Hacker News: alamsterdam

New comment by alamsterdam in "Game over? Video gamers take fight to Brussels over developers cutting supports"

alamsterdam — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 09:57:24 +0000

Campaign pushing for end to developers ending video games by withdrawing online support

Game over? Video gamers take fight to Brussels over developers cutting supports

alamsterdam — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 09:57:24 +0000

Article URL: https://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2026/01/29/game-over-video-gamers-take-fight-to-brussels-over-developers-cutting-supports/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46807969

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by alamsterdam in "Building a high-performance ticketing system with TigerBeetle"

alamsterdam — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 10:10:47 +0000

Agree with the above, we built and run a ticketing platform, the actual transaction of purchasing the ticket at the final step in the funnel is not the bottleneck.

The shopping process and queuing process puts considerably more load on our systems than the final purchase transaction, which ultimately is constrained by the size of the venue, which we can control by managing the queue throughput.

Even with a queue system in place, you inevitably end up with the thundering heard problem when ticket sales open, as a large majority of users will refresh their browsers regardless of instructions to the contrary

New comment by alamsterdam in "Lightweight open source reCaptcha alternative"

alamsterdam — Thu, 15 May 2025 13:54:35 +0000

Yes, I was wondering what is to stop you replaying the same PoW multiple times. All I can find is:

To prevent the vulnerability of “replay attacks,” where a client resubmits the same solution multiple times, the server should implement measures that invalidate previously solved challenges.

The server should maintain a registry of solved challenges and reject any submissions that attempt to reuse a challenge that has already been successfully solved.

This doesn't seem very scaleable? Or am I missing something?

New comment by alamsterdam in "Does your startup need complex cloud infrastructure?"

alamsterdam — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 15:17:37 +0000

For me (where our BE consists of maybe 100 endpoints) we’ve found the sweet spot to be Google AppEngine. Incredibly simple to deploy, we don’t really need to manage infrastructure or networking (although you can if you want), decent performance, plays well with other GCP services, great logging and observability, etc

We’ve tried deploying services on K8s, Lambda/Cloud Run, but in the end, the complexity just didn’t make sense.

I’m sure we could get better performance running our own Compute/EC2 instances, but then we need to manage that.

New comment by alamsterdam in "Why the serverless revolution has stalled (2020)"

alamsterdam — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 14:33:51 +0000

My use cases are probably regarded as small/medium, which need a handful of instances running, which you can effectively scale down to zero with Googles free tier (basically allows you go goto 1 instance for free), so cost has not been a major consideration.

New comment by alamsterdam in "Why the serverless revolution has stalled (2020)"

alamsterdam — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 13:38:03 +0000

I think appengine is one of the most underrated "serverless" offerings out there. I deploy everything on it, with almost zero concern about infra or server architecture

New comment by alamsterdam in "Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)"

alamsterdam — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 14:09:38 +0000

I could deploy to production 30 times a minute! haha :)

New comment by alamsterdam in "Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)"

alamsterdam — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 12:50:11 +0000

Using vi to update the .html directly on the production server (and this wasn't a personal website)... simpler times :)

New comment by alamsterdam in "New UK record for wind power set today – 21.81 GW between 0900-0930 GMT"

alamsterdam — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 14:11:44 +0000

Ireland is generating 75% renewable today also!

https://www.eirgrid.ie/grid/real-time-system-information