Alternatives
Products that do what Simstack, SSH escape room for developers does
I built a realistic prod system under heavy pressure where you SSH in and solve real problems. You get your own server (real box) and have to fix various things up under fire. a friend told me it reminded them of DOOM for SREs, another called it a "flight simulator" because you can do anything (and reboot if you crash). someone else said it was like "an escape room for engineers", in that you have to find your own way around an unfamiliar box and solve puzzles. idk, maybe it's fun. try it! how it works: you get two Hetzner servers: a traffic generator (real traffic from NYC taxi data highly…
- 1TC
Looking to get some feedback from the Hacker News community. I wrote the book with a focus on penetration testers and red teamers, but there are great examples for network admins, developers, and blue team defenders as well. You can pick up a copy for free here through May 19, 2019: https://gumroad.com/l/the_cyber_plumbers_handbook/hackernews... Please note, because it's hosted on Gumroad, it does require an email. If you don't want to give out your actual email, check out an anonymous email service. I give it away to students for free, so if you know of one that…
2019
- 2
- 3MS
A little over a year ago I gave away over 4,600 copies of my intro to SSH tunneling book, The Cyber Plumber's Handbook, for free over a 48 hour period to the awesome folks here on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19946941). Since then, I've been getting a lot of feedback about creating an interactive lab where SSH tunneling and port redirection techniques can be practiced in real scenarios. With a bit more time during the quarantine, I finally found the time to launch the lab portion. For the HN family, I'm offering the book and 2 weeks of lab time for 50% off…
2020
- 4IM
Hi HN, I’m one of the devs behind StarDesk, a P2P-first remote desktop we’ve been building for ~1 year. We started this partly out of frustration: some popular RDP tools haven’t seen meaningful updates in a long time, and long-standing issues are often left unaddressed. As devs, we really dislike software that stagnates once it “works well enough”. StarDesk is our attempt to do it differently. What we focus on: -P2P by default (relay as fallback) -Low RTT + low jitter > chasing max bitrate -Encoder / input path tuned for real-time interaction -Modern E2EE (TLS/DTLS) UX-wise, setup…
Jan 2026 · stardesk.net
- 5AM
For the past few months, I’ve been hacking together Hive: a retro-style virtual workspace for devs who love building in public. It’s a bit rough but already has some cool features: - AI-powered presence to represent you when you’re offline. - Live video streaming to showcase your work in real time. - VS Code integration to broadcast your status live. - GraphQL API for full customization and hackability (such as using your own agents) - Web3 donations to support and get support from other builders. In this demo, you can claim a desk by walking up to it and pressing E, then personalize it with…
2024 · joinhive.devmode.digital
- 6MD
Hello HN: I love the randomness of the universe. I've been spending some time creating a Craps simulator to help experience this love without having to shell out like a real degenerate. For others similarly fascinated: I would love to hear any and all feedback you've got on this. It's meant to be unique in the sense that it's a community-oriented, infinite simulation.
Feb 2026 · infinitecraps.com
- 7HM
Use beta invite code "hacker news" to sign up - only 50 people... This is VERY early and is missing lots of features but you can help shape the future... Let me know what you think... See http://www.ubercamp.net/
2013
- 8AS
Hi HN! This is my first game — something I’ve always wanted to do. It’s a small browser game built with Phaser 3, React, and the phaser template (https://github.com/phaserjs/template-react-ts/). I made it in 2 days (like 8 hours in total real time) using gemini-cli. About 90% of the code was generated with AI, but I learned a lot by making fine tweaks. It only works on PC since it’s a typical WASD + R (reload) shooter. I’d love feedback on: - Gameplay (is it fun, too hard?) - Ideas for new features Thanks in advance! ps: I used cubes as a prototype, but now I kind of…
2025 · cubic-zombies.pages.dev
- 9CQ
I'm building a cozy multiplayer game engine (very early stages - just a few days in!) combining Elixir, Go, and Godot to achieve sub-50ms latency while maintaining a warm, welcoming feel. My architecture uses Elixir/Phoenix for fault-tolerant session management, Go for high-performance game state sync (1ms tick rate), and Godot for client-side prediction. I've implemented lock-free data structures, SIMD-optimized physics, and binary protocols with delta compression. Quick note: the website/login aren't functional yet - this is a work in progress! Here's my technical deep-dive into…
2024 · tappygames.itch.io
- 10WB
Over the past few months, as we scaled our internal AI Agents, we hit a dead end: Running LLM-generated arbitrary code in Docker is basically running naked on security due to container escape risks. But using full traditional VMs takes minutes to boot and eats too much memory to support high-density concurrency. We loved the developer experience of SaaS sandboxes on the market, but they are closed-source, expensive, and have too high a barrier to entry for self-hosting. So, our team decided to build our own. After months of grinding, using RustVMM and KVM, we built a blazing-fast,…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 11IB
Hi HN, I’m the creator of Cordum. I’ve been working in DevOps and infrastructure for years (currently in the fintech/security space), and as I started playing with AI agents, I noticed a scary pattern. Most "safety" mechanisms rely on system prompts ("Please don't do X") or flimsy Python logic inside the agent itself. If we treat agents as autonomous employees, giving them root access and hoping they listen to instructions felt insane to me. I wanted a way to enforce hard constraints that the LLM cannot override, no matter how "jailbroken" it gets. So I built Cordum. It’s an open-source…
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 12LV
Hello HN! We've been working on a new hypervisor https://kwarantine.xyz that can run strongly isolated containers. This is still a WIP, but we wanted to give the community an idea about our approach, its benefits, and various use cases it unlocks. Today, VMs are used to host containers, and make up for the lack of strong security as well as kernel isolation in containers. This work adds this missing security piece in containers. We plan on launching a free private beta soon. Meanwhile, we'd deeply appreciate any feedback, and happy to answer any questions here or on our slack…
2021
- 13HL
Hello Hacker News! I’ve been working on a side project that ports the entire Source Engine to run in the browser using Emscripten. (Yes, the same engine that powered Half-Life 2, Portal, CSGO, and more.) It’s still a work-in-progress some features are missing and the launcher is in development but core engine functionality is up and running. I’d love feedback, ideas, or contributions. If you’re curious, feel free to check it out, star it, or open a pull request! Here's the link to the source code - https://github.com/OrbitaStudios/LambdaComplexSource
2025 · github.com
- 14GF
I've been a big fan of fly.io with it’s devx, but cold starts and pricing have been a consistent problem. Even for side projects it's painful if they take 30s to load, it just kills the whole experience. With coding agents becoming good, there were a lot more things I started building, and I just wanted to run all of those things! GCI was built to solve this. It’s just a CLI, just uses ssh to interact with your target machine, and relies on docker swarm to get your services running (docker swarm is IMO underrated, providing benefits even with a single node). It can deploy on any machine that…
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 15IV
So, I've never written a line of Rust in my life. I wouldn't know an `&mut this` from a mutandis. But I saw a tweet about a month ago that said, in this new era of AI, you'd be able to just take a library that you love, throw a TUI around it, and call it an app. So I spent about 200 bucks last month, here's what I came up with: Imbolc is a DAW that runs entirely in your terminal. It talks to scsynth over OSC and ships 58 instruments and 39 effects. VSTs are a work in progress, also GarageBand loops if you want to recreate "Umbrella". The codebase is about 60k? lines of Rust across 5 crates,…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 16HC
This is a model I’ve been thinking about lately. It demonstrates a pattern that I’m wondering could exist, where terminal applications, BBS-style shared user boards, and other expressions of creativity and sharing are created with web technologies but rendered into the terminal and accessed over SSH. I like that this brings back some kind of old days of the internet feeling and uses web technologies but sidesteps the public World Wide Web, even though it’s still on the internet. You can try it out too right now, and I’m thinking about making the self-hosting specialized applications part a…
Jul 2026 · duetbrowser.com
- 17RU
hey all, happy to share research i've been working on for islo.dev in recent months. ever since the cheating agents (https://debugml.github.io/cheating-agents/) paper came out, revealing reward hacking was 4x more prevalent than previously estimated, i've been looking into how we can deal with the issue the common approach (taken by the tbench team) is post hoc trajectory analysis. i've been interested in the idea of reframing the problem as an endpoint security problem and tackling it via sandbox i hope you find it interesting, and thanks to the islo.dev team for…
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 18IM
Hello HackerNews, I'm Kaamkiya, the author of this program. It's a collection of minimal games made for terminals, like 2048, Hangman, and even two player games like pong. They're all text-based, but they can actually be quite fun. If you want to test it right now, you can do this: go run github.com/Kaamkiya/gg@latest I started this project out of boredom, honestly. I was bored, and when I'm bored I like to code or play video games. So I coded video games. I kept them really minimal though, because I'm not great at gamedev and thought it would be easier to contribute to text-based…
2024 · github.com
- 19OC
Hi Hacker News! My Co Co-op Matt and I are on a work term and were given the task of building a webapp that could make $20 in four weeks as our onboarding challenge. We're in the final stretch here and would sure appreciate HN's thoughts (we realize we kind of did this backwards, building something first before talking to people who might use it, but hey! We're leaning.). So basically, we tried to apply game dynamics to retaining visitors to websites by offering a reward (ie. discount coupon / premium content, etc.) for meeting various 'objectives' (ie. pages to visit). We call it ScavSite…
2011
- 20RW
Hey Hackernews! My names Olly (a Designer from the UK). I’ve been a long time lurker on Hackernews but now I finally have something to share with the community. Along with my friend Oliver (Developer, Sweden/Japan) we have been working on Remotewise.io. It’s a new resource and learning platform dedicated to remote work. We’ve both been working remotely for most of our careers. Over this time remote work has been gaining huge momentum as a viable and desirable way to work and we believe it’s the future. We’ve been working on this during our evenings and weekends in between our full-time…
2019
- 21ET
Hey Hacker News, For the last 2 months, I've been working on a testing agent to free developers from the endless maintenance of end-to-end tests. You just push up a PR, and our agent analyzes the code changes and automatically visits the preview to test things out like a real human! We also support describing tests in English (or even in the PR description), and we'll go through your site whenever you want via a GitHub action to test and make sure various core flows continue to work as expected. We are looking for early testers and are giving out a generous free tier! Just sign up on the…
2025 · playmatic.ai
- 22IB
I'm working on the Survival Crafting RPG that you would have played on your Apple II back in the '80s. You can think of it as Valheim's gameplay crammed into the tile-based UI of the old Ultima games. It has a procedurally-generated open world with towns and NPCs to talk to, all the resource gathering, mining, crafting stuff you'd expect in a modern survival game, and some good old fashioned dungeon crawling to boot. I've been working on it off and on for the last several months. It's complete up through the Bronze Age (in Valheim terms). Let me know what you think!…
May 2026
- 23IB
The main goal of this was to be able to not just run multiple Claude Code sessions at once, but actually manage them and keep track of what I was doing. Sometimes this is multiple attempts on the same task, sometimes I work several tasks at once. Really I was just sick of twiddling my thumbs waiting for the coding agent to finish, and I wanted it to be easy to work on/review/test another change while I waited.
2025 · github.com
- 24IB
Hi HN, I'm one of the engine programmers at All Out Games (https://allout.game/), a multiplayer-first gaming UGC platform where creators can make and play games with their friends. For scripting we wanted our creators to be able to jump in and create game mechanics without having to think about networking. If a developer had to manually send packets to/from client/server to get things to happen then we have failed. It is particularly bad if you are using AI tools because they struggle to keep in mind what code is meant to run where (client, server, or both) and…
Mar 2026 · docs.allout.game
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