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mintflow

74 karma · joined March 4, 2025

creator of MintFlow, a brand new iOS Multiple Protocol VPN client(WireGuard/VMESS/SHADOWSOCKS/Experimental Tailscale and etc...) and Domain based split routing, with HTTPS Capture & Rewrite

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mintflow-netstack/id6742394218

also creator of NovaScale(formerly NovaAccess), an iOS app that allow you to access SSH server/Codex/Web Services on tailscale private network without requiring VPN, download at

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/novaaccess/id6749938291

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mintflow··on Dots: Always-on agents
This is a bit scary, this means they can even see the content of user's mail given the browser does not do any pin cert on the linux.
mintflow··on 10 Tells of a Slop UI
I added a rule on my agents.md for the design part, I never like any UI element that styling have a bg and slightly dark version of same color used by the bg because it's really made me mad and seems get being used by Agent

This coincidently the first picture in this article by cloudflare

mintflow··on Cloudflare Quick Tunnels
perhaps this is the most easy to use networking product that ever shipped, but given ngrok did this many years before, maybe they just think for the agentic era? though one must take care for the authentification

I also think it seems cloudflare enter into a stage keep adding products and make the portal looks like a maze to get more advanced features configured

Do you still remember cloudflare mesh and use and stick to it?

mintflow··on Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
Recently I start to do some hobby project by learning Common Lisp to understand more about the libraries I used on app

I read the document and sometimes use LLM as a quick search engine because I am tired of every query on google that use AI to summarize

The project goes slowly but seems the basics I grasped over the years help a lot

So perhaps it still worth to learn by hand with trial and fail

I agreed with the author that one must learn deep above the abstraction and I truely think programming still a thing even the agentic coding is getting powerful

mintflow··on I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea
What a joy to read this article, and the shell dump to the highlanders seems make me know a bit more of how money works and why bitcoin's scarcity make it have that high price
mintflow··on I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
Given this and the now saturated App market with accelerated with Agentic coding

Sometimes I am wondering the low acquisition rate still pay off

mintflow··on Connecting the machines
Been integrated a codex remote feature to my NovaScale app (with in-app tailnet connectivity) using remote app server too, it works well for me, though the websocket is experimental, but seems it keep schema compatible well.
mintflow··on Connecting the machines
This is the motivation I built the app NovaScale with in app tailnet connectivity

I was thinking the herdr remote features is nice to have in my app, given this herdr multi machine support, perhaps I need to reconsider how I integrate it in the future

mintflow··on My local model setup on an M4 Pro Mac Mini
Have a macmini m4 32G, not the pro version, previously everytime I tried local LLM is a bit disappointing, and I finally decide to not waste time and perhaps in the future invest a better hardware to server more modern and dense model

I am curious is what is the 80% request served by this setup, I was using it for OpenClaw which run serveral cron jobs that discover stuffs over the wide internet, check my support system's unanswered tickets, browser X and some social media for me to filter the valued ones(though I have to say even with GPT 5.6 sol, the quality is low for the timeline X sent to me)

Btw, Tailscale is quite cool and did a good job, I was using it to serve the local LLM and connct the openclaw on a Linux Machine to it.

mintflow··on Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT
As a engineering all my career life focused on networking, I am so depressed that IPv6 still not fully replaced IPv4

We have dozen of RFCs and vendors gears support IPv6 as well, but it just not finished

mintflow··on Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane
being built a iroh based distributed notes app for myself use

and see tailcat come out, trying to replace iroh with this to do some experiment because i really love how tailscale works and invest much time to the stack

True appriciated of open source this, combine the tailscale open source client core with this, i think it can unlock more stuffs

mintflow··on Being ambitious and being a dad
Thanks for sharing

Being dad is really hard joyful, you watch they grow from a tiny one to some big one which argue with you also sometimes care you when you sad

I quit from a high pay job because I want to enjoy more time with kids because I feel not get enough in my childhood

I like to read philosophy and settled with existentialism, this helps with the stress of low earning compared the previous time

Life may all about trade off, we may not lucky to get everything we want

mintflow··on Show HN: I built a native app for coding agents with Rust and GPUI
So this is basically a wrapper over the existing agents from differnt vendors?

Just poke it a bit and find for codex it use app server protocol too

> Not backed by Y Combinator

This is humor, isn't it?

mintflow··on A fortuitous decade as an indie software developer
Thanks for the frankly sharing of the journey, being in the same boat, after two years of not-worth-to-mention revenue from appstore, it seems start to get on track a bit now

I think I am not the lucky one to get overnight success and like in the post get the lucky time on iOS 15 release

Being writing a long article to record my indie app developper journey, Hope I can read in calm of it one decade later

mintflow··on Gemini 3.7 Flash
Given my codex have limited usage and I get a idea to build a on device clipboard translator with menubar when read a article find some words not seens before

So i launched agy and find seems it have a 3.7 flash i thought its latest,until i see this article i know it's just released

after serveral rounds prompt(the initial prd prompt is by chatgpt), it use 2.9k user message token and 42.5k reponse tokens with gemini 3.7 flash(low) after i check the status, i got a working on device translator, its cool

the model seems also p and retty fast and the generated app looks good and easy to use

but agy cli is a bit unintuitve and i also check the guy that release the latest agy, seems the guy does not commit much ? or perhaps agy does not open source and only use github as a issue feedback channel

mintflow··on Why Target Common Lisp for Code Generation?
I only touch some emacs lisp and never do Common Lisp But seems years of coding experience make me think those tenets in the article reasonable There are indeed elite programmers as I see in my career it’s rare also we do not need to be sad Maybe it’s time to learn some Common Lisp given it’s a good day for exploration and prototyping
mintflow··on Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering
Nice article and some tenets have been said, such as software engineering is not same thing as programming.

As a long term C programmer and start using go from the early days, really love it's rich ecosystem and portability.

Nowadays, for any backend code, i just let agent to write using go, and for resource constraint environment, i just use rust.

And both have good C interop, and good ffi interface to hook into more higher level language such as Swift/Kotlin if one wnat to develop some mobile Apps

mintflow··on My server is a phone now
Nice writeup but use legacy phone is really need to do some tuning and hacks, but that's fun to do if one like it.

For me I have a 24x7 running intel gen 11 nuc, i am lucky to get it installed with 32G memory and two NVME disks years ago and cannot image add those memory and NVME disk with much higher price

Just run some docker and VM on that, use cloudflare tunnel or tailscale funnel if you want to expose some service to the wild internet

I recently even find a pixel 5 and passthrough it to the openclaw VM on that nuc, let it browse the X to find some posts and relax me from doom scrolling, though seems timeline still bad and no much valued post find.

mintflow··on AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon
try let it to get a brief of france history which being reading a while hit the button and then the brieft jump into my eye

Generated in 0.051s • 14,092 tok/s

Impressive...

Given gpt 5.5 was very good to me and gpt 5.6 series seems not boost too much, i kinda like the way bake the model weight to the chip, and connect multiple chip to serve the large scale model and allow respin some parts(ROM like?) to do model weight update, maybe this seems sustainable, the future is exciting

mintflow··on Rio-vt and librio: Rio's terminal engine, now embeddable
Thanks for sharing

I tried some ghostty based terminal and find weird copy/selection issues or maybe I tried too early

Perhaps that because it seems bypass too much layer to get gpu rendering directly

mintflow··on Rio-vt and librio: Rio's terminal engine, now embeddable
Have a app that use swiftterm currently and want to try libghostty but no time

Turned out there are so many choices for the terminal engine

The clear C ABI sound good to me and will try it if time allows

Great work!

mintflow··on LLMs reward expertise
agreed on this.

recently i start to rewrite a core part of one of my iOS VPN app to rust, which previously use fd.io vpp as it's networking core, the original vpp port is 1.5 years ago manually by myself, given i know a lot about how the vpp does and how vpp coroutine and runtime scheduling works.

the rewrite is in good shape and solve many issues such as pre allocated memory heap using mmap apis and some scheduling issue of back2back tcp session terminated in the vpp host stack.

also by addressing the issus, i am now can easily integrated tailscale as a addon interface for moving in/out l3 packets between tailscale and the core.

All those i think cannot be done easily without domain knowledge about those networking and system stuffs.

mintflow··on SwiftUI After 7 Years
As a solo app developper for two years mainly for apple platform(previously do networking infra software using C/Go)

After two many trial and fail, now it's quite clear to me that for simple UI I will use swiftUI(such as help sheet or simple toggles), for complex and performance first, I will just use UIKit instead, it save a log of time and actually the imperative UIKit is also quite easy to read and review

the feasibility of review is important because code is not mainly written by agent, though as my understanding of UIKit grows I can smell the bad part and let it rewrite

mintflow··on The Absurdity of Albert Camus
Feel great to read this type of article on hackernews. Camus died too young, and the current world have enough of evidence of absurdity.
mintflow··on Substack writers, you need a website
Great idea.

Recently, I’ve decided to get back into blogging. It’s surprisingly easy these days. I already have a domain on Cloudflare, and I had Codex build a simple blogging system for me. I write everything in Markdown, the site is hosted on Cloudflare, comments are stored in Cloudflare D1, and all articles live in the repository as Markdown files. GitHub Actions takes care of publishing automatically and also performs regular backups. To reduce comment spam, I use Cloudflare Turnstile, which has been working really well. For comment moderation, I protect the admin interface with Cloudflare Zero Trust, using email-based authentication, so I don’t need to build or maintain my own authentication system. Overall, the setup has been incredibly simple, reliable, and has required very little ongoing maintenance.

mintflow··on More Tailscale tricks for your jailbroken Kindle
Bought a second hand kindle and love it after near 10 years of my first kindle battery bloated

Still not want to jailbreak it because experience is good and I just share some books to the phone app and it get synced to the kindle device

Love tailscale though, perhaps Need buy some full open source ebook reader with tailscale installed

mintflow··on Buz – A fork of Bun using modern Zig, with sub-1s incremental builds
saw another project based on pre-rust bun and this is another one never use bun and sometimes this make me wonder, are we enter a phase the supply way > requirement or people just build stuffs and not care serious usage anymore?

As a software engineer these days, I can't say i do not use Agent to help work done, but i am really a bit of tired to see so much solutions while not talk about what problem they are trying to really solve

mintflow··on Hyprland 0.55 announced the switch to Lua for its config files
same boat, tried hyprland and it's cool but seems a bit buggy, and switch back to i3 and settle there.
mintflow··on HomeLab #1: MikroTik as a Home Router
I am using a tiny mini pc j6412 with fd.io vpp(with dpdk enabled) and some customized plugins for pppoe and overlay tunnel, it works quite well

and it's cheap and fully customized, and powerful

For me when building homelab, customizability maybe important

mintflow··on Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux
Linux can really unlock old hardware well, and glad it work great on 32bit systems

Recently retired my pc with fx6300 because it take too much desktop space; and just setup a mini pc with j6412, also installed arch Linux, i3wm for desktop stuffs

Also find a old usb Bluetooth receiver make it play some music

It works great and use this new setup to get a Agent free experience

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