Unfortunately this new thread was posted while I was asleep, and so I haven't been online to answer questions as the thread developed. Whereas in the previous thread I participated from the start.
Pro tip to anyone whose stuff gets posted on HN: It is a completely different place when the author is present.
If you're present, then the people who are inclined to post cheap criticisms shy away, and the people who want to ask questions and learn show up.
(Aside from the house, I've had my work at Cloudflare posted many times, and seen this pattern in those posts.)
rpdillon 1 hours ago [-]
I can tell the world is getting squeezed. This has been posted to HN several times in the past 20 years, and it usually receives a great reception because of the hacker ethos involved, the love of lan parties, and the success in tech. It's just cool as hell.
This is the first time it's been posted where most of the comments appear to be resentment that you could afford to do the project at all. Money isn't the point: some people have it and some people don't, and that can change over time. What's interesting is how you use the money. And in this case, designing a living space around hosting lan parties is a really interesting hack! I like the fold-away keyboard monitor setups especially.
You didn't have to write about any of it, and yet you did, and you keep the post up, and it continues to be something interesting to discuss. So thank you!
ryandrake 2 minutes ago [-]
> This is the first time it's been posted where most of the comments appear to be resentment that you could afford to do the project at all.
Despite the negativity, I'm glad that we can at least talk about the topic of wealth and privilege on HN now, rather than comments pointing it out being flag/voted down into oblivion. I don't harbor any resentment about OP's home/project, but I can totally understand the resentment from others, especially in these times, and it at the very least deserves to be mentioned.
throwitaway222 57 minutes ago [-]
I feel bad. I posted a negative comment (under a different user name) one of the other times this was posted. I was in a bad spot in my life - still am, but I'm getting better.
jmuguy 3 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry so many people are hating on your house. I guess I could understand it if someone was showing off their yacht, because this isn't a boat owners forum, but a lan party house ought to be right up HN's alley. I think its awesome, and impressive yall have maintained friendships like that for so long. Some of my best memories are from the LAN parties of decades ago. Although some of the fun was in the amount of friction, like manually assigning IPs. Or when everyone got the code red worm as soon as they joined the network. Just being able to walk into something like this would literally have blown our minds back then.
onionisafruit 2 hours ago [-]
If someone wants to post a lan party yacht, I’m here for that too
kentonv 1 hours ago [-]
Hmmmmm.....
Just kidding. Gotta say I never understood the appeal of yachts. What does a yacht give you that a fancy house doesn't? It's on the water? So what? It's not like it goes fast enough to be a worthwhile form of transportation...
I do totally get private jets. They are fancy, but also get you somewhere. LAN party jet? That'd be a cool way to pass a long flight. Hey guys let's LAN party to Tokyo!
(I do not expect I'll ever have private jet money. Please don't eat me.)
bityard 3 minutes ago [-]
Heh. Nothing else says, "I have so much money that I literally don't have to care about anything ever again," than spending millions on a big-ass boat to go partying on and snort everclear or whatever it is that the ultra-rich get up to these days.
bluGill 39 minutes ago [-]
You can go swimming anytime you want to. They are slow, but you get to choose when you leave and where you go.
Most yacht owners don't live on them full time. (they may have a paid crew that does) they take them for vacations. They are not really transportation even though they often will go to multiple close destinations.
kentonv 17 minutes ago [-]
I just feel like, the whole point of travelling is to experience different environments. Isn't it more fun to stay in a different fancy hotel every time, than to be in your same old yacht you've been in many times before?
I'm also confused about people who own many vacation houses. Why not just rent a different fancy house each time? Less expensive, less trouble, more variety, you can experience more places...
igleria 38 minutes ago [-]
yatch can get into international waters so anything goes? So in my mind if someone owns a yatch they are into weird an illegal stuff 99% of the time.
throwayay4929 1 hours ago [-]
Awesome project!
My buddies and I do quarterly lan parties to play Q3, unreal tournament, tribes, l4d2, and a bunch of others stuff we find. We also bbq and hike. It's a great way to keep friend groups going!
throwitaway222 59 minutes ago [-]
It's almost like they stopped making good games in the last 10 years.... looks around - nice games you're playing!
throwayay4929 48 minutes ago [-]
Hahaha, yeah. It tells you about my age group for sure. But there are some new titles like RV Together that are pretty good too. We just don't have a ton of bandwidth to try new stuff too since it's usually 1 night every 2-4 months :-)
cowthulhu 2 hours ago [-]
I’m sorry your getting so much hate, this is a really cool and unique project.
sulam 2 hours ago [-]
I’m interested in the long DisplayPort and USB cables. I’d love to get my very loud gaming PC away from my quiet office and these would be just the trick. Thanks for making me aware that this is an option! Now I have to decide where I would want the holes in my walls. Any gotchas or are these really able to be treated as super long cables that still work?
ralferoo 2 hours ago [-]
I have a couple of 5M DisplayPort cables that I use to put my beefy work PC at one end of the room (and under a desk, between the wall on one side and stuff to the side of it on the other) while I sit at the other end of the room. I've also got a 5M USB3 active repeater with a 4-port hub for keyboard, mouse and the 2 monitors, and a game controller plugged into one of the monitors. I've been using it every working day for over 4 years now.
Very occasionally one of the monitor glitches out for about 5 seconds (maybe happens about once every 2-3 months), and they both seem to take much longer to wake up from the lock screen, again in the order of 5 seconds. Other than that had no problems whatsoever, and definitely the sound is much reduced. I only hear it at all when the GPU is maxxed out, and it's not unbearable like it is when it's right next to you. 4 years ago, the cables were £9 each for 5M DP M-M and £10 for the 5M active USB3 cable, but it's pretty cheap for the quality of life improvement.
kentonv 1 hours ago [-]
All the long cables are Monoprice.com "slim run" fiber optic cables.
The HDMI pretty much just works. Even at 8k resolution. Note that last I checked, Monoprice's DisplayPort cables (as opposed to HDMI) only supported an older standard and they don't handle 8k. Most of my monitors are 4k though, and the DisplayPort cables work fine for that.
USB can be finicky. Sometimes certain devices, or plugging and unplugging devices too much, can "crash" the USB cable, requiring a "reboot" by unplugging it and plugging it back in, from the computer end. But if you're just using a keyboard and mouse through it it's basically fine.
hostyle 1 hours ago [-]
Look into KVM extenders. Beware though that there are two main types - standard KVM Extenders (which is more or less point to point - you can't connect these to an existing wired network) and IP KVM Extenders (which can run across an existing ethernet or fibre network). Its get complicated but getting those two confused at the outset can lead to a lot of unnecessary pain and expense.
ropeadoge 47 seconds ago [-]
uh oh the baron is big mad
you are a good person!
mercanlIl 2 hours ago [-]
Thank you for posting the other thread, it's much more interesting to read through.
Your house is inspiring!
NoDodgeQuestion 3 hours ago [-]
The key is that the author is present, rather than people having different views on wealth over time?
kentonv 3 hours ago [-]
Views on wealth haven't changed.
The reactions to my first (much smaller) house in 2011 were very similar.
tristor 2 hours ago [-]
Every time I see this posted, I am tempted to do something similar but then I remember all the friends I used to have for LAN parties have moved different places across the country, so it'd get used at most once a year (we still have a yearly New Years LAN party). I think this is an awesome project though and I give you props not only for doing it, but maintaining relationships to make it useful.
Eridanus2 1 hours ago [-]
You rich. You give job. I clean.
aurels 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
kenty 6 hours ago [-]
> How much did this cost? The 22 game machines (including monitors, cables, and peripherals) cost about $75,000 in total. The house overall was a 7-digit number.
I needed like a minute to process this. These folks are privileged as hell. I understand that folks on HN are typically affluent but this is rich rich level.
oooyay 2 hours ago [-]
This is old tech money as I call it. People from the early 2000s and 2010s who owned a home in the Bay area back then through the pandemic. Most of these folks share a characteristic of not knowing how wealthy they are comparatively to new tech entrants or even those than entered in the 2010s.
Not to say anything negative of that, I think it's just a byproduct of the free wheeling and fast paced times back then, but if you're not prepared for it then it can rub you the wrong way sometimes.
xyzelement 5 hours ago [-]
Depending on where you live most cars you see on the road are in the ballpark. It costs about 40k to change the roof on a house around here.
So 75k is both objectively massive, and not.
I won't argue "privilege" but it seems like both people in the couple have been working for a long time and took equity bets that paid off.
Another way to look at it, in many tech jobs 75k could be a bonus (additional to salary an equity)
klardotsh 5 hours ago [-]
75k bonus? I’ve worked one job ever with a formal bonus structure at all. The annual target for that bonus was less than a third of that amount.
Sometimes I wonder if I work in the same tech industry as some of the other folks around here, but then, I guess I haven’t worked FAANG.
silversmith 5 hours ago [-]
You don't. I'd guess most of the developers don't. For example, my near 20 years of experience nets me a salary FAANG interns would find offensive. But in this part of the world it's "raise a family comfortably" money. In the end, it all depends on cost of living. And accepting you are not building 20 seat Lan party setup in your spare wing of the house.
PxldLtd 4 hours ago [-]
My salary literally doubled just working remote/hybrid for London companies around COVID. I much prefer the lifestyle now I work for a smaller company in Canterbury and get paid less for the role. Turns out all that extra travel and overtime ended up being materially worse for my quality of life. And my job is way more fun nowadays.
itake 5 hours ago [-]
He is relatively early at Cloudflare, joining via CF’s acquisition of his startup.
My understanding most Tier 1 employers are paying $700k-$1.5m usd per year in TC.
$75k is less than his tax bill.
Also the home is in Texas (I think). So lower cost square footage.
m4tthumphrey 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
afavour 5 hours ago [-]
Is it hate? Or is it just shock?
Tech does have a crazy variance in salary for people who are doing, broadly at least, the same jobs. I don’t see any hate here. Just surprise.
throwayay4929 4 hours ago [-]
The jobs are massively not the same. It's like saying the IT guy that's in charge of reimaging PCs at your municipal office is broadly doing the same job as the couple that built this lan house.
There are relatively large pockets of engineers making great money while coasting at a big company, but more often the engineers are actually doing a more complex job.
afavour 2 hours ago [-]
There is plenty of crossover. e.g. look at the salaries of an engineer at Netflix vs one at ABC/Disney that works on their streaming platform.
Netflix is operating at a higher technical level, no doubt. But the salaries can be something like 5x higher. Maybe all industries are like that but I’m not sure they are.
ryandrake 11 minutes ago [-]
It's the same shock/objection that's expressed at CEO salaries: Do we really think the engineer at Netflix who makes $1M/yr is really 10X more productive or adding 10X more value than the engineer at NoNameCo who makes $100k/yr? Or are people simply paid what each company is willing to pay them, without some kind of full-industry merit-based leveling system? In my view, pay has long since totally divorced from productivity and more closely tracks random chance of what company you ended up in, and who acquired who.
goosejuice 2 hours ago [-]
> There are relatively large pockets of engineers making great money while coasting at a big company, but more often the engineers are actually doing a more complex job.
I'd love to see some data on this though I don't know how you'd measure it. I suspect a high percentage of west coast FAANG level jobs are low impact but also low complexity. I do figure people work more hours though. With scale comes new problems but also a lot of infrastructure and support around it.
It's pretty silly to use IT guy when there's loads of software devs working on complex stuff for critical infrastructure making less than 200k.
itake 4 hours ago [-]
Probably some confusion here.
IT (outside of the USA) typically means Software Engineer, but in the USA the context is as you described.
I don’t know where they are located, but they might be talking about what you would call software engineering.
massiveturd 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
itake 5 hours ago [-]
I don’t get the hate tho? Is this a covet thy neighbor situation?
unrented7977 5 hours ago [-]
There's growing popular sentiment that being a millionaire/billionaire at all is morally repugnant and antisocial behavior that deserves to be shunned, if not punished.
xyzelement 3 hours ago [-]
Yes but is it healthy.
If a kid graduated with comp sci degree in 2000, joined decent companies as a w2 employee, does he become "repugnant" and "deserves to be shunned if not punished" the moment his net worth crosses 1m, which may happen within a few years of graduation?
Or does he need to "marinade" a few years as a millionaire before we roll out the guillotine?
If he joined a worse company (or slacked and didn't get promoted) and hadn't become a millionaire, does he avoid the repugnancy and punishment?
What if he did make the money but blew on stupidity, does that also avoid that classification?
Symbiote 4 hours ago [-]
One year after we graduated, the guy I'd shared a flat with in London got a £30,000 bonus from the small fin-tech company he worked at.
But the more stressful work, and the idea that I'd be working to trade stock a few nanoseconds faster than the competition, didn't not appeal.
baobabKoodaa 4 hours ago [-]
The last tech job I worked at which had a bonus structure had the bonus amount set at 100 euros (not a typo).
weakfish 5 hours ago [-]
> most cars are in the ballpark
If you’re in the Bay, maybe, otherwise it’s $35-50k depending on how new
xyzelement 4 hours ago [-]
That's why I wrote "depending on where you are"
pooloo 4 hours ago [-]
Brand new cars, yes, most people are NOT buying brand new that is another privilege.
idiotsecant 3 hours ago [-]
There is no argument from which this can be minimized. Even in an incredibly rich country like the US this is an enormous expense. You're looking at this from the top of a field that is already at the top of the economic pyramid which is in turn at the top of a global economic pyramid.
This is excess on a scale that is essentially laughable for the entire human race, minus some statistically insignificant population.
sorenjan 6 hours ago [-]
He spent more on gaming computers than my yearly salary, and then follows it up with
> I actually find it funny how cheap computers are.
kentonv 3 hours ago [-]
If you read it in context, I am making a comparison between computers and cabinetry, and noting how absurd it is that the technological marvel that is a computer costs a similar amount of money to the cabinet holding it, which is just some wood and hinges. One would almost expect the computer to cost millions of dollars, but instead it costs thousands.
Maybe "cheap" was a poor choice of word for this. Sorry.
ropeadoge 2 minutes ago [-]
"Sorry"
sorenjan 2 hours ago [-]
I get what you mean, the marvels of modern mass production and logistics impress me too, but those cabinets costs as much as a small house in some places so it still comes across as rich people musings. And for the record I'm not poor, I'm just a European engineer.
Congrats on all your success though, good to see you're enjoying it with friends.
thenthenthen 19 minutes ago [-]
He spend more than 10 yearly salaries of me. Why not get 20 junk computers and lan party classics or opensource incarnations?
remuskaos 3 hours ago [-]
And then it's - objectively! - not even true. That amounts to 3750 per computer. For a 4070, that's insanely expensive. You can get decent gaming pc with this card for less than a thrid of that, even in 2024.
I mean I have to admit this house looks live every geeks dream, but come on... Seven figure house price... In my country, most people don't make that much money in their entire working life. I do mean that literally, let's take "seven figure" as 4.5M. Evenly divided by 40 working years, that's 112.5k a year. That's almost double the median income. And I live in Germany, a nation that's considered rich.
kentonv 45 minutes ago [-]
FWIW, the 4070 was $600 at the time. You could indeed build a great gaming machine around a 4070 at much lower cost, but a few things inflated the price for me:
* I included the fairly nice 4k monitors ($750) in the price.
* The motherboards were stupidly expensive ($450) since I wanted something with 10G networking onboard, to support the netboot setup.
* The super-long fiber optic HDMI and USB cables are on the order of $150 each (and each computer needs one of each).
* Rackmount gear, which is stupidly expensive when purchased retail. (Datacenters obviously don't buy this stuff retail, so it's a weird market.)
* I think I included the networking gear and some other not-per-machine stuff in the figure. My spreadsheet from the time shows $3,067.64 per machine before tax.
(I am not trying to make any particular point here, just providing data for those who are curious.)
Jommi 5 hours ago [-]
This is from (2024) fyi
pooloo 4 hours ago [-]
Still not cheap... even in 2024 GPUs were very inflated. The GTX 970 was around 350 at launch in 2014, and in 2024 was 650-ish.
birksherty 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, this line made me angry. Privileged people from first world countries like these will increase their products prices for growth & more profit saying it's very cheap anyways.
Meanwhile common people in other countries can't even think about buying a proper gaming PC now. I bought a pre owned gpu, it stopped working after 5 months and I lost my savings.
mkirsten 5 hours ago [-]
I see and also had some immediate reaction when somebody mentions a $75k figure and says “cheap”.
But I think the point really here is that computers are cheap in relation to other items you can buy. Not cheap as in “small part of my wealth”, but as in “about equally much money as something that is not as impressive (as a computer)”.
And I really agree. I think it’s amazing that I can get eg a computer I find fast for the price of a kind of bad sofa. 2nd hand MacBook M1 vs dinner for 4 at a nice restaurant.
Computers are cheap!
collabs 5 hours ago [-]
It was cheaper than it is now after the AI stuff. I don't think people buying and using computers makes them expensive. Your anger is misplaced.
Be angry instead at companies who won't even comply with the most ridiculously basic laws. They are the ones causing all those problems.
He is an American so 'first world' is kind of debatable now with Trump. /s
iluvcommunism 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
rpdillon 1 hours ago [-]
Kenton worked at Google and was instrumental in building capn' proto and protocol buffers and then went to Cloudflare and did huge amounts of infrastructure work there. I wouldn't compare Kenton to a typical dev.
mpeg 5 hours ago [-]
I recognised Kenton from his profile pic, he’s definitely doing well but also is a terrific principal engineer, and still somehow finds the time to answer questions on discord, I’ve had chats with him about DOs even though my spend on the cf platform is ridiculously low
imjonse 4 hours ago [-]
From the Q&A:
"Why did you move to Austin?
[...] needed a bigger house, but we really could not afford to buy (much less build) anything bigger in Palo Alto."
So there are a few more levels of richness above
fuzzfactor 2 hours ago [-]
Many more.
They may be due for a big inheritance but depending on age it probably hasn't happened yet. This looks more like an indulgence that was paid for from the work the couple has done by focusing their earnings over a fairly long period of time.
If they were ultra-privileged they would have been destined to arrive at the same place since birth without having to make any effort of their own at all.
And they would have other homes in places like Telluride, Paris, Milan, and Montreaux that are over-the-top in a purely domestic way without any need for digital extravagance, since they've got that right here in Austin whenever they want. Even if it was only a month or two out of the year ;)
That's something so many people envy or truly dislike even worse, but I admire this effort.
zaken 3 hours ago [-]
This seems like standard well off bay area family to me TBH... Houses in Cupertino cost $3,000,000 (7 figures), and the owners drive around a pair of $75,000 Teslas.
tecoholic 5 hours ago [-]
I think they are more lucky than privileged. Multiple IPO stock options, both well educated and high paying jobs and shared interests. They seem to have hit right timings multiple times. Things compound.
xyzelement 5 hours ago [-]
Do you think there's any good decision making and hard work involved too, or just pure dumb luck?
tecoholic 5 hours ago [-]
I think they are smart enough to take advantage of things. Hard work or not doesn’t matter. For example, assessing that their home in California is worth way more than they make out of it and seeking out a cheaper place to convert that “luck” into profit is definitely their smarts and not privilege.
AdamN 4 hours ago [-]
both. And it's important to remember that. Luck being a main force (which is really true for almost any outcome good or bad). The other forces being talent and labor.
bluGill 3 hours ago [-]
Both. Everybody gets good and bad luck, nothing you can do about that. However hard work will make a major difference in the outcome. His good luck was in large part only possible because of working for the right company at least hard enough to not get fired. (a different post says he is a principal engineer which implies a lot of hard work to get - edit: also good luck that someone else wasn't also working that hard and got selected, but second to principal engineer is probably still a good income)
idiotsecant 3 hours ago [-]
The world is absolutely packed with incredibly hard working people who make excellent decisions and die like a dog of a preventable disease in a slum somewhere.
Yes, luck. Hard work is table stakes. It is necessary but wholely insufficient. We shouldn't make the mistake of over-attributing our successes to hard work and ignore the massive social and economic advantages that let us capitalize on the work we do. Everyone else works hard too, they just don't get to reap the benefits of that labor.
sgarland 55 minutes ago [-]
I agree. I grew up poor, was accepted to every college I applied to, but couldn’t afford any of them so I joined the Navy instead.
10 years later, after a brief stint as an Electrical Distribution Engineer, Samsung hired me because one of their Directors at their Austin plant was specifically seeking out Navy Nuclear-trained Electronics Technician senior leaders — pure luck. While I was there, working nights on a 4/3 - 3/4 schedule, I got into UT Austin’s SWE MS program. That was hard work, and those 2 years are largely a blur. My wife also pulled more than her fair share of work taking care of our extremely young kids, lest I claim I was the I only one working hard.
After that, I convinced a hiring manager that I could do SRE work despite having zero industry experience, because I explained how I had done most of their job description at home. That was a mix of hard work and luck, I guess? Then it’s like any other industry: if you have experience, you can get interviews.
Meanwhile, I have family on both sides who have worked much harder than I have, and have far less to show for it. Tech pays absurdly well in many sectors, and I think people often forget that on here.
rpdillon 1 hours ago [-]
I agree with your core point that luck is necessary, but thinking that everybody works hard is simply fiction.
mkirsten 5 hours ago [-]
And luck creates privilege!
m4tthumphrey 5 hours ago [-]
100%. It's hard work and good luck/timing, not privilege.
vachina 4 hours ago [-]
The dad is an architect. So probably rich enough to afford (good) education and putting Kenton in the right place at the right time.
kentonv 2 hours ago [-]
My dad was able to pay for me to attend the University of Minnesota.
More importantly though was that my parents fed my childhood fascination with computers, making sure I had the opportunity to learn to code early (a volunteer at my school taught me BASIC at age 8; my parents bought me a PC so I could continue experimenting) and then they gave me a lot of free time to spend building things and learning. After I graduated my mom let me spend a couple more years in her basement just working on open source software projects. These are certainly privileges that wouldn't be possible if my dad didn't have comfortable income.
I got into Google by applying on the web site and showing them my projects.
sampullman 5 hours ago [-]
Can't rule out privilege without knowing a bit more background. Most people work hard, it increases the odds of success but isn't necessary.
pooloo 3 hours ago [-]
Cant always say its hardwork... As a people observer there seems to be a lot of people coasting, or doing as little as possible, and yet get promoted, or they get into really high paying positions. This is far more common in larger corporations, where the visibility is lower.
In smaller companies the people are definitely worth their weight in gold as if they are not doing the work its very visible.
Yeah, I am jealous, but such is life...
mcmcmc 3 hours ago [-]
Straight white males are famously lacking in privilege /s
Toutouxc 5 hours ago [-]
> the original LAN house was not very big: 1400 sqft. This made for a pretty awesome bachelor pad, but would have been a bit cramped for raising a family.
That’s 130 m^2. A fucking bachelor pad.
Kirby64 3 hours ago [-]
1400sqft is relatively small in the US for a house. Typical 3 bedroom house size is going to be a lot closer to 2000 sqft.
The only way you would see new construction at 1400sqft is if it’s a condo or something.
Toutouxc 2 hours ago [-]
Are people that much larger in the US? I’d happily raise three European-sized kids in the 130 sqm bachelor pad.
Kirby64 2 hours ago [-]
Larger? No, not really. But there’s generally just an expectation that rooms are larger. Most bedrooms you expect to have king size beds for adults, for instance. Master bathrooms and closets also tend to be quite large. Americans just tend to have a lot of stuff…
sgarland 49 minutes ago [-]
Houses are also often poorly laid out. I’m not sure if it’s a side effect of open concept, or cheap builders, but it’s definitely a thing. I toured a new build community north of Austin once that mostly had < 2000 sf homes, and they felt spacious, because the layouts were excellent. In contrast, the house we wound up getting was 2600 sf but felt roughly the same to me, because the layout was just “make square rooms.” The primary bedroom was 400 sf, for crying out loud. We put a couch in there we never used, just to fill some of the space.
Kirby64 33 minutes ago [-]
Absolutely true. The other thing inflating the square footage is condos or other space-constrained floor plans tend to waste a lot of space on hallways and stairways. Since you count the square footage of hallways and stairways, a 3 story condo could feel somewhat cramped for a 3 bedroom despite being on paper 2400+ sqft. Could easily be 500+sqft wasted.
I toured a 2600 sqft 3 story condo ages ago (happened to live nearby and was curious during their open house) that felt quite cramped and 'railroad' style, purely because it just had to be 'narrow' due to the lot size and had to waste a bunch of space.
pizzafeelsright 2 hours ago [-]
I have had the privilege of growing up very poor while working for and being around the rich and wealthy.
I grew up in a 700sqft home and now own a 1400sqft house and my friend is building a custom 4000sqft house. They both feel 'small' for different reasons.
The very rich I know have 2 or 3 homes, each >3000sqft.
The most wealthy people I know have a modest house on as many acres as they can get because no neighbors and gardens and horses and tractors are where the life is at.
The fish bowl theory is we grow to our environment. Look at the billionaires and their yachts, it is never enough.
Contentment must be learned. I am beyond content now while I could afford a house 2x the size.
jorvi 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, the whole post just screams / drips of extreme privilege.
4 hours ago [-]
gambiting 3 hours ago [-]
It's insane. My current 3 bed house where I live with my wife and 2 kids is 900sqft, and we're not exactly short on space. The idea that 1400 would be "a bit cramped for raising a family" just doesn't compute - unless your family has 7 kids or something?
milindsmart 3 hours ago [-]
You're right in an absolute sense, but trust me its easy to get used to a much larger space than that. And I can attest that in my world people don't stop aspiring for larger spaces until the space per person is much higher than what you've quoted.
someguynamedq 59 minutes ago [-]
Where do you eat meals?
gambiting 31 minutes ago [-]
At the table in the living room?
adamtaylor_13 5 hours ago [-]
Who cares? They got lucky or worked hard or whatever. Congrats to them. Their success does not make your life worse.
haunter 4 hours ago [-]
> Their success does not make your life worse
Debatable
pjc50 3 hours ago [-]
Guy building a lan party house is extremely harmless behavior, and has probably employed a number of local trades.
The spectrum of rich person crank behavior has got a lot worse these days, going all the way up to "buying Twitter".
mschuster91 2 hours ago [-]
> The spectrum of rich person crank behavior has got a lot worse these days, going all the way up to "buying Twitter".
And even that pales in comparison to running for President thrice and winning it twice just to settle an imagined score with Barack Obama for a well-deserved roast [1] and rip apart everything bearing his name.
If the people who cry about the rich spent 15% of their time minding their own business and focusing on their own success, they'd actually be successful.
Somehow those who cry nonstop about the rich are even more insufferable than the rich.
haunter 4 hours ago [-]
I mean the guy is coming from Google so they actually made the world worse.
kentonv 4 minutes ago [-]
This may be hard to remember but in 2005 (when I joined Google), everyone pretty much universally loved them and thought they were making the world better. I left in 2013, in part because the company was gradually turning into something different.
adamtaylor_13 4 hours ago [-]
Ahh yes. The old "because they were within 10 feet of evil, they are evil." He didn't single-handedly stop Google, so he's guilty of perpetrating the evil himself, right?
Go on, next you'll tell me about how your hands are clean. You've never so much as touched a product that made someone's life worse.
tikimcfee 3 hours ago [-]
Being complicit in feeding a malicious whale is often just as bad as being the malicious whale. When 1000 people all thing "I'm not doing that many objectively bad things at this company," that's 1000 workers under 1 tiny group's control deciding the destinies and "luck" of millions. It's obfuscation of power and responsibility, and I think people "in tech" need to realize this and accept it more than they do right now.
If you work for Google, for Apple, for Amazon - if you derive a payment from The Whale and in turn the whale continues to thrive in some way because of your work, you are complicit. Whether or not you or society is ok with it is the problem to discuss.
rglullis 3 hours ago [-]
He didn't have to stop Google from doing evil, but he could've refused to have his fortune coming from there.
> Go on, next you'll tell me about how your hands are clean.
They are as clean as they can be, which is a lot more that can be said from anyone who works at any FAANG (or Wall Street, or Big Oil...)
No one has been forced to work for Big Tech. No one ever said "I only took those $300k/year salary with those huge RSUs from Facebook because I couldn't find any other way to provide for my family" or "It was either working for OpenAI or washing dishes at an Olive Garden".
mock-possum 45 minutes ago [-]
“Just following orders” eh?
mcmcmc 3 hours ago [-]
If you work at the orphan killing factory and your job is just to mop up the blood (you would never hurt kids) that makes you innocent right?
3 hours ago [-]
4 hours ago [-]
kubb 3 hours ago [-]
This is an underrated property of wealth accumulation: beyond a certain point money doesn’t cover useful things, but vanity projects, and is being wasted.
The typical cliches in this subject are that nobody can decide what’s worthwhile or not so we have to let the people with accumulation decide and that it stimulates the economy, no matter what kind of spending it is.
Claude can point out the flaws in those arguments fairly easily by now.
fc417fc802 2 hours ago [-]
This has to be some sort of record. Not only did you set up a strawman to facilitate a shallow dismissal, rather than tilting at it yourself you simply assured us that AI is capable of shredding it. Somehow you've managed an even more offensive variant of the "condescendingly hand out a reading assignment to strangers" trope.
glitchc 3 hours ago [-]
That's good for the economy. Vanity projects help the wealth spread around. Think of all the people who received income by working on this house. It's a much bigger problem when wealth is hoarded.
kubb 3 hours ago [-]
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peddling-brink 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah well my llm said the opposite, so this is obviously untrue.
Also, my llm can beat up your llm.
rpdillon 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I don't think building a house dedicated to LAN parties is a waste of money at all: it provides a substantial benefit for those that get to use it!
jebarker 2 hours ago [-]
> and is being wasted
Why is this use of their money a waste?
throwayay4929 1 hours ago [-]
You don't get to decide whats useful and what's not useful for other people. It's extremely disrespectful. I'm sure you'd hate it if someone were to look at your life and label parts of it that way.
sailfast 4 hours ago [-]
The author goes through this in great detail with some humility in the FAQ.
It’s rich, yes. And the author acknowledges that. Still a cool build!
thenoblesunfish 5 hours ago [-]
They are rich. But then again plenty of people have multi-million dollar homes. I am sure there are some in your city. In some cities a million dollar home is becoming a normal price. Many people have hobbies and pastimes that they spend many tens of thousands of dollars on. Think about boats. Or how much some hotels and resorts, full of people, cost. These people are, again, rich, but so are millions of other people who don't tell you the details on the internet.
3 hours ago [-]
roenxi 5 hours ago [-]
> I needed like a minute to process this.
Something like 1 person in 15 in the US is a millionaire, and a million dollar house + some LAN gear should be well within reach of a millionaire. Obviously they're a comfortable distance from poor but we're not talking unattainable wealth on display here.
jms703 4 hours ago [-]
Or they just cashed in some stock options.
larodi 4 hours ago [-]
> These folks are privileged as hell.
Wonder how a seven-figure house would make feel an engineer/hacker/mind-hacker (which neuroscientists are) from Kenya or perhaps Ukraine, Russia, Nigeria, Malaysia, etc. No offense, but if that whole project was made by refurbished stuff, it would've meant more to hackers and to me personally.
In its current form - it means a massive showoff of power, and the location being Texas adds on top. This is luxury on a level that 99% of population would most likely never achieve in their lives, and hacking/gaming should be universally accepted and loved if it is meant to be a uniting factor.
sitzkrieg 2 hours ago [-]
the amount of people pretending this post is anything but rich rich level of spending is staggering
5 hours ago [-]
cma 2 hours ago [-]
If ever there was a case for cloud gaming.. However these days those machines may be appreciating assets.
m4tthumphrey 5 hours ago [-]
I really didn't expect this to be the take on HN...
- He's been in big (huge) tech since 2005
- She is an angel investor
- Moved to Austin
...
Does privileged just mean wealthy/successful now?
tikimcfee 5 hours ago [-]
That's... that's all it's ever meant? Since when had wealthy/successful not afforded privilege?
I think the point is that posts like this are becoming a sour taste for a greater ratio of humans because of the increase ratio of disparity in global wealth/success.
I don't begrudge someone their enjoyment and livelihoods and I'm a fan of DDR and lan parties like every good nerd.
But please don't pretend or be ignorant of the idea that there are many more people in the world now that can both see this and likely never attain it despite "hard work" or "good investments".
m4tthumphrey 5 hours ago [-]
> But please don't pretend or be ignorant of the idea that there are many more people in the world now that can both see this and likely never attain it despite "hard work" or "good investments".
Of course - I am one of them - but I can still appreciate the project.
Edit: To add, I would probably refer to this purely as hard work, good investments AND lots of good luck and timing, as opposed to privilege.
tikimcfee 4 hours ago [-]
Cool, and I think I came off sounding accusatory - that's from a place of misplaced attribution that you're not the right target for.
I too would love to have been a part of building this, or of course "having" something like this; aspiration to bigger things is sometimes legitimately what brings drives someone an extra step further than they thought they could.
abanana 4 hours ago [-]
Regarding investments, I can't believe how often people fail to understand that to make money by investing, you have to have money to invest in the first place! Getting rich by investing is a way to turn a small fortune into a bigger one. It's not a way to make a fortune in the first place.
They both came from wealthy families. Of course they worked hard and applied themselves fully, without ever having money worries to distract them. But let's not perpetuate that cliché that it's purely down to "hard work", like the trope from rich people's self-marketing autobiographies. "It's all down to my hard work, nothing to do with my rich family, really, nobody works as hard as me"! People all over the world work very very hard, some much harder than these people, and don't have the privilege of wealthy families to fall back on.
To clarify: correcting and clarifying isn't begrudging or complaining. Same for those of us who know we won't attain it because we don't have that privilege. They enjoy it, good luck to them.
tikimcfee 4 hours ago [-]
Yes indeed. I realize that the way I posed my response was as if I was angry at the person or people and not the last bit there about privilege.
I am quite joyous that the things I like to build and play with are also something aspirational and "exist" in bigger, cooler variants out there in the world. Seeing Space, so to speak, stirs the imagination and drives people in amazing ways sometimes.
It's the unfortunate mechanisms of the world and society and politics and business that partition this in uneven ways that hurts much more. I've met a lot of those very hard working people you describe I think, many times more over than myself in ways I sometimes find hard to admit. But that's what makes it emotionally poignant for me: we're both working hard, have visions, and neither have enough gas to get to the end of the road.
To wit: I can't afford to pay a professional team to design a product around my technology toys, and that likely precludes me in this particular decade from ever making it into something that would "make money" or "become useful" to more than myself. I'd need the "privilege" of living in a city or state where technologically capable people could spend their time talking about software tools and problems with me, and not living between jobs and family demands where that spare time simple can't be afforded. The trap of poverty, as insidious as it is. Someone with disposable income the size of my salary can toss that at a team for a month or two and end up with a shape that quickly evolves into their idea without a second thought.
My struggle - evident in my responses - is not feeling personally affronted when I know it's a nature of the world right now, and that doing what I think as "the right thing" sometimes means being pointed or unyielding in my beliefs. I'm still working on directing that into meaningful discourse.
jebarker 2 hours ago [-]
> That's... that's all it's ever meant?
Per the dictionary, perhaps. But when people use it online they rarely mean it as a neutral statement about someone’s level of wealth. It’s typically meant to imply unfairness or that the wealth was obtained through unearned advantage.
throwayay4929 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, HN today is not the same HN as 10 years ago. A lot more Foucault, a lot less Paul Graham.
pjc50 3 hours ago [-]
Back in 2005 (and indeed all the way back to the first boom in the late 90s), people were a lot more optimistic that they'd be able to participate in the boom with a good idea and some hard work.
The mood has soured with enshittification, frauds, and the general toxicity of social media.
veeti 5 hours ago [-]
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DarmokTanagra 6 hours ago [-]
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naikrovek 6 hours ago [-]
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iwontberude 2 hours ago [-]
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lucasacosta_ 6 minutes ago [-]
I hope I didn't get deceived, but this was such a human-non-ai read!! It was wonderful to get to know the history which I would think you wrote yourself!
Much appreciated, thanks for sharing! Really!
pringk02 7 hours ago [-]
I'm not usually one to comment on other people's home decor but this house looks like living inside a generic office building. The board game room looks like somewhere you'd have a conference call. I'm somewhat fascinated. I can't imagine choosing to make your living space look like this willingly. And yet they have! So they must enjoy it and it must feel like home to them.
jasode 6 hours ago [-]
>The board game room looks like somewhere you'd have a conference call.
The author literally labeled that room the "Upstairs Office".
The rest of the house (kitchen, family room, etc) that's not dedicated to LAN computers looks like a normal Euro/Scandinavian type of clean minimalism aesthetic which a lot of people like.
My home currently has a lot of "traditional" style furniture and decorations hanging on the walls which some might call "warm & cozy". But others would disagree and think of it as "grandma's house" and as I've aged, I tend to agree. I'd like to eventually dial it back and redo the interior to be more minimalistic but I have other higher priorities than remodeling the house.
jmuguy 3 hours ago [-]
I think a lot of it is lighting - I imagine they have the "house lights" on for these photos. Turn the temperature down and it becomes a lot cozier. The normal parts of the house look great.
pringk02 2 hours ago [-]
I think you are correct about the lighting. It was seeing the kids bedroom that made me feel the most taken aback, but I think with some warmer light the effect would be less stark
venzaspa 5 hours ago [-]
It's funny because there's a comment about the cabinetry being expensive despite it just being a 'bunch of wood' but actually if they opted for the right wood panels instead of the standard veneered chipboard used in a lot of offices, it probably would have made the whole setup look a lot more homely. They probably do need a bit of colour and some items on the wall to break it up too.
Saying that, I'd live there in a heartbeat.
pringk02 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I can't claim I wouldn't live in it if given the chance (even if I'd redecorate). I think you are correct about the wood. If I reflect on it some amount of it is that everything looks like the same yellow laminate I am most used to seeing on office furniture, and have spent a bunch of time sat at. Maybe darker wood tones would completely change the effect this has on me
Gareth321 6 hours ago [-]
I guess I'm boring because I really like it :-/ Maybe some cozier lighting/plants could be nice in the LAN/party spaces. I think the bones are pretty good. Just needs some finishing touches.
usrme 7 hours ago [-]
Agreed. It's clear that the owners have considerable financial resources, but seemingly no one thought to hire an interior designer/architect to consider how the place looks or functions outside of the gaming aspect. If that's their style, then more power to them; it just seems incredibly generic and like wasted potential.
harvey9 5 hours ago [-]
I used to work for a firm that did custom homes for wealthy clients. Even when we paired them up with designers some of them just preferred a very plain appearance.
That said, I thought the games room with rows of hide-away PCs looked like a call centre or at best a 90s internet cafe.
It’s likely just his preference. My wife and I also rather like a relatively “IKEA” aesthetic so I think it’s just preference.
darkwater 7 hours ago [-]
If you read TFA you will see that the house was architected by his father, an accomplished architect.
asdfsa32 6 hours ago [-]
Did you look through the accomplishments? I don't mean to be crass but I like a bit of weight for "accomplished".
I mean, the American Express office looks like a track stop or mall you will find along the highway.
Nicook 1 hours ago [-]
You should really go visit the musical instrument museum if you ever have the opportunity. Just the shortlist of his stuff is pretty objectively impressive, dunno maybe I'm replying to some secret famous person's account shrug.
quietbritishjim 6 hours ago [-]
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
nvarsj 5 hours ago [-]
Reminds me a lot of big tech campus interior decoration. A lot of greys, neutral colors, very little color or personality.
Pretty much what you'd expect from techies that never really thought too hard about their living space beyond functionality.
I mean, I'm the same, so no judgement, but I did hire an interior decorator for my own place. Definitely worth the money and my house has all kinds of funky fun stuff and colors going on (on top of being 130 years old and super wonky everywhere, ha ha).
asdfsa32 6 hours ago [-]
The will to do and the power to do does not mean well to do.
5 hours ago [-]
7 hours ago [-]
jamiecurle 6 hours ago [-]
> The cabinetry is just a bunch of wood, cut into fairly large pieces. Maybe a few screws and hinges. Whereas the computers in total contain more than a trillion transistors, each of which had to be carefully etched in the right spot connected correctly to all the others. A trillion! That's 1,000,000,000,000!
Really cool house, but describing the cabinets as "bunch of wood, cut into fairly large pieces. Maybe a few screws and hinges" shows little understanding of what goes into building something like that.
It's hard to tell from the pics if the cabinets are made of sheet goods with veneer or solid boards glued into panels. But at the very least, the trees need to be grown, they need to be managed, they need to be felled, sent to processing for sheet goods, dried and milled for solid wood. Even then you've got to get everything cut to size and square, then build the cabinets with all the specific sizes, then finish them, transport to site and install everything and the trim.
It's two ends of the manufacturing scale. For transistors, you've got mass production at an impossibly difficult level of accuracy for a human and for cabinets you've got single production (at the install level) at very difficult level for a human.
But again, very, very cool house. I especially like the cat doors but not nearly half as much as I imagine the cat does.
Symbiote 4 hours ago [-]
I would equate the wooden cabinet to the PC's metal case — the ore must be mined, the metal extracted, etc etc.
Once you've done that, just add the computer chips.
asdfsa32 6 hours ago [-]
> Really cool house, but describing the cabinets as "bunch of wood, cut into fairly large pieces. Maybe a few screws and hinges" shows little understanding of what goes into building something like that.
I mean, the whole place looks like a cookie cutter office block. The lack of appreciation and want for good design goes far deeper.
literallyroy 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds like preference. I think it looks beautiful personally.
swiftcoder 9 hours ago [-]
God, imagine having a big enough friend group as an adult to justify an 18-gaming-PC LAN. These folks are doing something right
ssl-3 7 hours ago [-]
We had LAN parties like that once upon a time when we had a space that supported it.
Friends of friends would show up. Not everyone knew everyone else and this was fine. Cold drinks of every sort were available at the carry-out next door, and some would bring things to share. Donations were had for pizza or burgers (sometimes nowhere near enough donations, and sometimes more than plenty; it averaged OK). The social aspects of it really worked OK. Cleanup wasn't bad.
The biggest problem was that the first ~couple of hours were spent getting all of the PCs connected, updated, and working properly-enough.
By providing gaming stations, this dude has the big problem completely solved: All of these machines can be known to be on the same page when things start.
(The second-largest problem -- the smell -- is a different issue entirely. It usually ramped up pretty well by the time the first problem was approaching being solved.)
swiftcoder 4 hours ago [-]
> (The second-largest problem -- the smell -- is a different issue entirely. It usually ramped up pretty well by the time the first problem was approaching being solved.)
I'm guessing that's where his spending a shit ton on HVAC comes in...
xattt 3 hours ago [-]
From my humble experience that does not scratch the surface of this build, a heat-recovery ventilation unit does wonders.
cammikebrown 7 hours ago [-]
As a bartender, I have a bunch of friends, but none of them have the same night off!
vachina 4 hours ago [-]
When you’re well to do everyone wants to be your friend
senectus1 8 hours ago [-]
I... jeepers. I dont think i have enough friends for a 4 person LAN party in my adult life.
nerd life seems to get lonelier the older you get.
MrDresden 8 hours ago [-]
I can't speak to your situation, but I know that in mine the main blocker for a LAN party with adult friends wouldn't be a lack of interest nor lack of friends (though I don't have a giant pool, and can't even count 18 people I'd be able to even suggest such a thing to) it would be lack of time due to other life responsibilities, that tend to increase as we get older.
My solution has been to play boardgames remote using BoardgameArena[0].
I usually have 2x turn based games going with two separate groups along with a dedicated chat channel, and then do 1-2 live evening sessions over video call with other groups. But all setup to be flexible and made to fit with the constraints of adult life, so sometimes we play and sometimes we reschedule.
This is why it is perfect to have two brothers and a brother-in-law. We can at least get the four of us together to do something. Pretty sure we could manage 8-12 with friends, but none of our houses would be big enough.
dcminter 7 hours ago [-]
> it is perfect to have two brothers and a brother-in-law
This is difficult to arrange at short notice :)
swiftcoder 8 hours ago [-]
I'm more or less in your boat, but I also know several folks who play D&D or warhammer every weekend in big groups. It's kind of a choices-one-makes and where-one-lives deal, I think
voidUpdate 8 hours ago [-]
I shudder to think of an 18 person DND group... 5 is enough for me
embedding-shape 8 hours ago [-]
> nerd life seems to get lonelier the older you get.
Nerds always thinks they're special :) This is the same for most people in the world.
8 hours ago [-]
8 hours ago [-]
rob74 6 hours ago [-]
> We have efficient heat pumps and solar panels, but it's still a disturbing amount of energy usage and something I'm trying to debug. Perhaps we have too many windows letting in too much sunlight...
External window blinds work wonders with that - your AC doesn't have to work hard to get the heat out of the greenhouse you inadvertently built if you avoid the heat getting in in the first place. But yeah, these might be more widespread over here in Europe than in the US...
kentonv 2 hours ago [-]
Oh, we figured this out, maybe I should update the page.
It turns out at installation time the installer set all the fans on "high", and I left them that way stupidly thinking: "Well, I like circulation, and the power meters show the fans aren't actually using much power, so I'll just leave it like that."
Changing them all to "auto" fixed the problem.
It turns out that while the fans themselves weren't using a ton of power, their activity caused the heat pumps feeding them to work harder. In retrospect it seems not that surprising and I feel pretty dumb about it.
(And yes there are a lot of windows but they are not south-facing and they are all tinted in a way that blocks most of the sun's energy.)
bob1029 5 hours ago [-]
The house is located in Austin TX.
Root cause analysis complete.
chinathrow 3 hours ago [-]
The house is also mostly glass.
subscribed 6 hours ago [-]
Window blinds for the worst hours (can be angled so the sun doesn't enter but the view outside is retained), and solar reflective foil for the normal days.
I'm still looking for the good, transparent matte coat for my exterior walls, but I've already cut some of the cooling power use via passive means.
aktau 5 hours ago [-]
> transparent matte coat for my exterior walls
I'm curious about this. Do you mean a layer of paint-like substance that makes the walls isolate better?
walthamstow 6 hours ago [-]
I'm putting external shutters on my house in London this winter. This summer was crazy. I've never seen them further north than Barcelona.
lai 9 minutes ago [-]
Sick! Good to see that DDR is still a thing. Make DDR great again!
Everything is high tech except for the cat litter collection, which tells me the owner already knows cats don't like automated litter collection. I wonder how hard is to keep the house clean tho!
beeforpork 3 hours ago [-]
OK, rich couple show their home and happy family. I find it relatively boring and trivial. (I am not complaining, I can just skip on this -- no problem!)
But I would be interested in the sex dungeon parts of the rich couple's home, maybe there are some ideas that are closer to my world. Or maybe not! But ideas, that's what's interesting here, not actual cable lengths or room or computer counts. That would be interesting.
haunter 6 hours ago [-]
MTV used to have this show called Cribs where celebrities showed their house around and cars and everything. Basically bragging about their rich life. I have the same feeling opening this site. Maybe we need an MTV Cribs SV edition.
Cribs was at its best when it was some newly rich musician living in a boring suburban neighborhood and they had basically nothing in their house except some weird piece of art that cost 300k.
lifestyleguru 3 hours ago [-]
There was an episode where one American rapper bragged he never wears the same socks twice. He unpacks every day a pair of brand new white socks. I have no bloody idea why this carved into my memory.
rylando 41 minutes ago [-]
This is so sick! Apologies if I missed it but is there more info on how you did the mounting for the folding monitor stations?
I love the cat doors everywhere! Great idea to keep the litter boxes sequestered.
Howdy from Houston fellow Texan!
chinathrow 5 hours ago [-]
As someone without that much money at hand, I enjoyed reading the section further down the page. Well written and congrats on the success!
wraptile 5 hours ago [-]
This makes me really miss LAN parties. What an absolute gem of early PC culture that is sadly mostly forgotten? A reasonable replacement is phone gaming parties and I'm not kidding - it's really fun! We did Among Us phone LAN party recently and it was a blast.
28304283409234 7 hours ago [-]
The basement is awesome, but I would not feel cozy and welcome there. From the pictures it feels like any serverroom I've ever been into. Unwanted tips: Put some plants in there, some color, some wall-to-wall gaming art prints on the closet-doors and floors. <3
elAhmo 7 hours ago [-]
Wholesome read. These guys are enjoying life and I loved reading the FAQ in the end, as well as them acknowledging they are very lucky!
darkwater 6 hours ago [-]
They are lucky, coming (at least Kenton) from a good family with money and, I surely believe, parents that pushed him in the right direction, helping him to fully develop his natural talents. And you definitely needed raw brain power (which is a natural gift) to join Google in 2005.
gblargg 5 hours ago [-]
Same. I like seeing people who have made great tech houses and seem like nice people.
llm_nerd 4 hours ago [-]
It's an interesting read and a wonderful experiment, but is this house still operational as a "LAN party" house? Humans in groups can be...exhausting...in very short order.
Like I notice zero food or drink in the pictures, and there's a very good reason for that when you have groups of people. So I guess they eliminated one of the primary friction sources early. Wonder how the bathroom situation is...
It would be interesting to see how this worked out.
The pair behind the house have two children, which I can't even envision combined with this. Yes, someone is going to romanticize how great it is for the kids...but it simply isn't.
jonheller 2 hours ago [-]
Sad to see so much anger expressed at this couple's financial success and how they decided to use that and then do what I thought was a interesting, fun, and in no way "rub in your face" or arrogant writeup about it. The author even recognized his luck with his financial situation in terms of things like the housing market in California.
I'm not sure what the angry people in this thread want. That they should have donated to charity? That they should not have shared the project? That they should have turned down raises or sold their house below value just because?
There are good arguments that the wealth distribution in our country has some serious issues but I don't think attacking this author is the right way to address that.
throwayay4929 1 hours ago [-]
It's eternal September but for HN. The relatively small group of HNers that used to inhabit this place has been slowly pushed out by people who are looking for cheap dunks. It's still better than other place but your question is naive: this couple not have done anything to avoid criticism. They are the outgroup, and exist only to be attacked. There's no intellectual argument being made here, just in-group signalling.
I remember this! Its crazy because the comments section on that thread seems more curious about the setup (with albiet one long thread about home costs). Massive contrast to this one.
kentonv 3 hours ago [-]
It's because this latest thread was posted while I was asleep. :/
HN is a massively nicer place if the author is present to interact. The people who are inclined to criticize don't want to do it to people's face, and the people who want to act questions are more eager if someone is there to answer.
literallyroy 2 hours ago [-]
It’s very jarring to see such a different reaction than my own to this post. Each time it comes up (was posted in a friend discord as well recently) I’m in awe and love the explanations.
Some folks don’t want others to be happy. I had someone in my life recently complain that someone they met was too happy and thus toxic and ignorant of the world’s atrocities.
Keep smiling at have a good day :)
tikimcfee 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah.. 2 years have unfortunately changed a lot of what privilege, ownership, wealth, and "luck" have meant.
BorisMelnik 46 minutes ago [-]
great work - and I dont use patch panels, I think I have 20 cat 6 cables in my house going to my switch and its been doing just fine for 5+ years. you don't really have to for your house. it can def make life easier on you, it is kind of an elitest thing for homes, but a mandatory thing for commercial
arjie 5 hours ago [-]
It’s been on HN a few times and I’ve always enjoyed looking at it. I think it looks great, fantastic setup, cat walks and doors. LAN parties with your friends for 30 years is awesome! Now that is hard to replicate even if one uses the house design as inspiration!
My buddies and I sometimes reminisce fondly about those times (we are now spread across the globe) but fortunately we all still chat every time there’s an Arsenal game - an automatic Schelling point no matter where in the world you are.
None of us plays video games much any more so there’s no loss in it but it feels pleasantly nostalgic.
fitsumbelay 54 minutes ago [-]
This is an accomplishment. That it's a couple with two kids elevates it further.
Aeolun 7 hours ago [-]
I've seen this so many times, and every time it makes me smile. Especially the 'how the hell did we manage this' section.
bayindirh 6 hours ago [-]
Normal room: Integrated catwalk with cat doors to other cat places.
Alright.
Schlagbohrer 4 hours ago [-]
If/when widespread Netwar occurs and the US and China and other actors balkanize the internet, along with common outages, maybe we'll see a resurgence of in-person LAN gaming again.
gorgoiler 4 hours ago [-]
I really love the idea of having all the PCs in some place far away from where I, the human am sitting, but I don’t know how to do that. HDMI and USB cables can’t work over more than a few tens of feet can they? Or maybe these are special shielded cables, or sent down shielded cat6 cabling? Would love to have even more details on how to do this.
Also, since saying goodbye to my dad in hospital last year, whenever I hear about people enjoying time with their own fathers I feel really happy. I would have loved to build a house with my dad!
kllrnohj 4 hours ago [-]
HDMI over fiber is readily available. USB is more annoying depending on the speeds you desire, but again USB over optical exists.
And then of course once it's over fiber, nearly any length desired is easily achieved
kentonv 2 hours ago [-]
You can get ultra-long HDMI and USB extenders that use fiber optic cables.
Monoprice.com in particular sells these under their "slimrun" line -- that's what I used in the house.
They are often technically not spec-compliant but work just fine in practice.
lxgr 4 hours ago [-]
USB 4/Thunderbolt explicitly supports fiberoptics-based USB-C cables and can carry 4K video, regular USB, and more.
kllrnohj 4 hours ago [-]
do you know of any that actually exist? All I can find are active cables that go up to 15 feet which is a lot better than the 3ft of copper but still a far cry short of running to another room easily
massel 1 hours ago [-]
I've used Corning's Thunderbolt 3 fibre cable in the 25m length (~80'). It's eye-wateringly expensive, and it works perfectly.
lxgr 4 hours ago [-]
I don't have any personal experience with them, but Amazon and Google are full of options going up to 30m.
I don't see why they shouldn't work; all the translation logic is in the active circuitry at each end, and the low-level protocol and USB-C spec was designed with this use case in mind, so nothing expects a continuous copper connection between both ends. Obviously power delivery doesn't work over that type of cable.
emh68 5 hours ago [-]
I've been thinking about running a "mystery retro LAN party". Dig into a big cardboard box and pull out an old gaming laptop. You get what you get. Then go try to get top frag!
Aboutplants 6 hours ago [-]
The funnest part of this whole thing is the manual litter box, literally the worst part of having a cat, and it’s been solved through technology (litter robots). Everything in the house has tech, except the one thing that has you picking up actual shit every day.
Zoom out buddy
Aachen 6 hours ago [-]
You saw they addressed that at the bottom of the page?
gblargg 5 hours ago [-]
I've seen the insides of those automatic ones. If you think scooping lumps out of a normal litterbox is bad, try cleaning an automatic one out.
Clumping litter works surprisingly well. It's really a minor thing.
crimsoneer 6 hours ago [-]
"solved through technology" is an optimistic take on modern litter robots, in my experience ... I saw those as someone who has owned like 3 of them. Sometimes I realise I'm paying 500 bucks for an incredibly unreliable machine that gets slowly more smeared in poop over time instead of spending 30 seconds of my day to scoop some poop and feel quite silly.
yakkomajuri 6 hours ago [-]
The lack of any decoration is what struck me.
Otherwise really cool! Enjoyed the FAQ and appreciate the courage to put this out given the types of comments one receives online (see thread).
The resumes are impressive :) didn't realize Kenton had created Cap'n Proto
_ink_ 5 hours ago [-]
I really wonder where people find the time. Like two people, probably working stressful jobs, kids and still find the time to design and build something like this and probably also use it. Fascinating.
arjie 5 hours ago [-]
Someone once told me “you’ll make time for the things you care about” and I’m fortunate to have heard it since I have found it to be true for myself. The unfortunate truth appears to me that I care about Hacker News and other social media…
_ink_ 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah :D But I for one don't care much about my job, yet it still takes quite a chunk of my time away from me.
5 hours ago [-]
r0ckarong 8 hours ago [-]
I hope they invested similar money in their home security.
m4tthumphrey 7 hours ago [-]
Just came here to say, everything about this is incredible. The house itself, the site, the FAQs but most of all, the attention that went into the cat's needs.
11/10.
We want(ed) to do something similar (re the cats needs) when renovating our house but just could never decide!
darkwater 6 hours ago [-]
I have a "simple" PetSafe door which has a cat-chip controlled relay to open it, and our cat can just come and go whenever she wants, and she does her needs outside in our garden. Simple and effective and she lives the best of both worlds.
m4tthumphrey 1 hours ago [-]
It was more the indoor parts, ie the human-less doors. We had plans for them into the utility which is where their trays are but just couldn't fit the cat doors in (the human doors are crittall, ie glass so couldnt put them into the door itself.
It worked out fine in the end!
apexalpha 5 hours ago [-]
While I am a bit jealous of the ability to buy a in-house gaming cafe setup for $75.000 there is little in here that is particularely noteworthy.
Everyone that has $75k can buy hardware? I guess the Netboot setup might be interesting?
Giving me MTV Cribs vibes where people pretend to be interested in a particular feature of a house while in reality it's just a 45min boast of how rich they are, broadcast in a socially acceptable way.
vachina 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, have money, will spend. Water is wet.
takoid 4 hours ago [-]
I couldn't help but notice the lack of mousepads[1]. Please get your poor guests some mousepads!
I recently landed (again) at this website while reading about Kenton Varda‘s work on Cloudflare workers. It was a nice “aha” moment!
unpopularopp 3 hours ago [-]
I will never understand rich people. You won life, you live better than billions but somehow that’s not enough you have to boast about it. Even seemingly good folks like Gabe Newell is doing the same with his 360ft superyacht. As if they seek the validation because otherwise they know it’s all meaningless and empty.
kubb 3 hours ago [-]
They need to buy status. In the end most of them don’t feel very good about their life and need external validation.
giancarlostoro 2 hours ago [-]
> Honestly I never even thought about it. I haven't used a mousepad in decades. None of my friends ever commented on it. But I guess it might be a good idea, to prevent wear on the wood finish.
Trackball.
truthbe 3 hours ago [-]
All this tells me is money buys friends and happiness
bix6 1 hours ago [-]
This is dope.
Igrom 8 hours ago [-]
(2024)
mattanimation 1 hours ago [-]
this is just cool
bhtru 8 hours ago [-]
Dude this is so freaking cool.
Especially the cat entrances / infra to allow them access throughout the home and while human doors are closed. Would love to see a cat POV via an action cam of them running through the home.
bitwize 7 hours ago [-]
At the former apartment, my office/work area had an opening to the living area high on the wall that might've been for a window, or something. My cat spent a lot of time staring at that opening. Not just the opening itself, but he'd work his way backwards, along some exposed AC ducting (it was a loft with 20' ceilings), trying to plot a route from the floor over the ducting to the hole. If we'd had a high enough shelf in the living area he would have gotten in.
qsera 6 hours ago [-]
Worried about if they could that no one asked if they should...
8 hours ago [-]
Havoc 8 hours ago [-]
Ngl having a house with a hot side for rack cooling sounds like homelab fun
yigalirani 5 hours ago [-]
Wow that's really nice house
hajrice 6 hours ago [-]
Great landing page! (if I can call it so?)
lifestyleguru 8 hours ago [-]
Rich people are rich, ok I get it.
vincnetas 7 hours ago [-]
"This house has normal parts, too!" got me triggered :)
Yeah our "normal" house : swimming pool (heated by servers?), panoramic view, guest room bigger than my whole house, roof deck, 30-mile view...
greggsy 7 hours ago [-]
They’re a pretty accomplished couple if you read their bio.
Aeolun 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but not so much that it's not relatable.
lifestyleguru 7 hours ago [-]
Behind every accomplished person stands an accomplished parent.
kev009 7 hours ago [-]
Definitely an accomplished architect, there are a lot of fine construction details in these photos. So much that it makes the IT/low voltage installation look like a hack job.
shotgan 7 hours ago [-]
I came here to say exactly the same XD
6 hours ago [-]
ThePowerOfFuet 6 hours ago [-]
>All network equipment and cameras are UniFi.
Wow. Imagine having this budget and then doing this.
sgerenser 5 hours ago [-]
What exactly is the problem with UniFi? I’ve always thought Ubiquiti gear is generally pretty good. At least a better option than e.g. Cisco for the home/small business customer.
iomer 5 hours ago [-]
wow.
Simulacra 4 hours ago [-]
Who has enough friends past 30 to even justify a lan party? Lol
canto 5 hours ago [-]
Nice flex, lol.
4 hours ago [-]
rustysnail 6 hours ago [-]
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fleroviumna 4 hours ago [-]
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farceSpherule 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
alpineman 6 hours ago [-]
Late stage capitalism
yonran 6 hours ago [-]
I disagree. This is the good part of capitalism. In an ideal world, a custom-designed housing unit should be achievable by anyone in the upper middle class. The combined property tax rate in Austin is around 1.8%-2.5% (according to https://lrgrealty.com/lrg-blog/property-taxes-in-austin-tx/), which is decently high and supports the community. ChatGPT says that they paid $52,142 in property taxes for 2025 on an assessed value of $3M.
In my opinion, the only immoral part of this is the “million dollars in profit” on the house in Palo Alto that he left which the author himself called out as ridiculous. This unearned increment is thanks to Palo Alto’s exclusionary zoning and Proposition 13’s low property taxes (around 1.25% at acquisition, but much lower for long-term investors). ChatGPT says that the author paid $11k/year and the new owner now pays $28k/year for the Palo Alto house now assessed at $2.3M.
temp0826 6 hours ago [-]
"Invite only", ok I get they're rich but I wonder about the airbnb potential for recouping some of that cost.
subscribed 6 hours ago [-]
And having to restore everything (this is a house with personal items, not a loaner, anonymous flat) if someone trashes it?
Naah, even a small risk is unacceptable in such case.
Rendered at 16:32:54 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42156977
Unfortunately this new thread was posted while I was asleep, and so I haven't been online to answer questions as the thread developed. Whereas in the previous thread I participated from the start.
Pro tip to anyone whose stuff gets posted on HN: It is a completely different place when the author is present.
If you're present, then the people who are inclined to post cheap criticisms shy away, and the people who want to ask questions and learn show up.
(Aside from the house, I've had my work at Cloudflare posted many times, and seen this pattern in those posts.)
This is the first time it's been posted where most of the comments appear to be resentment that you could afford to do the project at all. Money isn't the point: some people have it and some people don't, and that can change over time. What's interesting is how you use the money. And in this case, designing a living space around hosting lan parties is a really interesting hack! I like the fold-away keyboard monitor setups especially.
You didn't have to write about any of it, and yet you did, and you keep the post up, and it continues to be something interesting to discuss. So thank you!
Despite the negativity, I'm glad that we can at least talk about the topic of wealth and privilege on HN now, rather than comments pointing it out being flag/voted down into oblivion. I don't harbor any resentment about OP's home/project, but I can totally understand the resentment from others, especially in these times, and it at the very least deserves to be mentioned.
Just kidding. Gotta say I never understood the appeal of yachts. What does a yacht give you that a fancy house doesn't? It's on the water? So what? It's not like it goes fast enough to be a worthwhile form of transportation...
I do totally get private jets. They are fancy, but also get you somewhere. LAN party jet? That'd be a cool way to pass a long flight. Hey guys let's LAN party to Tokyo!
(I do not expect I'll ever have private jet money. Please don't eat me.)
Most yacht owners don't live on them full time. (they may have a paid crew that does) they take them for vacations. They are not really transportation even though they often will go to multiple close destinations.
I'm also confused about people who own many vacation houses. Why not just rent a different fancy house each time? Less expensive, less trouble, more variety, you can experience more places...
My buddies and I do quarterly lan parties to play Q3, unreal tournament, tribes, l4d2, and a bunch of others stuff we find. We also bbq and hike. It's a great way to keep friend groups going!
Very occasionally one of the monitor glitches out for about 5 seconds (maybe happens about once every 2-3 months), and they both seem to take much longer to wake up from the lock screen, again in the order of 5 seconds. Other than that had no problems whatsoever, and definitely the sound is much reduced. I only hear it at all when the GPU is maxxed out, and it's not unbearable like it is when it's right next to you. 4 years ago, the cables were £9 each for 5M DP M-M and £10 for the 5M active USB3 cable, but it's pretty cheap for the quality of life improvement.
The HDMI pretty much just works. Even at 8k resolution. Note that last I checked, Monoprice's DisplayPort cables (as opposed to HDMI) only supported an older standard and they don't handle 8k. Most of my monitors are 4k though, and the DisplayPort cables work fine for that.
USB can be finicky. Sometimes certain devices, or plugging and unplugging devices too much, can "crash" the USB cable, requiring a "reboot" by unplugging it and plugging it back in, from the computer end. But if you're just using a keyboard and mouse through it it's basically fine.
you are a good person!
Your house is inspiring!
The reactions to my first (much smaller) house in 2011 were very similar.
I needed like a minute to process this. These folks are privileged as hell. I understand that folks on HN are typically affluent but this is rich rich level.
Not to say anything negative of that, I think it's just a byproduct of the free wheeling and fast paced times back then, but if you're not prepared for it then it can rub you the wrong way sometimes.
So 75k is both objectively massive, and not.
I won't argue "privilege" but it seems like both people in the couple have been working for a long time and took equity bets that paid off.
Another way to look at it, in many tech jobs 75k could be a bonus (additional to salary an equity)
Sometimes I wonder if I work in the same tech industry as some of the other folks around here, but then, I guess I haven’t worked FAANG.
My understanding most Tier 1 employers are paying $700k-$1.5m usd per year in TC.
$75k is less than his tax bill.
Also the home is in Texas (I think). So lower cost square footage.
Tech does have a crazy variance in salary for people who are doing, broadly at least, the same jobs. I don’t see any hate here. Just surprise.
There are relatively large pockets of engineers making great money while coasting at a big company, but more often the engineers are actually doing a more complex job.
Netflix is operating at a higher technical level, no doubt. But the salaries can be something like 5x higher. Maybe all industries are like that but I’m not sure they are.
I'd love to see some data on this though I don't know how you'd measure it. I suspect a high percentage of west coast FAANG level jobs are low impact but also low complexity. I do figure people work more hours though. With scale comes new problems but also a lot of infrastructure and support around it.
It's pretty silly to use IT guy when there's loads of software devs working on complex stuff for critical infrastructure making less than 200k.
IT (outside of the USA) typically means Software Engineer, but in the USA the context is as you described.
I don’t know where they are located, but they might be talking about what you would call software engineering.
If a kid graduated with comp sci degree in 2000, joined decent companies as a w2 employee, does he become "repugnant" and "deserves to be shunned if not punished" the moment his net worth crosses 1m, which may happen within a few years of graduation?
Or does he need to "marinade" a few years as a millionaire before we roll out the guillotine?
If he joined a worse company (or slacked and didn't get promoted) and hadn't become a millionaire, does he avoid the repugnancy and punishment?
What if he did make the money but blew on stupidity, does that also avoid that classification?
But the more stressful work, and the idea that I'd be working to trade stock a few nanoseconds faster than the competition, didn't not appeal.
If you’re in the Bay, maybe, otherwise it’s $35-50k depending on how new
This is excess on a scale that is essentially laughable for the entire human race, minus some statistically insignificant population.
> I actually find it funny how cheap computers are.
Maybe "cheap" was a poor choice of word for this. Sorry.
Congrats on all your success though, good to see you're enjoying it with friends.
I mean I have to admit this house looks live every geeks dream, but come on... Seven figure house price... In my country, most people don't make that much money in their entire working life. I do mean that literally, let's take "seven figure" as 4.5M. Evenly divided by 40 working years, that's 112.5k a year. That's almost double the median income. And I live in Germany, a nation that's considered rich.
* I included the fairly nice 4k monitors ($750) in the price.
* The motherboards were stupidly expensive ($450) since I wanted something with 10G networking onboard, to support the netboot setup.
* The super-long fiber optic HDMI and USB cables are on the order of $150 each (and each computer needs one of each).
* Rackmount gear, which is stupidly expensive when purchased retail. (Datacenters obviously don't buy this stuff retail, so it's a weird market.)
* I think I included the networking gear and some other not-per-machine stuff in the figure. My spreadsheet from the time shows $3,067.64 per machine before tax.
(I am not trying to make any particular point here, just providing data for those who are curious.)
Meanwhile common people in other countries can't even think about buying a proper gaming PC now. I bought a pre owned gpu, it stopped working after 5 months and I lost my savings.
But I think the point really here is that computers are cheap in relation to other items you can buy. Not cheap as in “small part of my wealth”, but as in “about equally much money as something that is not as impressive (as a computer)”.
And I really agree. I think it’s amazing that I can get eg a computer I find fast for the price of a kind of bad sofa. 2nd hand MacBook M1 vs dinner for 4 at a nice restaurant.
Computers are cheap!
Be angry instead at companies who won't even comply with the most ridiculously basic laws. They are the ones causing all those problems.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/naacp-...
"Why did you move to Austin? [...] needed a bigger house, but we really could not afford to buy (much less build) anything bigger in Palo Alto."
So there are a few more levels of richness above
They may be due for a big inheritance but depending on age it probably hasn't happened yet. This looks more like an indulgence that was paid for from the work the couple has done by focusing their earnings over a fairly long period of time.
If they were ultra-privileged they would have been destined to arrive at the same place since birth without having to make any effort of their own at all.
And they would have other homes in places like Telluride, Paris, Milan, and Montreaux that are over-the-top in a purely domestic way without any need for digital extravagance, since they've got that right here in Austin whenever they want. Even if it was only a month or two out of the year ;)
That's something so many people envy or truly dislike even worse, but I admire this effort.
Yes, luck. Hard work is table stakes. It is necessary but wholely insufficient. We shouldn't make the mistake of over-attributing our successes to hard work and ignore the massive social and economic advantages that let us capitalize on the work we do. Everyone else works hard too, they just don't get to reap the benefits of that labor.
10 years later, after a brief stint as an Electrical Distribution Engineer, Samsung hired me because one of their Directors at their Austin plant was specifically seeking out Navy Nuclear-trained Electronics Technician senior leaders — pure luck. While I was there, working nights on a 4/3 - 3/4 schedule, I got into UT Austin’s SWE MS program. That was hard work, and those 2 years are largely a blur. My wife also pulled more than her fair share of work taking care of our extremely young kids, lest I claim I was the I only one working hard.
After that, I convinced a hiring manager that I could do SRE work despite having zero industry experience, because I explained how I had done most of their job description at home. That was a mix of hard work and luck, I guess? Then it’s like any other industry: if you have experience, you can get interviews.
Meanwhile, I have family on both sides who have worked much harder than I have, and have far less to show for it. Tech pays absurdly well in many sectors, and I think people often forget that on here.
More importantly though was that my parents fed my childhood fascination with computers, making sure I had the opportunity to learn to code early (a volunteer at my school taught me BASIC at age 8; my parents bought me a PC so I could continue experimenting) and then they gave me a lot of free time to spend building things and learning. After I graduated my mom let me spend a couple more years in her basement just working on open source software projects. These are certainly privileges that wouldn't be possible if my dad didn't have comfortable income.
I got into Google by applying on the web site and showing them my projects.
In smaller companies the people are definitely worth their weight in gold as if they are not doing the work its very visible.
Yeah, I am jealous, but such is life...
That’s 130 m^2. A fucking bachelor pad.
The only way you would see new construction at 1400sqft is if it’s a condo or something.
I toured a 2600 sqft 3 story condo ages ago (happened to live nearby and was curious during their open house) that felt quite cramped and 'railroad' style, purely because it just had to be 'narrow' due to the lot size and had to waste a bunch of space.
I grew up in a 700sqft home and now own a 1400sqft house and my friend is building a custom 4000sqft house. They both feel 'small' for different reasons.
The very rich I know have 2 or 3 homes, each >3000sqft.
The most wealthy people I know have a modest house on as many acres as they can get because no neighbors and gardens and horses and tractors are where the life is at.
The fish bowl theory is we grow to our environment. Look at the billionaires and their yachts, it is never enough.
Contentment must be learned. I am beyond content now while I could afford a house 2x the size.
Debatable
The spectrum of rich person crank behavior has got a lot worse these days, going all the way up to "buying Twitter".
And even that pales in comparison to running for President thrice and winning it twice just to settle an imagined score with Barack Obama for a well-deserved roast [1] and rip apart everything bearing his name.
[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PPP-2011-book1/pdf/PPP-2...
Somehow those who cry nonstop about the rich are even more insufferable than the rich.
Go on, next you'll tell me about how your hands are clean. You've never so much as touched a product that made someone's life worse.
If you work for Google, for Apple, for Amazon - if you derive a payment from The Whale and in turn the whale continues to thrive in some way because of your work, you are complicit. Whether or not you or society is ok with it is the problem to discuss.
> Go on, next you'll tell me about how your hands are clean.
They are as clean as they can be, which is a lot more that can be said from anyone who works at any FAANG (or Wall Street, or Big Oil...)
No one has been forced to work for Big Tech. No one ever said "I only took those $300k/year salary with those huge RSUs from Facebook because I couldn't find any other way to provide for my family" or "It was either working for OpenAI or washing dishes at an Olive Garden".
The typical cliches in this subject are that nobody can decide what’s worthwhile or not so we have to let the people with accumulation decide and that it stimulates the economy, no matter what kind of spending it is.
Claude can point out the flaws in those arguments fairly easily by now.
Also, my llm can beat up your llm.
Why is this use of their money a waste?
It’s rich, yes. And the author acknowledges that. Still a cool build!
Something like 1 person in 15 in the US is a millionaire, and a million dollar house + some LAN gear should be well within reach of a millionaire. Obviously they're a comfortable distance from poor but we're not talking unattainable wealth on display here.
Wonder how a seven-figure house would make feel an engineer/hacker/mind-hacker (which neuroscientists are) from Kenya or perhaps Ukraine, Russia, Nigeria, Malaysia, etc. No offense, but if that whole project was made by refurbished stuff, it would've meant more to hackers and to me personally.
In its current form - it means a massive showoff of power, and the location being Texas adds on top. This is luxury on a level that 99% of population would most likely never achieve in their lives, and hacking/gaming should be universally accepted and loved if it is meant to be a uniting factor.
- He's been in big (huge) tech since 2005
- She is an angel investor
- Moved to Austin
...
Does privileged just mean wealthy/successful now?
I think the point is that posts like this are becoming a sour taste for a greater ratio of humans because of the increase ratio of disparity in global wealth/success.
I don't begrudge someone their enjoyment and livelihoods and I'm a fan of DDR and lan parties like every good nerd.
But please don't pretend or be ignorant of the idea that there are many more people in the world now that can both see this and likely never attain it despite "hard work" or "good investments".
Of course - I am one of them - but I can still appreciate the project.
Edit: To add, I would probably refer to this purely as hard work, good investments AND lots of good luck and timing, as opposed to privilege.
I too would love to have been a part of building this, or of course "having" something like this; aspiration to bigger things is sometimes legitimately what brings drives someone an extra step further than they thought they could.
They both came from wealthy families. Of course they worked hard and applied themselves fully, without ever having money worries to distract them. But let's not perpetuate that cliché that it's purely down to "hard work", like the trope from rich people's self-marketing autobiographies. "It's all down to my hard work, nothing to do with my rich family, really, nobody works as hard as me"! People all over the world work very very hard, some much harder than these people, and don't have the privilege of wealthy families to fall back on.
To clarify: correcting and clarifying isn't begrudging or complaining. Same for those of us who know we won't attain it because we don't have that privilege. They enjoy it, good luck to them.
I am quite joyous that the things I like to build and play with are also something aspirational and "exist" in bigger, cooler variants out there in the world. Seeing Space, so to speak, stirs the imagination and drives people in amazing ways sometimes.
It's the unfortunate mechanisms of the world and society and politics and business that partition this in uneven ways that hurts much more. I've met a lot of those very hard working people you describe I think, many times more over than myself in ways I sometimes find hard to admit. But that's what makes it emotionally poignant for me: we're both working hard, have visions, and neither have enough gas to get to the end of the road.
To wit: I can't afford to pay a professional team to design a product around my technology toys, and that likely precludes me in this particular decade from ever making it into something that would "make money" or "become useful" to more than myself. I'd need the "privilege" of living in a city or state where technologically capable people could spend their time talking about software tools and problems with me, and not living between jobs and family demands where that spare time simple can't be afforded. The trap of poverty, as insidious as it is. Someone with disposable income the size of my salary can toss that at a team for a month or two and end up with a shape that quickly evolves into their idea without a second thought.
My struggle - evident in my responses - is not feeling personally affronted when I know it's a nature of the world right now, and that doing what I think as "the right thing" sometimes means being pointed or unyielding in my beliefs. I'm still working on directing that into meaningful discourse.
Per the dictionary, perhaps. But when people use it online they rarely mean it as a neutral statement about someone’s level of wealth. It’s typically meant to imply unfairness or that the wealth was obtained through unearned advantage.
The mood has soured with enshittification, frauds, and the general toxicity of social media.
Much appreciated, thanks for sharing! Really!
The author literally labeled that room the "Upstairs Office".
The rest of the house (kitchen, family room, etc) that's not dedicated to LAN computers looks like a normal Euro/Scandinavian type of clean minimalism aesthetic which a lot of people like.
My home currently has a lot of "traditional" style furniture and decorations hanging on the walls which some might call "warm & cozy". But others would disagree and think of it as "grandma's house" and as I've aged, I tend to agree. I'd like to eventually dial it back and redo the interior to be more minimalistic but I have other higher priorities than remodeling the house.
Saying that, I'd live there in a heartbeat.
That said, I thought the games room with rows of hide-away PCs looked like a call centre or at best a 90s internet cafe.
It’s likely just his preference. My wife and I also rather like a relatively “IKEA” aesthetic so I think it’s just preference.
I mean, the American Express office looks like a track stop or mall you will find along the highway.
Pretty much what you'd expect from techies that never really thought too hard about their living space beyond functionality.
I mean, I'm the same, so no judgement, but I did hire an interior decorator for my own place. Definitely worth the money and my house has all kinds of funky fun stuff and colors going on (on top of being 130 years old and super wonky everywhere, ha ha).
Really cool house, but describing the cabinets as "bunch of wood, cut into fairly large pieces. Maybe a few screws and hinges" shows little understanding of what goes into building something like that.
It's hard to tell from the pics if the cabinets are made of sheet goods with veneer or solid boards glued into panels. But at the very least, the trees need to be grown, they need to be managed, they need to be felled, sent to processing for sheet goods, dried and milled for solid wood. Even then you've got to get everything cut to size and square, then build the cabinets with all the specific sizes, then finish them, transport to site and install everything and the trim.
It's two ends of the manufacturing scale. For transistors, you've got mass production at an impossibly difficult level of accuracy for a human and for cabinets you've got single production (at the install level) at very difficult level for a human.
But again, very, very cool house. I especially like the cat doors but not nearly half as much as I imagine the cat does.
Once you've done that, just add the computer chips.
I mean, the whole place looks like a cookie cutter office block. The lack of appreciation and want for good design goes far deeper.
Friends of friends would show up. Not everyone knew everyone else and this was fine. Cold drinks of every sort were available at the carry-out next door, and some would bring things to share. Donations were had for pizza or burgers (sometimes nowhere near enough donations, and sometimes more than plenty; it averaged OK). The social aspects of it really worked OK. Cleanup wasn't bad.
The biggest problem was that the first ~couple of hours were spent getting all of the PCs connected, updated, and working properly-enough.
By providing gaming stations, this dude has the big problem completely solved: All of these machines can be known to be on the same page when things start.
(The second-largest problem -- the smell -- is a different issue entirely. It usually ramped up pretty well by the time the first problem was approaching being solved.)
I'm guessing that's where his spending a shit ton on HVAC comes in...
nerd life seems to get lonelier the older you get.
My solution has been to play boardgames remote using BoardgameArena[0].
I usually have 2x turn based games going with two separate groups along with a dedicated chat channel, and then do 1-2 live evening sessions over video call with other groups. But all setup to be flexible and made to fit with the constraints of adult life, so sometimes we play and sometimes we reschedule.
[0]: https://boardgamearena.com
This is difficult to arrange at short notice :)
Nerds always thinks they're special :) This is the same for most people in the world.
External window blinds work wonders with that - your AC doesn't have to work hard to get the heat out of the greenhouse you inadvertently built if you avoid the heat getting in in the first place. But yeah, these might be more widespread over here in Europe than in the US...
It turns out at installation time the installer set all the fans on "high", and I left them that way stupidly thinking: "Well, I like circulation, and the power meters show the fans aren't actually using much power, so I'll just leave it like that."
Changing them all to "auto" fixed the problem.
It turns out that while the fans themselves weren't using a ton of power, their activity caused the heat pumps feeding them to work harder. In retrospect it seems not that surprising and I feel pretty dumb about it.
(And yes there are a lot of windows but they are not south-facing and they are all tinted in a way that blocks most of the sun's energy.)
Root cause analysis complete.
I'm curious about this. Do you mean a layer of paint-like substance that makes the walls isolate better?
But I would be interested in the sex dungeon parts of the rich couple's home, maybe there are some ideas that are closer to my world. Or maybe not! But ideas, that's what's interesting here, not actual cable lengths or room or computer counts. That would be interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV_Cribs
I love the cat doors everywhere! Great idea to keep the litter boxes sequestered.
Howdy from Houston fellow Texan!
Like I notice zero food or drink in the pictures, and there's a very good reason for that when you have groups of people. So I guess they eliminated one of the primary friction sources early. Wonder how the bathroom situation is...
It would be interesting to see how this worked out.
The pair behind the house have two children, which I can't even envision combined with this. Yes, someone is going to romanticize how great it is for the kids...but it simply isn't.
I'm not sure what the angry people in this thread want. That they should have donated to charity? That they should not have shared the project? That they should have turned down raises or sold their house below value just because?
There are good arguments that the wealth distribution in our country has some serious issues but I don't think attacking this author is the right way to address that.
HN is a massively nicer place if the author is present to interact. The people who are inclined to criticize don't want to do it to people's face, and the people who want to act questions are more eager if someone is there to answer.
Some folks don’t want others to be happy. I had someone in my life recently complain that someone they met was too happy and thus toxic and ignorant of the world’s atrocities.
Keep smiling at have a good day :)
My buddies and I sometimes reminisce fondly about those times (we are now spread across the globe) but fortunately we all still chat every time there’s an Arsenal game - an automatic Schelling point no matter where in the world you are.
None of us plays video games much any more so there’s no loss in it but it feels pleasantly nostalgic.
Alright.
Also, since saying goodbye to my dad in hospital last year, whenever I hear about people enjoying time with their own fathers I feel really happy. I would have loved to build a house with my dad!
And then of course once it's over fiber, nearly any length desired is easily achieved
Monoprice.com in particular sells these under their "slimrun" line -- that's what I used in the house.
They are often technically not spec-compliant but work just fine in practice.
I don't see why they shouldn't work; all the translation logic is in the active circuitry at each end, and the low-level protocol and USB-C spec was designed with this use case in mind, so nothing expects a continuous copper connection between both ends. Obviously power delivery doesn't work over that type of cable.
Zoom out buddy
Clumping litter works surprisingly well. It's really a minor thing.
Otherwise really cool! Enjoyed the FAQ and appreciate the courage to put this out given the types of comments one receives online (see thread).
The resumes are impressive :) didn't realize Kenton had created Cap'n Proto
11/10.
We want(ed) to do something similar (re the cats needs) when renovating our house but just could never decide!
It worked out fine in the end!
Everyone that has $75k can buy hardware? I guess the Netboot setup might be interesting?
Giving me MTV Cribs vibes where people pretend to be interested in a particular feature of a house while in reality it's just a 45min boast of how rich they are, broadcast in a socially acceptable way.
[1]: https://lanparty.house/images/office-action-overhead.jpg
Trackball.
Especially the cat entrances / infra to allow them access throughout the home and while human doors are closed. Would love to see a cat POV via an action cam of them running through the home.
Wow. Imagine having this budget and then doing this.
In my opinion, the only immoral part of this is the “million dollars in profit” on the house in Palo Alto that he left which the author himself called out as ridiculous. This unearned increment is thanks to Palo Alto’s exclusionary zoning and Proposition 13’s low property taxes (around 1.25% at acquisition, but much lower for long-term investors). ChatGPT says that the author paid $11k/year and the new owner now pays $28k/year for the Palo Alto house now assessed at $2.3M.
Naah, even a small risk is unacceptable in such case.