Hacker News: robertlagrant

New comment by robertlagrant in "Linux 7.1"

robertlagrant — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:58:23 +0000

I prefer KDE (on Ubuntu, because I tried it and it's good enough) - it's got more stuff built into the OS in terms of settings. I tended to find that Gnome needs you to install more things to expose configuration settings, whereas KDE's configuration UI is pretty good.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Introduction to UEFI HTTP(s) Boot with QEMU/OVMF"

robertlagrant — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 19:51:09 +0000

I agree that integrity can be done by secure boot, but HTTPS does mean that someone can't intercept your request and serve you valid, signed, older software that has a known security flaw in it.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Looking Forward to Postgres 19: Query Hints"

robertlagrant — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:22:32 +0000

I'm not an expert in database hints, but the syntax looks very readable and composable. That's great thing to have got right.

New comment by robertlagrant in "MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production"

robertlagrant — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:19:41 +0000

Most people have laptops now, in my experience of large corporations.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Using Git's rerere feature to escape recurring conflict hell"

robertlagrant — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 23:45:52 +0000

Hm - I think I follow. But say I push a commit on a branch, then realise I messed up the commit message, so I --amend and push. I know that git push will fail, but if I git push -f then it won't detect that someone else pushed to the same branch in between - it'll just silently wipe their push.

Using --force-with-lease means the git push -f will succeed if no-one's pushed in between, and fail otherwise.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL"

robertlagrant — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:25:33 +0000

Oh dear. That is tricky. It must be a rare enough combination that it looks like automation.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Proton Mail adds support for Gmail account syncing and sending"

robertlagrant — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 11:54:44 +0000

Well, that was terrible searching by me! Thanks. @dang could you update it please?

New comment by robertlagrant in "Using Git's rerere feature to escape recurring conflict hell"

robertlagrant — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 09:46:57 +0000

All force-with-lease does it stop you from clobbering rather than you having to realise somehow that you did that. It seems like a no-brainer. What's the problem with it?

New comment by robertlagrant in "Proton Mail adds support for Gmail account syncing and sending"

robertlagrant — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 09:41:38 +0000

(I couldn't find this announced on the Proton website - apologies if there was a page, Proton!)

Proton Mail adds support for Gmail account syncing and sending

robertlagrant — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 09:41:38 +0000

Article URL: https://cyberinsider.com/proton-mail-adds-support-for-gmail-account-syncing-and-sending/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48367970

Points: 7

# Comments: 3

New comment by robertlagrant in "Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL"

robertlagrant — Sun, 31 May 2026 22:11:55 +0000

I haven't ever noticed Cloudflare having any issues on Firefox, so presumably that implies any unilateral actions in web standards have been worked around by CF to provide the service to Firefox as well.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL"

robertlagrant — Sun, 31 May 2026 22:03:00 +0000

> and if you're lucky Firefox

I haven't had any problems with Firefox so far. Why do you say this?

New comment by robertlagrant in "The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients"

robertlagrant — Mon, 25 May 2026 09:49:48 +0000

I was reading things[0] about sugar a lot earlier than that - maybe 2007? And it made a lot of sense back then.

[0] https://nosdiet.com

New comment by robertlagrant in "Anyone on the Internet Can Ring Your Doorbell"

robertlagrant — Tue, 19 May 2026 15:01:55 +0000

Thank you! I will have to give it a try.

New comment by robertlagrant in "UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system"

robertlagrant — Tue, 19 May 2026 08:17:51 +0000

> As if megacorps somehow don't have inefficiencies

No one is saying megacorps don't have inefficiencies.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Anyone on the Internet Can Ring Your Doorbell"

robertlagrant — Tue, 19 May 2026 08:16:53 +0000

I have a Reolink but haven't got to Home Assistant yet. I'm happy switching to that, but for less technical (though still digital savvy) spouses - how would you say the switch would be for them?

New comment by robertlagrant in "UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system"

robertlagrant — Fri, 15 May 2026 13:17:40 +0000

No, many of them fold, and even those that don't close departments and make redundancies. Companies can only grow if they're serving their customers with value, or if someone believes that they will do in future and puts money in for a bit to get them started.

If they get things wrong by overspending or overinvesting in the wrong thing, they don't have a wellspring of tax money to keep drawing from. They have to offer enough value to not only supply the good and make a profit, but also pay taxes on that profit.

New comment by robertlagrant in "UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system"

robertlagrant — Fri, 15 May 2026 12:48:21 +0000

> you simply stated but haven't explained why bloat is inevitable in the government except to say there is no market pressure applied in government. Whereas the parent is literally talking about employing people using market rates, an example based on market pressure.

The market pressure I'm referring to isn't on salaries, it's on departments. If a department gets the same budget next year because it managed to spend it all this year - a universal truth in UK public sector then departments only ever grow.

New comment by robertlagrant in "UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system"

robertlagrant — Fri, 15 May 2026 12:46:58 +0000

I agree, but also a civil servant has incredible pension opportunities, and defined benefit as well, and is hard to remove if they turn out to be bad. A contractor is a fixed cost, and individuals can be rejected with far less ceremony and cost.

If the civil service could shape its workforce with individualised salaries and quicker removal due to low performance I suspect it'd be a different story. I agree that consultancies and contractors are not cheap, but they are not the root cause.

New comment by robertlagrant in "UK sovereign LLM inference"

robertlagrant — Fri, 15 May 2026 11:44:59 +0000

Ah great! Best of luck. They're a nice bunch.