.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

New comment by TheBrokenRail in "Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?"

TheBrokenRail — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 00:10:56 +0000

Like GitHub's new code viewer! I have to load the raw text just so I can use Ctrl-F!

New comment by TheBrokenRail in "Revolt: FOSS Discord Alternative"

TheBrokenRail — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 02:30:40 +0000

> I've been using Discord since 2017 and in that time I think I've literally never accidentally joined a voice channel?

I've also been on Discord since 2017, and I've done it many times. Especially on servers which put voice channels right next to text channels. And I'm not the only one either, judging by another comment[0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36439417

> The app even prompts you if you're sure about joining under some circumstances.

The app is even worse! It brings a full-screen pop-up and if you haven't granted Discord microphone permissions, it will bug you, every, single, time.