Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties

lanparty.house

231–240 of 397 posts

Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties

#231

This is neat, but as a $NET shareholder and someone with another ~$1m in net worth that can't afford to buy a house for at least another 6 years this makes me think we should significantly increase taxation.

Your net worth is far above the median. If taxes increase, you are likely to lose wealth, not gain it.

Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties

#234

Amazing build, and even better, a set of long time friends. You and your wife are rich in all senses. I was wondering what the maximum power draw you have seen. Do you monitor your energy usage during normal use and during a party with all machines buzzing.

I haven't actually monitored power usage during parties. But I should do that at the next one... I have better equipment for than now that since we finished the solar install! I suspect though that even when the game machines are running they probably don't draw all that much power compared to the HVAC. We seem to have ~10-12kW going to HVAC throughout the day... this feels broken to me (these are supposed to be high…

It's almost certainly insolation (sol, not sul). UV/IR rejecting film on the windows might help, given mild enough winters that blocking it year round is fine. Check out https://youtu.be/uhbDfi7Ee7k

If you can find someone willing to do it, dumping the heat (pumped out as air conditioning) directly into the pool would be quite efficient relative to heating the pool separately. Have it dump to the ambient outdoor air only as overflow when the pool's thermostat is satisfied (upper 80s or whatever).

Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties

#236

This is neat, but as a $NET shareholder and someone with another ~$1m in net worth that can't afford to buy a house for at least another 6 years this makes me think we should significantly increase taxation.

If you’re a Cloudflare shareholder, Kenton has increased your net worth quite a bit. He is one of the few people who is so unreasonably capable he can and has changed the direction of a multibillion dollar company single handedly. It sounds hyperbolic, but it’s not in this particular case.

I’m also fairly convinced he didn’t capture one tenth of one percent of the value he created, so I’m not sure how anyone can argue this is ‘unfair’.

Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties

#238
post #236

This is neat, but as a $NET shareholder and someone with another ~$1m in net worth that can't afford to buy a house for at least another 6 years this makes me think we should significantly increase taxation.

If you’re a Cloudflare shareholder, Kenton has increased your net worth quite a bit. He is one of the few people who is so unreasonably capable he can and has changed the direction of a multibillion dollar company single handedly. It sounds hyperbolic, but it’s not in this particular case. I’m also fairly convinced he didn’t capture one tenth of one percent of the value he created, so I’m not sure how anyone can argu…

As someone that was previously bullish on Workers but now fully disillusioned with a barely positive cost basis on it right now I disagree with this - if anything I feel burned for believing and continuing to believe.

Either way, people like me aren’t going to be able to capture even a tenth of the success of joining Google in 2005 or buying a $1m house in Palo Alto ~4 years after graduating (I’m 6.5 years out of graduating) because people like me aren’t as human as the folks that own this house.

Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties

#239
post #58
post #44

> I've never heard of anyone else having done anything like this. This surprises me! But, surely, if someone else did it, someone would have told me about it? If you know of another, please let me know! I never had the tenacity to consider my build "finished," and definitely didn't have your budget, but I built a 5-player room[1] for DotA 2 back in 2013. I got really lucky with hardware selection and ended up fightin…

Hah, you really did the VM thing? A lot of people have suggested that to me but I didn't think it'd actually work. Pretty cool! Yeah I'm pretty sure my onboard 10G Marvell AQtion ethernet is the source of most of my stability woes. About half the time any of these machines boot up, Windows bluescreens within the first couple minutes, and I think it has something to do with the iSCSI service crashing. Never had troubl…

I've done a multi-seat gaming VM back in the day too. I don't think I'd want to do it again. Assigning hotplug USB devices was a pain: I mostly wanted unique USB devices per computer to easily figure which device was which. Though nowadays I would probably use a thin client Raspberry Pi running Moonlight to do it cheaply.

I think another issue is the limited amount of PCI-E lanes now that HEDT is dead. I picked up a 5930k for my build at the time for its 40 PCI-E lanes. But now consumer CPUs basically max out at 20-24 lanes.

Also with the best CPUs for gaming nowadays being AMD's X3D series because of its additional L3 cache, I wonder about the performance hit with 2 different VMs fighting for cache. Maybe the rumored 9950X3D will have 2 3D caches and you'd be able to pin the VMs to each CPU cores/cache. The 7950X3D had 3D cache only on half of its cores, so games generally performed better pinned to only those cores.

So with only 2-3 VMs/PC, and you still needing a GPU for each VM which are the most expensive part anyway, I'd pay a bit more to do it without VMs. The only way I'd be interested in multiseat VM gaming again would be if I could utilize GPU virtualization: split up a single GPU into many VMs. But like you say in the article that's usually been limited to enterprise hardware. And even then it'd be interesting only for the flexibility, being able to run 1 high-end GPU for when I'm not having a party.

Post reply on HN