Hacker News: jamienicol

New comment by jamienicol in "Jujutsu megamerges for fun and profit"

jamienicol — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:39:27 +0000

I use jj but not mega merges. But as I understand it you're not going to push the merge itself for review. It allows you to work locally on multiple branches at once. But when ready you push the individual branch, pre merge, for review.

What's the red flag about a stack?

New comment by jamienicol in "Jujutsu megamerges for fun and profit"

jamienicol — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:33:24 +0000

There's a configurable setting for which changes are marked as immutable. The default works perfectly for my workflow (pull-only from upstream, rewrite and push freely to my fork). other workflows may presumably need to tweak it

https://www.jj-vcs.dev/latest/config/#set-of-immutable-commi...

New comment by jamienicol in "I write games in C (yes, C) (2016)"

jamienicol — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 16:38:36 +0000

Surely your criteria should be some combination of the two (plus other factors). C may have fewer footguns than C++, but it still has many, whilst also lacking many useful features

New comment by jamienicol in "Firefox is the best mobile browser"

jamienicol — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 15:59:20 +0000

isolatedProcess is being worked on, for what it's worth: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1565196

New comment by jamienicol in "Helium Browser"

jamienicol — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 07:59:05 +0000

I’m a Mozilla employee who works on Firefox, so I’ll try to answer this to the best of my knowledge but as a disclaimer I can’t guarantee I’m 100% correct

Paying for relay will give money to Mozilla Corporation, the same pot the google money goes into, which will predominantly pay for Firefox development but also other products. The corporation’s profits also fund the non-profit Foundation’s activities.

People often raise this argument regarding donating to the Foundation, as that money will be spent by the foundation, therefore not on Firefox. But a dollar raised by the foundation is a dollar less the corporation has to give the foundation, leaving it with more money to spend on Firefox and other things.

You can also donate directly to “MZLA” which makes thunderbird, and that money will be spent on thunderbird.

New comment by jamienicol in "Code formatting comes to uv experimentally"

jamienicol — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 10:37:41 +0000

But I don’t know what the formatter of choice is. Nor do I care what it is. I just want to format my code

New comment by jamienicol in "Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long?"

jamienicol — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 20:14:30 +0000

Did you consider using wgpu instead of writing a new dx11 renderer? It has metal, vulkan and dx12 backends so could have been used for a single renderer for macOS windows and Linux. (And webgpu in the future)

New comment by jamienicol in "Mozilla to shut down Pocket on July 8"

jamienicol — Thu, 22 May 2025 19:29:22 +0000

It does include tags

New comment by jamienicol in "Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo"

jamienicol — Tue, 13 May 2025 07:26:29 +0000

I am a Firefox developer, and you're spot on. Previously there were separate hg repos for central, beta, release. I think ESRs too. And autoland. Now they're all branches in the same repo, and central is renamed main.

Commits land in autoland and get backed out if they cause test failures. That's merged to main ~twice per day when CI is happy

New comment by jamienicol in "Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo"

jamienicol — Tue, 13 May 2025 07:18:02 +0000

That problem is solved by preventing forced pushes. Rewriting history locally is encouraged.

New comment by jamienicol in "Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor"

jamienicol — Wed, 07 May 2025 14:31:26 +0000

You can not use it. I rarely do, but I love zed, it's fast and the LSP (rust and clangd in my case) just work

New comment by jamienicol in "Retro Boy: simple Game Boy emulator written in Rust, can be played on the web"

jamienicol — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 10:20:11 +0000

Because people are interested in how technology is built, and if they’re interested in rust they might be interested in seeing how it’s used in other projects

New comment by jamienicol in "I kind of killed Mercurial at Mozilla"

jamienicol — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 23:41:12 +0000

> In future it won't be possible to contribute to Firefox without a Microsoft account

What makes you think that?

New comment by jamienicol in "Firefox desktop extensions coming soon for the upcoming Android release"

jamienicol — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 13:49:16 +0000

you can save as PDF from the "share" menu

New comment by jamienicol in "Save web pages as PDF in Firefox for Android"

jamienicol — Mon, 26 Dec 2022 18:59:01 +0000

> Searching for World cup matches in google only shows the goal score, I guess it's a google search issue, but in chrome I get detailed scorecards

Go to settings -> add ons and install "Google search fixer"

New comment by jamienicol in "Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)"

jamienicol — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 11:45:35 +0000

Download firefox from the mozilla website instead of using the ubuntu package and this won't happen. Or disable auto upgrades.

New comment by jamienicol in "Texas requires ‘In God We Trust’ signs in schools. A man wants some in Arabic"

jamienicol — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 12:33:25 +0000

Perhaps it's because you didn't start the exchange with enquiry, but instead claimed that what happens in your country is "exactly what every country does"

New comment by jamienicol in "Texas requires ‘In God We Trust’ signs in schools. A man wants some in Arabic"

jamienicol — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 10:18:05 +0000

It's certainly not normal in my country for schools to display the country's motto or flag, nor do children pledge allegiance to anything. We did sing some hymns though.

New comment by jamienicol in "Retrospective and technical details on the recent Firefox outage"

jamienicol — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 09:08:44 +0000

Some examples of things I've used telemetry for at Mozilla:

* Noticed performance regressions not caught by our testing, and therefore been able to fix the regression.

* Noticed an unexpected number of users with hardware acceleration disabled, and therefore been able to find and fix the bug that was causing them to have acceleration switched off

* Figure out which device in a category is most commonly used by our users, so that I can dogfood my work on a representative device

Those are just a few examples off of the top of my head. It's not about removing features because telemetry says nobody uses them. People Mozilla use telemetry to answer all sorts of important questions. We also have to jump through hoops to add any new data collection, justifying why it's needed and ensuring the data is not personal. As is right, because we take user privacy very seriously

New comment by jamienicol in "Spotify is removing Neil Young’s music after falling out over Joe Rogan"

jamienicol — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 12:31:41 +0000

I'm not sure what should be done about it, but again don't see the relevance of that question. Your argument was that there's value to be had out of such a debate, which there isn't. And that a debate cannot be misinformation, which is again clearly false. Packaging misinformation up as a debate doesn't stop it being misinformation.