Simstack, SSH escape room for developers
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…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
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 compressed to 12k rps) firing tons of requests at a user server, which has some (realistically) broken stuff trying to get that data to a chart. your job is to get it working and get the whole system latency down. You can use whatever tools or techniques you like to do so. so far I've seen people messing around in databases, adding caching, rewriting services in go. There's no one right solution! why I'm building it: I was a school teacher 15 years ago and have been training developers for the last 10. most dev training (tutorials, toy projects &c) feels nothing like the "real job". I wanted to see if we can make training more realistic, challenging, fun.
Does the same job
all alternatives →- TCThe Cyber Plumber's Handbook – SSH Tunnel Like a Boss2019 · ▲277
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…
- MSMaster SSH tunneling in an interactive lab2020 · ▲13
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…
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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…
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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…
- MDMy Degenerate Craps SimulatorFeb 2026 · infinitecraps.com · ▲6
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.
More growth this month
the category →
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Growth · 29d ago · astrapixels.com
Launched alongside, June 2025
the whole month →- IM
Hey HN! Pilots everywhere are required to keep a logbook of all their flying hours, aircraft, airports, and so on. Since I track everything digitally (some people still just use paper logbooks!), I put together some data visualizations and a few 3D globes to show my flying history. This globe is probably my favourite so far: https://jameshard.ing/pilot/globes/all If you’ve got ideas for other graphs or ways to show this kind of data, I’d love to hear them!
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- WC
I was the main contributor to workout.lol, an open-source fitness app to easily build a workout routine. The project had traction (1.4k GitHub stars, 95 forks, ~20K visits/month), but was eventually sold due to video licensing hurdles. The new owner stopped maintaining it, and the repo went abandoned. Over the next 9 months, I sent 15 emails to try to save it : no replies. Feature requests & issues were ignored. The community was left with a "broken" tool let's say. I couldn't just let it die So I built the new version from scratch with the same open-source spirit, but a better…
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