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toastalon Show HN: Morph – Videos of AI testing your PR, embedded in GitHub

Only works on a proprietary forge. Wouldn’t it be better to build tooling to get OFF that godforsaken platform?

toastalon A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

It’s weird being literate enough in a language now without a bicameral script (or spaces). When I was younger, I thought this stuff wasn’t so important, but then when you learn a new language, you are trying to figure out what a “robert” is, to then be told “oh, it’s just a name”—which is obvious if know standard `en-Latn` conventions.

toastalon Radicle: The Sovereign Forge

I would be much happier if folks were trying to do with something revolutionary in terms of VCSs instead of always being yet more Git tooling.

toastalon GitHub experience various partial-outages/degradations

There’s never been a better time to migrate to another forge or at least have a self-hosted bare repository to handle outages.

toastalon Nixtamal: Fulfilling, Pure Input Pinning for Nix

A contributor sent me a fix for the Darwin build as I don’t own any machine of this architecture & cannot test. It’s merged into Nixpkgs unstable.

I have tried a lot of technologies & chose the ones I like for on their own merits without following ‘trends’ as they should be used more.

Darcs predates Git & does a lot of things better than Git (plus I want to dog food supporting it); Pijul does great things too! If Nixpkgs has fetchers + prefetchers, there should be a tool that can support users not supported by the builtins (which is only URLs, archives, Git, & Mercurial). Hopefully we can get the Fossil prefetch script merged too for support. Supporting these alternatives is a part of the premise. Flakes can never support this—& they do not seem to want to accept any fetchers despite a few attempts due to the maintenance burden.

XMPP is a reliable, lightweight, decentralized messaging platform commonly, but not exclusively, used for chat. It offers more features than IRC & runs using 10x less resources compared to something like Matrix so I can in good faith recommend self-hosting your own node. I would like to set up an IRC gateway that works at some point, & if ProcessOne adds fuller gateway support to Ejabberd for the MUC, I will enable it despite not caring for Matrix. There definitely isn’t going to be any Discord option.

toastalon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026)

  Location: Thailand (UTC +7), but night owl
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No, but can travel on occasion
  Technologies: Nix, but also any functional or scripting language
  Résumé/CV: https://toast.al/skills/
  Email: toastal posteo net

I have been doing software for 16 years now. I want to transition from front-end & work with Nix & its ecosystem which I have spent a lot of time contributing to in the last 3 years. I hav written tools, packages, modules, hosted servers & even given talks/lectures on Nix.

toastalon Show HN: Prism.Tools – Free and privacy-focused developer utilities

It allows Microsoft to collect the traffic data. Generally it also implies the code is also hosted on Microsoft GitHub—which requires an account, accepting ToS, training the Copilot models by interacting with the platform.

toastalon Show HN: Prism.Tools – Free and privacy-focused developer utilities

> it's more likely that users ALREADY have that CDN link downloaded and cached on their machine than not

This isn’t how it’s worked for years. Browser isolate isolate assets like this to mitigate fingerprinting which renders the whole concept of use-CDN-since-it’ll-be-cached moot.

toastalon Show HN: Prism.Tools – Free and privacy-focused developer utilities

Which is why PRISM Break was created.

toastalon Show HN: Prism.Tools – Free and privacy-focused developer utilities

    > Free
    > Privacy-focused


    > GitHub (Microsoft)
    > Cloudflare

Which is it? These US megacorporations are respecting neither users’ privacy nor their freedom. Then on top is a proprietary license stating: “No Re-hosting: You may not host these Tools on other websites or public repositories” even if you wanted to host it locally or your own server.

https://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html

https://httptoolkit.com/blog/public-cdn-risks/

Also not to be confused with PRISM Break <https://prism-break.org/>, an aggregated list of privacy-focused tools.

toastalon How GitHub monopoly is destroying the open source ecosystem

GitLab, Codeberg, SourceHut, Notabug, Radicle, Tangled… & that is just Git but there are other VCSs hosted other ways like Darcs, Pijul, Fossil, & so on.

toastalon Odoo: Open-Source ERP

That is very good insight. Thank you. I recently added H2O+PostgreSQL support for the NixOS module & it has been running fine for me. I had a bit of a hard time assessing the open source options but Dolibarr using PHP meant it was probably going to perform consistently & better than Python or Node.js-based ones rather than trying to contrast their featuresets, not having much domain knowledge about ERP/CRMs.

toastalon Odoo: Open-Source ERP

Why not Dolibarr?

toastalon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2026)

    Location: Eastern Thailand (UTC +7)
    Remote: yes
    Willing to relocate: 98% no
    Technologies: Nix, NixOS, & functional programming (OCaml is current favorite)
    Résumé/CV: https://toast.al/skills/ (contact for more specific details iff required)
    Email: toastal+hn@posteo.net

toastalon You can make up HTML tags

> Now everything "has" to be a SPA because developers want to use React

Have you followed anything in the last 5 years? Outside of bootcamp students, this has been on the decline for a while… in some cases overcorrecting for where a SPA might make more sense.

toastalon Useful patterns for building HTML tools

> small experimental utilities

This is what CDNs should be used for at this time—or for fetching the scripts to vendor. That’s fine, but recommending I don’t think is the best call since one folk’s experimental utility will inevitably get released into production—often not even at fault of the utility’s maker. When I use CDNs like this, there are  around the code just in case someone were to run with it, along with adding the integrity attribute.

toastalon I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

I have this as !important in a global userStyle for code, pre, kbd, samp elements.

toastalon Useful patterns for building HTML tools

> The alternative to CDNs is to use npm and have a build step for your projects. I find this reduces my productivity at hacking on individual tools and makes it harder to self-host them.

No. You can vendor these scripts & host them 1st party so you aren’t leaking data to these CDNs or risk users not actually getting the scripts. It isn’t like CDNs give you a performance boost anymore.

https://httptoolkit.com/blog/public-cdn-risks/

toastalon Guarding My Git Forge Against AI Scrapers

Darcs by it’s nature can just be hosted by HTTP server too, but without needing a special tool. I use H2O with a small mruby script to throttle IPs.

toastalon Nixtml: Static website and blog generator written in Nix

I am already working on this <https://darcs.toastal.in.th/nixtamal/trunk/README.rst>

toastalon Days since last GitHub incident

These are different concerns. There are a lot of use cases, where folks are just getting dependencies & not interacting with bug tracker or continuous integration use which are less critical & can be accessed later or ran locally.

toastalon Days since last GitHub incident

Building your software usually involves getting dependencies, & those dependencies are, hopefully, in more than one location—which includes a cronjob to a bare repo, or Alice’s fork on another repo that at least has the latest tags. It should be trivial to point to these as mirrors for the cases where any forge/repository, even the ones held by megacorporations, inevitably go down. Even Nixpkgs itself, while not maintaining their own official mirrors, are mirrored by TUNA. Backups are an important strategy, & the source code should also be a part of that.

toastalon Days since last GitHub incident

This is why I keep encouraging folks to a) have a mirror & b) make sure their tools automatically pick up the mirrors.

I recently got mirror support upstreamed into Nixpkgs for fetchdarcs & fetchpijul which actually work on my just-alpha-released pinning tool, Nixtamal <https://darcs.toastal.in.th/nixtamal/trunk/README.rst>, for just this sort of thing.

toastalon GrapheneOS is the only Android OS providing full security patches

I have an Xperia with Sailfish OS. The Android app support ironically ends up what makes it usable, but the new patch isn’t released with kernel support that actually makes the IO work properly. Its own app selection is pretty small. It would be cool if all desktop Linux didn’t need an entirely new skin to work at this form factor, else I could get what I needed. I also use Nix to smooth over some of the repository shortcomings.

toastalon HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)

reStructuredText support :math: roles. AsciiDoc has stem blocks. Why do folks keep trying to shoehorn Markdown into everything, creating yet another fork, when there are other lightweight markup languages that support actual features for technical blogs/documentation?

toastalon GrapheneOS is the only Android OS providing full security patches

> but still I'd like to choose my hardware and software separately interoperating via standards

This is why I can’t do GrapheneOS. Pixel devices do not suit my needs (& aren’t available). 2 of the big appeals for my going Android was 1) device options 2) ability to customize (appearance, apps from other sources, root access). Google has basically done everything to prevent #2 & GrapheneOS prevents #1. …This is why I also have a Linux phone to just leave these restrictions.

toastalon Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

You could also try Movim. You could have a decentralized XMPP server with a client that support group calls as well as having posts like a forum folks can comment on.

toastalon Migrating Dillo from GitHub

Darcs is older than Git

toastalon Migrating Dillo from GitHub

Darcs & Pijul as the Patch Theory-based approach eliminates an entire class of merge conflicts which make working in a distributed manner more feasible. These DVCS have good (subjectively “better”) foundations & need better tooling like forges—unlike Git that already has a ton of things to choose from.

toastalon Migrating Dillo from GitHub

I wish Tangled supported alternatives to Git