Hacker News: AtticusTheGreat

New comment by AtticusTheGreat in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"

AtticusTheGreat — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:34:56 +0000

Currently fleshing out my boggle-like empire. serpentinegame.com. I've got ELO rated rooms, a daily room, and a new infinite room. I've been doing this since 2008 but recently rewrote everything from scratch and seeing how far I can push the online multiplayer boggle niche.

New comment by AtticusTheGreat in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

AtticusTheGreat — Sun, 10 May 2026 21:14:43 +0000

I built on online multiplayer boggle game back in 2008 that somehow drew a lot of users, many of whom still play every day after 17 years. About a year ago I started a rewrite from scratch in more modern technologies but stalled out after getting to about 80% of the way there. A few months ago Claude enabled me to finish the remaining 20% and was able to relaunch mostly successfully! It's been tough though. I'm a dad with three kids and use Claude all day at my day job and my interest in working late isnt always there. But I'm eeking my way to something that hopefully can stay up for another 17 years.

https://serpentinegame.com

New comment by AtticusTheGreat in "Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell"

AtticusTheGreat — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 20:09:07 +0000

https://SerpentineGame.com brings in close to that with advertisements and premium subscriptions. It is a clone of a game called Tangleword that is itself a clone of Boggle. I originally wrote it in 2008 and am currently re-writing it from scratch because the technology stack is so old and cumbersome to maintain.

New comment by AtticusTheGreat in "It's all Greek to me: Thoughts on code readability and aesthetics"

AtticusTheGreat — Sat, 20 Jul 2019 11:52:03 +0000

Whenever this kind of disagreement happens with my team, we put it to a vote and then the winning convention is enforced across the codebase from then on. There are tons of things in programming that come down to opinion but the important thing for me is that the team has a set convention and sticks to it.

New comment by AtticusTheGreat in "Living without the modern browser"

AtticusTheGreat — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 14:23:49 +0000

In the old days the user would submit the form, the validation would happen on the server, then return a result. If the result was a failure, you would render the errors on a new page load. If the result was a success, you could redirect the user to "confirmation" page or reload the same page but with a different output.

New comment by AtticusTheGreat in "Firefox 58"

AtticusTheGreat — Tue, 23 Jan 2018 19:47:54 +0000

I did try Firefox 57 on my Android phone and found the scrolling to be unpleasant with lots of artifacts and stuttering. It's still a much better experience with the mobile version of Chrome.

New comment by AtticusTheGreat in "Integrating “safe” languages into OpenBSD?"

AtticusTheGreat — Mon, 04 Dec 2017 16:19:48 +0000

It would be interesting to try to cobble together a Linux distribution with a rust userland, using coreutils (https://github.com/uutils/coreutils) and over time building more and more of the userland/interface in rust.

New comment by AtticusTheGreat in "HAProxy vs. Nginx for load balancing (2016)"

AtticusTheGreat — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 14:15:36 +0000

I only skimmed the article but I agree with the conclusion. I evaluated both HAProxy and Nginx for a high-volume/low-latency load balancer cluster (500k requests/s) and HAProxy simply beat the pants off of Nginx. It has an extensive and well documented set of configuration options, tooling, and reporting, and it performed flawlessly on production (after much toiling). I couldn't ever quite get Nginx to handle the same load without falling apart at the seams.

New comment by AtticusTheGreat in "2018 Intel NUC Models"

AtticusTheGreat — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 18:34:49 +0000

I've got two NUCs, which I use as HTPCs running Fedora. They're fantastic machines. Really tiny, quiet, and plenty powerful enough for HD movies and light gaming/emulation.

New comment by AtticusTheGreat in "Show HN: Pygit – Just enough git to push itself to GitHub"

AtticusTheGreat — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 18:03:03 +0000

The thing is, all of these details are implemented in the git command line tool, not in a library. So it is pretty difficult to write a tool that works exactly the same way the command line tool does, or if you do manage to do it, it'll be fragile since the command line tool could change behavior at any time.

New comment by AtticusTheGreat in "Keeping track of technical debt in source code"

AtticusTheGreat — Fri, 14 Apr 2017 11:31:28 +0000

This is exactly my stance on the matter. Don't litter the code with unnecessary comments that will never get acted upon. Instead, make a story in your bug tracker and act upon it.

New comment by AtticusTheGreat in "Building a NAS"

AtticusTheGreat — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 22:34:37 +0000

Getting 60TB of usable space in the cloud is pretty expensive. Honestly I have no idea why he needs so much space, but if he does need it all, he probably didn't make out too badly. One of the main benefits of the cloud, though, is that you only pay for what you use, and he has to over-provision from the beginning, so let's consider that.

So he's currently using about 10TB of 60TB of usable space. If he uses Amazon S3's standard storage, he would be paying about $230/mo. If he uses infrequent storage that is $125/mo. That goes up as his usage goes, so when he's using 30TB that will be $690/mo and $375/mo respectively. He also has the benefit of high speed ethernet with the home NAS, unless he has fiber 1Gig internet, in which case speed is probably a wash. I'm not sure if there are other significantly cheaper cloud storage solutions at that scale.

So I'd say he hasn't done too badly for himself, though he probably could have saved some on the hardware by getting cheaper parts.

New comment by AtticusTheGreat in "Visual Studio Code: Shipping One of the Largest Microsoft JavaScript Apps"

AtticusTheGreat — Sat, 08 Apr 2017 12:45:53 +0000

Such as?

New comment by AtticusTheGreat in "Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence"

AtticusTheGreat — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 19:54:30 +0000

As someone who applauds this pivot, I never saw much value in the whole convergence idea. Why would I want my laptop and phone to be the same device? This seems to follow the misguided idea in software that if two ideas are similar, just make a single generic idea that solves both problems. But then you get into leaky abstractions and have to make lots of sacrifices to get it working well for both use cases.

New comment by AtticusTheGreat in "DragonFly BSD 4.8 released"

AtticusTheGreat — Mon, 27 Mar 2017 19:32:05 +0000

I know you probably meant "gold standard" but I was amused thinking about what a golf standard might mean ;)

New comment by AtticusTheGreat in "Modules vs Microservices"

AtticusTheGreat — Sun, 26 Mar 2017 15:53:40 +0000

I don't have much ideology behind going with microservices vs. monolith, but what we've done on some recent projects is organize our code into modules that only communicate with each other through a narrow and well defined boundary layer. If we need to split a module out into a separate service, then it isn't nearly as much work to split it out later.

One of the practical issues we've had with microservices that need to interact with each other in real time is ensuring a consistent state across systems. For example, let's say I need to change the status of an object and afterwards, call a separate service to change state there as well. What happens if the call fails in some way? You can't just run all of this inside a single database transaction anymore. Now you have to design your code to deal with several potential failure points and edge cases, which adds complexity. The other consideration is all calls to a service should be idempotent if possible. It makes coding from the client side a lot easier if you can just fire off a call multiple times (in case of local or remote failure) and not have to worry about state.

Just some of my thoughts, since this stuff has been on my plate recently.

New comment by AtticusTheGreat in "H&R Block and Intuit Are Lobbying Against Making Tax Filling Free and Easy"

AtticusTheGreat — Tue, 21 Mar 2017 22:25:22 +0000

Yeah absolutely. I'd love a free online solution from the government as it would make my life easier. So far, I haven't been willing to pay out to Intuit or HRBlock for a slight time/convenience savings.

New comment by AtticusTheGreat in "H&R Block and Intuit Are Lobbying Against Making Tax Filling Free and Easy"

AtticusTheGreat — Tue, 21 Mar 2017 15:56:37 +0000

I file my taxes for free, easily, by printing out the forms at home and doing them by hand on paper. The only cost to me is for the envelopes and postage. I've done some pretty complex filings over the years, and have built up the knowledge I need to do it well. Also, if I make a mistake the government is usually pretty good about letting me know and I either cut them a check for the difference or they cut me a check. It's actually not that hard, as long as you go through it line by line and read the instructions.

New comment by AtticusTheGreat in "They Used To Last 50 Years"

AtticusTheGreat — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 13:54:09 +0000

The person responsible for this makes his money on craigslist, probably buying and selling old appliances. So he probably has a lot to gain by getting people to buy old "better" appliances off of craigslist than the "terrible" new appliances at a box store. Sure, maybe he's right, but it is worth considering when reading this article.

New comment by AtticusTheGreat in "Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?"

AtticusTheGreat — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 20:50:58 +0000

I was going to mention this as well. It is worth making it clear that the article is written by a SF staffing company (which the article does do).