Is there a proton/wine-like thing that lets me try MacOS apps on Linux or Windows?
Readit Newsandyferris commented on Show HN: Base, an SQLite database editor for macOS menial.co.uk/base/... · Posted by u/__bb
andyferris commented on We put a coding agent in a while loop github.com/repomirrorhq/r... · Posted by u/sfarshid
People keep saying that Gemini 2.5 Pro can solve some problem that Sonnet 4 cannot, or that GPT5 can solve a problem that Gemini 2.5 Pro cannot, or that Sonnet 4 can solve some problem that GPT5 cannot.
There was a blog article about mixing together different agents into the same conversation, taking turns at responses and improving results/correctness. But it takes a lot of effort to make your own claude-code-clone with correct API for each provider and prompts tuned for those models and tool use integrated etc. And there's no incentive for Anthropic/OpenAI/Google to write this tool for us.
OTOH it would be relatively easy for the bash loop to call claude code, codex CLI, etc in a loop to get the same benefit. If one iteration of one tool gets stuck, perhaps another LLM will take a different approach and everything can get back on track.
Just a thought.
andyferris commented on Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012) cdn.akamai.steamstatic.co... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11
Valve gets a lot of heat for slowing down on first party gaming content, but I think Steam has been a net positive for the gaming community. There are certainly some cases where the accessibility has created "noise" and other trouble, but overall I think this is a good thing. Their 30% cut is absolutely justified once you start looking into everything they do for you as a developer and the market that you have access to. It is a lot easier to pay that kind of fee when you don't feel like your technology partners actively hate the fact that you merely exist.
Steam is still like what Netflix used to be. You have pretty much everything you care about in one place. Even big monster AAA developers like EA have given up and put their content on the platform. If I had to pick between having HL3 and a coherent gaming ecosystem, I'd pick the latter.
It interests me that it needs to be an "or".
A HL3 team could essentially function as an independent studio using the Steam platform, with some funding thrown from Valve. Assuming the ROI is positive what exactly is holding them back?
Well, Windows is an odd beast when 8-bit file names are used. If done naively, you can’t express all valid filenames with even broken UTF-8 and non-valid-Unicode filenames cannot be encoded to UTF-8 without loss or some weird convention.
You can do something like WTF-8 (not a misspelling, alas) to make it bidirectional. Rust does this under the hood but doesn’t expose the internal representation.
I believe the same is true on linux, which only cares about 0x2f bytes (i.e. /)
andyferris commented on Io_uring, kTLS and Rust for zero syscall HTTPS server blog.habets.se/2025/04/io... · Posted by u/guntars
In the former the caller does not retain access to T until Fn returns.
I think I'm lost. If I give a mutable reference to a function... I can't access it (even read it) until it returns, no?
What is different?
andyferris commented on Io_uring, kTLS and Rust for zero syscall HTTPS server blog.habets.se/2025/04/io... · Posted by u/guntars
It’s annoying but possible to do this correctly and not have the API be too bad. The “happy path” of a clean success or error is fine if you accept that buffers can’t just be simple &[u8] slices. Cancellation can be handled safely with something like the following API contract:
Have your function signature be async fn read(buffer: &mut Vec<u8>) -> Result<…>’ (you can use something more convenient like ‘&mut BytesMut’ too). If you run the future to completion (success or failure), the argument holds the same buffer passed in, with data filled in appropriately on success. If you cancel/drop the future, the buffer may point at an empty allocation instead (this is usually not an annoying constraint for most IO flows, and footgun potential is low).
The way this works is that your library “takes” the underlying allocation before starting the operation out of the variable, replacing it with the default unallocated ‘Vec<u8>’. Once the buffer is no longer used by the IO system, it puts it back before returning. If you cancel, it manages the buffer in the background to release it when safe and the unallocated buffer is left in the passed variable.
It sounds like this would be better modelled by passing ownership of the buffer and expecting it to be returned on the success (ok) case. What you described doesn't seem compatible with what I would call a mutable borrow (mutate the contents of a Vec<u8>).
Or maybe I've misunderstood?
andyferris commented on Happy 100000th birthday, Debian lists.debian.org/debian-d... · Posted by u/pabs3
I am definitely having a birthday party when I turn 1,000,000. :)
andyferris commented on I've never had a real adversary inoticeiamconfused.substa... · Posted by u/walterbell
I suppose this is taken seriously by a society at war. Otherwise we tend to try to be civil (which requires giving the benefit of the doubt).
The white-anting by Russia hasn't really triggered this kind of "immune response" - it's hard to know what to do about it, which is of course the entire point.
andyferris commented on AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents agents.md/... · Posted by u/ghuntley
But no, that's the opposite - here sub-context files REPLACE the ones above it rather then augmenting it - and I think that deviating in this way is kinda' dangerous in that user's might not notice this difference.
I think it's just poorly written. Further down:
> What if instructions conflict? > The closest AGENTS.md to the edited file wins; explicit user chat prompts override everything.
This seems appropriate for hierarchical AGENTS.md files? How would it even realize there was a conflict if it hadn't read both files?
Nowhere does that require you to go and get a DUNS number, which is onerous for a single developer to do without the infrastructure of a company.
It seems kind of odd to me to rely on some kind of external hidden "credit agency"-style company for this? And why would DUNS want to know about some kid in their basement in Bangledesh making (non-malicious) apps, and why would the kid want Dun & Bradstreet to know about them? It makes no sense at all.