Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)

On my spare time, I am working on my game, a sci fi dungeon crawler – written in Haskell. Currently finishing up the graphics engine. OpenGL based. 2.5D but with a real 3D dynamic light system. In game objects and entities cast realistic soft shadows, and are lit up realistically. Took a lot of mathing and thinking to get working!

Next up is actually implementing game play!

There is a little video demo here (but bear in mind that everything is temp graphics) https://hakon.gylterud.net/diary/2026-05.html#2026-05-02

[dead]

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

The Ubuntu DDoS got me to thinking: If we had a critical need to respin machines (like our data center caught fire), we would have been in for a real challenge. We run apt-cacher-ng, but it did nothing for us during the DDoS, and worse: Every few weeks or a month ac-ng will go out to lunch and we have to fix it.

So: ac-ng didn't reduce the impact of the DDoS, but it does lead to impact when there is no DDoS. Worst of both worlds.

So I'm working on an apt-cacher that goes to lengths to keep working as much as possible when the upstream is down. It will check the repo metadata and keeps a list of your "hot packages", and will download those before flipping the new metadata to be live, effectively a snapshot. It won't allow you to download a package you've never downloaded before in the case of a DDoS, but packages that you do download regularly (machine re-installs, apt updates), it will ensure are available in the repo.

I'm calling it apt-cacher-ultra. It is pretty early days, it'll probably be another week before it's ready for a beta. I'm running it in my dev cluster right now, successfully.

https://github.com/linsomniac/apt-cacher-ultra

working in adjacent space for tracking more visual sports http://ballers.gg