Hacker News: ultrahax

New comment by ultrahax in "Drop, formerly Massdrop, ends most collaborations and rebrands under Corsair"

ultrahax — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:15:44 +0000

Same; typing this on the same Drop CTRL keyboard I got when it launched.

New comment by ultrahax in "Running Tesla Model 3's computer on my desk using parts from crashed cars"

ultrahax — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 22:08:08 +0000

My first job out of university was at IBM wrangling a prototype some research PHDs had written into a shipping product, and.. yeah, this tracks.

New comment by ultrahax in "Hackers (1995) Animated Experience"

ultrahax — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 21:44:21 +0000

12 year old me watched this movie and immediately went out and bought colored floppy disks so I too could hack the planet. Simpler times.

New comment by ultrahax in "Heathrow scraps liquid container limit"

ultrahax — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 17:49:22 +0000

Only time I have ever been shouted at by personnel in an airport was at JFK.

New comment by ultrahax in "SIMD City: Auto-Vectorisation"

ultrahax — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 09:53:22 +0000

Us video game folks are big fans of LTO, PGO, FDO, etc.

New comment by ultrahax in "A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure"

ultrahax — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 18:04:41 +0000

Related, to this day my Frontier connection black holes all my traffic a couple of hops inside their network if I do sustained line-rate UDP (WireGuard, for example) for more then three or four minutes. After some LinkedIn sleuthing I got in touch with their local NOC director who tells me it’s some piece of gear that hangs so bad he can’t remote into it and it stays down until the watchdog fires. Been that way for two years now.

New comment by ultrahax in "The Byte Order Fallacy"

ultrahax — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 21:48:12 +0000

As a games coder I was glad when the xbox 360 / ps3 era came to an end; getting big endian clients talking to little endian servers was an endless source of bugs.

New comment by ultrahax in "Intel confirms oxidation and excessive voltage in 13th and 14th Gen CPUs [video]"

ultrahax — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 02:08:24 +0000

I had a watercooled 5950x up and die on me recently after 3 years. AMD RMA’d it without argument.

New comment by ultrahax in "Increasing QUIC and UDP Throughput over Tailscale"

ultrahax — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 00:56:13 +0000

Tangentially, I've faced some interesting challenges getting a multi-gigabit Wireguard VPN operating through my 2Gb Frontier connection.

My UDM Pro seems to top out around ~800mbit per UDP stream - pegged at 100% CPU on a single core. Likely it can't keep up with the interrupt rate, given it's ksoftirqd pegging it. Replaced UDM Pro with a pfsense machine.

Then I started getting 100% packet loss on the edge of Frontier's network after a couple of minutes of sustained UDP near-line-rate throughput. In the end, after trying and failing to explain this to Frontier's tech support, I reached out to their engineering management on LinkedIn, and got put in touch with the local NOC director. Turns out to be some intermediate hop is rebooting after a few mins, and they're "in contact with the manufacturer". Haven't heard back in a few months.

tldr as >1Gb connections become more ubiquitous, other bottlenecks will become apparent!

New comment by ultrahax in "Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts"

ultrahax — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 08:30:32 +0000

Citibank did this to me. Venmo'd my architect for some work he was going on my house, kablammo, account closed, no notice. Was just lucky it was an account set up specifically for work on that house and not my that's-where-my-paycheck-goes account.

New comment by ultrahax in "Why many scientists are now saying climate change is an all-out 'emergency'"

ultrahax — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 17:10:29 +0000

Hi Rob! Miss the DW days. Hope you’re well.

New comment by ultrahax in "Exploring the Halo 1 System Link Protocol"

ultrahax — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 04:26:10 +0000

I've had many an adventure with secure gateways on varied xenon Call of Duty games. Nice to meet the person behind them!

New comment by ultrahax in "NASA has reestablished full communications with Voyager 2"

ultrahax — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 16:04:30 +0000

“The Farthest” by PBS has interviews with the people who built the probes, it’s a pretty great watch https://www.pbs.org/the-farthest/

New comment by ultrahax in "Raytheon asks retirees for help making new Stinger anti-air missiles"

ultrahax — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 16:35:18 +0000

“Physics package” is usually a phrase meaning the explodey bits of a nuclear weapon, so that lines up.

New comment by ultrahax in "Scaling Databases at Activision [pdf]"

ultrahax — Sat, 22 Apr 2023 00:23:45 +0000

I have to be careful what I say here, given I work for ATVI, I'm former Demonware myself.

I do feel safe in saying though that the login queues are _definitely_ not hype.

They're designed to constrain a quite-complex distributed system to a login rate that has been load-tested thoroughly, e.g. they know it'll work at that rate.

New comment by ultrahax in "Scaling Databases at Activision [pdf]"

ultrahax — Sat, 22 Apr 2023 00:20:20 +0000

They handle online services for pretty much any Activision-published game, with carve-outs for Blizzard and King - they still do most of their own backend stuff themselves, with some collaborations.

New comment by ultrahax in "Counter-Strike 2 – Limited Test for select CS:GO players"

ultrahax — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 00:51:25 +0000

I’m not sure your information wrt Call Of Duty is correct.

To my knowledge, the client timestamps their inputs and sends them to the server; the server will then rewind the state of the world to the time of the input before applying it. RTT isn’t an input. Each snapshot from the server includes the server world timestamp of that snapshot; the client will gently lerp its clock to match this per frame.

Source - I’m a COD engine developer the last ~15 years or so.

New comment by ultrahax in "Ask HN: Small scripts, hacks and automations you're proud of?"

ultrahax — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 03:50:04 +0000

When I worked at IBM circa ~2006 you'd get a written warning called a clean desk violation if you left your workstation unlocked.

I wrote a little daemon that'd l2ping my Nokia brick phone; if it didn't get a response for 30 seconds it'd invoke xscreensaver. Saved me a lot of paperwork.

I currently work at a Call of Duty studio. My favorite hacks ( not super high tech, but the ones that had the most impact for the least code, and the ones I feel I can talk about.. ):

* Put together a little box that polls varied knobs on a USB midi device to mangle the traffic going across its two interfaces. Allows for real time latency / jitter / packet loss testing https://twitter.com/ultrahax/status/1200902654882242562

* Studio LAN game browser didn't work across subnet boundaries ( studio is a couple of class B's ). Wrote a little daemon that'd take game discovery packets from one subnet, mangle the src addr, and send it on its merry way. Everyone can see everyone's games, happy producers.

New comment by ultrahax in "Tesla video promoting self-driving was staged, engineer testifies"

ultrahax — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 00:29:04 +0000

Tesla owner here ( 2019 Model 3P, including paying for the "full self driving" ).

I wish Tesla hadn't gone whole-hog after full self driving, and had just concentrated on making a Better Car.

New comment by ultrahax in "Fail-slow at scale: Evidence of performance faults in large systems (2018)"

ultrahax — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 05:36:35 +0000

I've seen this first hand, across datacenter providers. The most common one is some sort of power supply failure that causes the CPUs to under-volt and throttle; the machine won't go down entirely, the clock will just go through the floor. It's common enough we set up alerting to watch for it specifically.