A 10-Year-Old Nuclear-Blast Simulator Is Popular Again

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15 points·mesofile··4 comments

I took one of Alex Wellerstein's classes, he's a very interesting guy. Very fun and laid back while sill being really instructive. It always makes me chuckle to see Nukemap get posted, I think this is like the four or fifth time I've seen it on HN. Crazy that he made the site in 2004 and people are still getting so much mileage out of it.

I posted this interview partly because the recent bump in interest in his site and its attendant uptime problems has apparently spurred him to update its provisioning. As he points out, this is a side project by a non-IT professional created years ago, and he's had to get up to speed on the latest best practices in a hurry. From the interview:

> It’s taken up a lot of my time the last week to figure out how to fix the site to give access to those who want it. I’ve spent a couple of days rebuilding the server from the bottom. I’m sitting around looking up best practices for server maintenance and talking to people on forums to learn more. I’m pretty computer-savvy for a historian, but I’m still having trouble parsing things written for full-time engineers.

I always have a lot of admiration for non-experts who wade in and learn enough in a short time to build a site that can draw and support a global audience.

this made me think of the game DEFCON which was a great game out of the UK I think.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1520/DEFCON/

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