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Comment by phatskat | Hacker News Reader

> To validate that I made a script that spins up ~600 bots

Funny, when I went there were just over 600 active players and things were running super smoothly, even on my mobile. Kudos!

Do you see this project and the things you’ve tried applying to other future projects?

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Hah, yes, but for testing I removed all my rate limits so I pushed 1 million moves in 2 or 3 seconds, whereas now I think I rate limit people to like 3 or 4 moves a second (which is beyond what I can achieve on a trackpad going as fast as I can!) so the test isn't quite comparable!

I definitely learned a lot here. Most of my projects like this are basically just "give the internet access to my computer's memory but with rules." And now I think I've got a really good framework for doing that performantly in golang, which should make the next set of projects like this much quicker to implement.

I also just...know how to write go now. Which I did not 6 weeks ago. So that's nice.

You ain't the only one who's removed the rate limits lol. Some of these queens are clearing a whole board in like 3s, must've written something to keep a piece selected. This is turning into a race to the godliest piece hackathon.

The rate limits aren't that aggressive and have a decent amount of burst, you can get about 10 moves done in 1 second before you hit them and start getting throttled[1]. And of course you can run multiple clients (I account for this too, but I'm not that aggressive because I don't want to punish many people NAT'd behind a single IP)

[1] down to something like 3/sec?

I figured the multiple people per ip would be an issue, was wondering if that might be at play here. I thought you said it was already at 3-4/s and I doubted it based on some of what I'm seeing. 10/s tracks a little better.

As to what you should change, I can't say. It's in the wild now lol.

Yea seems the rate limit should be stricter, I made a quick script to do 1 move (capture) every 150ms, doesn't seem to get throttled.

I like how generals.io did it where they explicitly made a bot only server/version.

Six weeks is pretty quick! Can I ask what editor you use (always curious), and what other languages you have a background in?

these days I mostly use vscode / cursor, although I still really like vim and use it for languages that I know really well (mostly python these days) and quick edits.

I spent much of my professional career at Jane Street Capital, which means that I spent a long time just writing OCaml and some bash (and a tiny bit of C). I'm very comfortable with Python, and over the last year I've gotten pretty comfortable with frontend javascript. And now golang!

I could probably write semi-reasonable java, ruby, or perl if you gave me a few days to brush up on them. And it'd take me a while before I was happy putting C on the internet. Not sure otherwise.

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