Building the ultimate home office again | Hacker News Reader

Building the ultimate home office again

troyhunt.com

77 pointsGordonS62 comments

I kept on scrolling waiting for the price tag on this and it was never listed. Let's see. (All prices are US$)

Røde Broadcaster mic: $420

Lenovo Thinkstation P720, custom config: "As Configured $6,204.00 / Item Discount -$1,985.28 Use Coupon THINKJULY10* -$421.87 Your Price $3,796.85"

49" monitor: $2k

2x 32" monitors: 2*$540

Ergotron HX monitor arm: $280-310

2x Ergotron LX monitor arms: 2x$165

Sony a6400 camera: $1100

Lens for camera: $640, this may be AU$ in which case it's US$454

Elgato Cam Link: list of $130 but they are in high demand and only available on ebay for usorious prices, "it stung a bit", whatever that means in the context of already being around $10k in the hole for this setup so far

Elgato multi mount "modular rigging system": out of stock, no retailer partners listed, I'm gonna guess, I dunno, $100

Fingerprint reader: $140

Also some Hue lights that don't have prices on the pages he links to and I don't wanna chase those down

Elgato Stream Deck: $150

Surface Precision Mouse: $100

Surface Ergonomic Keyboard: $130

Eaton 5p UPS: "Contact us"

I am getting around $10400 for this setup, plus whatever "stung" for that Cam Link, however much the Hue lights cost, and the UPS. Plus whatever shipping he paid for all this stuff.

Christ, and here I am feeling like I was splurging when I spent like $200 on some new Ikea stuff to replace the standing desk I left behind when I moved from Seattle to New Orleans. It's still not even really functional because I haven't been able to find a stool that I like for when I don't feel like standing. Talk about conspicuous consumption. Dude paid like 80% of my year's rent for this setup.

Man, I just plopped my work laptop down next to a spare monitor on my dining room table and have been cranking away for the last few months. Approximate cost, $0.

I feel like I may be doing COVID wrong.

Pffft, I grabbed an old cardboard box and used it to convert my sitting desk to a standing desk.

(Seriously; it's the perfect height box)

Any the old box truck. I may have also used that once or twice. These days I have one of those adjustable desks that sits on top of my desk that I can raise or lower.

I guess it is OK for Troy Hunt[1], not for us mere mortals. He runs HaveIBeenPwned[2] and is a content creator in various capacity.

1. https://www.troyhunt.com/about/

2. https://haveibeenpwned.com

Sounds expensive, but how much does the average salesman spend on their car to look the part? Or a banker on their suits? Or a founder on their bicycle?

Seems a reasonable expense to reflect Troy's commitment to IT, encourage people to take him seriously, and eventually - pay him more.

Sadly he was let go before the items had a chance to arrive.

Source? Or is this supposed to be a joke?

I'm not 'wolco but it should be a joke. The author of the posted link can't be let go as I believe he owns the businesses which fund his lifestyle (most notably the website "haveibeenpwned.com" although I'm not sure that's revenue generating besides donations).

The joke certainly does reference real life right now. Quite a few tech-adjacent companies have had major layoffs this quarter, so workers who have invested their own money into home-office amenities may be wishing they'd kept the cash instead. For $500-1000 it ideally shouldn't be a huge deal for most western tech workers. But it would be prudent to make sure you have a dependable revenue stream before putting $10,000 into a home office as Troy Hunt has done.

Most of the cost is the laptop and the big monitor - and that laptop would be serious overkill for just about anyone (probably including Troy!).

I was more interested in the other parts of the setup TBH, such as the lighting and monitor arms.

This is all pretax income since it's deductible, so you should be multiplying it by your (1 - marginal tax rate) to get the real equivalent price. Assuming he probably makes more than $180k AUS ($127k USD), his rate is probably at %45, so the 'real' price for this is $5720.

Also the prices your looking up are pretty inflated. I did a very lazy amazon search for the CRG90 for example and I got ~$1500 right off the bat: https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B07L9HCJ2V/ref=sr_1_...

I am an artist living close to the poverty line, I know absolutely nothing about how “business deductions” work. He still had ~$10.4k of cash or credit on hand all at once to turn into this pile of hardware, right? That sounds pretty real to me.

He mostly linked to manufacturer pages, I did not feel like spending the time to see if there were better deals out there. Feel free to spend an hour or so on that if you want to.

Perhaps in your jurisdiction it is. In mine (US¹), it is not.

¹it was, but my understanding is that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act did away with it; e.g.: https://www.barrons.com/articles/can-you-deduct-a-home-offic...

I'm fairly certain he is self employed / has a business, and Australia is different :)

oh wait, I forgot my SO is helping out with the rent after we moved to a much cheaper town, dude paid slightly less than twice my year's rent for this. Dude paid three months of my friggin' rent for his webcam.

Honest question, what does this guy do that makes any of that even remotely necessary?

I mean, good for him and all, but it just seems like a post about a guy who likes fancy toys getting fancy toys.

Is there anything more to it than that?

It may seem like flexing to you but to me it is a carefully thought out business decision.

I’m very well-off now but in the early part of my career we were very frugal except in computer hardware. I did a lot of freelancing, and the logic was simple. Anything that makes it easier for you to spend extra time doing work is worth it. I have never ever regretted hardware purchases made on those terms. If Troy makes a conservative hundred dollars per hour and works an extra hour or two a day because of the ergonomics, he makes out like a bandit.

Conversely, if inadequate hardware leads you to a repetitive stress injury or simply not feeling motivated to work, the resulting cost can be substantial.

When you spend 15 hours a day in front of a computer every day, you want the best experience for yourself. It’s the one place where I’m totally happy to be a bit extravagant rather than fancy clothes, cars, home location etc

When I was a teen working on my car, I had very little money. I always had to make do with whatever could be scrounged for a tool. It's amazing what you can do with a screwdriver :-/

As an adult working on my car, I get the right tools, and that sure makes for both a much easier time and getting professional results.

If you're into electronics, spending $$$ on a quality soldering iron is night and day in terms of time and money saved on the project. I discovered this because that was my side job in college, assembling circuit boards, and they gave me a pro soldering iron and what an amazing difference that was.

If your business is your video blog, getting a professional quality mike and camera is a good investment.

I suppose it's maybe a matter of understanding what will get you a decent return on your investment.

To the car example, I've done a moderate amount of work on my car in the past year. When I started, I had a junk set of sockets and wrenches from Walmart. I had a socket split in half when I was trying to loosen a bolt. Obviously the tools I had weren't up to the task. So I went to the hardware store and bought Crescent brand tools. They work great for a hobbyist like me. I don't do nearly enough mechanical work to require SnapOn or similar professional-grade tooling.

So I guess my critique is more, does this guy do things that require the top of the line tooling, or is he doing it just to showboat?

From other things I've read here, I'm reasonably convinced that he is probably justified in spending on the things he did. I didn't have any of that background when I read the article and made my initial comment.

> does this guy do things that require the top of the line tooling

If his business is video blogging, yes, he does.

I can buy that I guess.

Probably the main philosophical disagreement I have with the article is summed up by (and probably the rest of the article was tainted by) the opening line:

> I was searching around for a quote along the lines of you only being as good as the tools you use

I personally (fully aware it's a quirk of mine that others don't seem to share) feel that fancy tools are often a crutch for a lack of understanding.

Granted, this guy looks to have a long list of accomplishments, so good for him for wanting a fancy set up. If it brings him joy then more power to him.

I feel you, In several areas of my life (computers, stereo, photography, old truck, etc) I go overboard in building whatever it is I’m working on not because I strictly need that amazingness but because I enjoy having constructed it and the feel of using a fine instrument.

Building and using it sparks joy.

I also am irked by people who buy and use amazing things and display said amazing thing from a position of “I am amazing therefore I need amazing things” or vice versa. I dunno, it seems really inauthentic or something. I’m getting a little of that vibe from this article but OTOH I’m also getting a lot of the “Building and using great instruments sparks joy” vibe too and I think the former may just be coming across by virtue of writing a blog post to share the latter so, oh well :)

I've always felt you are only as good as you are when your tools are taken away.

I think it's bad to let your tools become a crutch to avoid gaining a deeper understanding.

That being said, if you take a software developer's CPU away what are they supposed to do - build their own foundry? Same for electrical engineers - can they really be faulted for an inability to design a modern chip without the help of extensive tooling?

(I'm certainly nowhere near being capable of implementing my own C++ compiler from scratch.)

> I'm certainly nowhere near being capable of implementing my own C++ compiler from scratch.

It's not that bad. A couple months and you're good to go.

I doubt even you would be that keen to write a C++17 compiler from scratch :P

I did write a C++98 compiler from scratch. I then was consumed by writing a D compiler, but the later C++ versions aren't hard from a compiler perspective.

For context, the person you replied to is the author of the D language.

Video editing and streaming would be the main things driving his hardware needs - the computer, camera, lighting, etc.

I edit video on the side and without touching much 4K, I already need a new laptop ($5k or so). I am self-employed and have three screens at the office and three at home. I looked into the same 49" he got but ended up getting a colour-calibrated 24" instead. I have a curved 34" at the office which is great. He's included some of his recording gear which pushes out the cost. If I included drone, two gimbals, camera, GoPro, etc in my list it would ramp up as well.

He also explains that tax write-offs are a factor. Plus, I imagine he has some cash stockpiled and burning a hole in his pocket. Upgrading his tools for the first time in years isn't that outrageous if he'd been running into issues with much of his gear just prior to that.

He does blogging and stuff. So this seems like a combination of unboxing, business expense tax deduction and simple expensive toys.

An honest setup could be had for much less. I think he could save quite a bit on his PC with custom built, screens by going smaller and more numerous, camera by going 1080p instead of 4k. That would be a perfectly good work from home setup but he wanted to go max and blog about it.

but tbh from the invoices i have seen for business 'expenses', 10k for a critical part of your work flow is forgiveable.

He explained that shifting from more smaller screens meant that he could remove the bezel from right in front of his face. Those big, curved screens are brilliant to use IMO. He might have passive income from Pluralsight courses, have his mortgage paid off and figure he might as well use the surplus cash to treat himself. Others might spend more than that upgrading a car they're suddenly using less than ever before.

You can read about Troy on his Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_Hunt

tldr; he’s a security researcher and the creator of Have I Been Pwned?

Nice setup, no doubt, but it's a bit of the "more money than I know what to do with" setup. I've set up mine as following

1. just get one ultra wide. I've had 3 or 4 monitors before. his setup with another monitor on either end strikes me as borderline insane/gratuitous. plus then you can consider different graphics cards.

2. mic: blue yeti pro

3. webcam: just my Android smartphone with droidcam installed. With blu-tack and having a bunch of three prong powerpoint plastic safety things for my toddler, I've rigged them up as the mounts/tripods.

4. logitech Master 3 mouse

5. mechanical keyboard

5. computer I haven't upgraded for almost 10 years (this is likely the year), but as hinted in the post, AMD seems obviously the way to go right now.

6. seat: I've actually got a kneeling chair because of limited space. I don't mind it but I agree that chair is a necessary expense.

7. desk: actually a custom cabinetry job off the side of my bedroom: possibly a spot where I've one upped him.

I think my setup will soon be approaching his in terms of practical capability, but probably cost 4 to 5 digits less...

I think two of the items will have a particularly significant impact.

The camera and lens will yield a vastly superior result, much more visually pleasing. If you’re capturing video for public consumption, it’s well worthwhile considering. (Concerning the camera body: Troy speaks of the Sony α6400, but the α6100 will produce identical results at a somewhat lower price; the main differences are that the α6100 lacks colour grading profiles—something only useful if you do post-processing—and has a plastic body and an inferior screen and viewfinder.)

The computer: ten years is a rather long time in desktop CPU performance. Per https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html, the average desktop CPU is now more than 5× as fast as the average 2010 one. That rate seems roughly right for high-end consumer CPUs, though once you go up to your Threadripper SKUs it jumps up to 7.5–10× the best of then ’cos you’ve got so many cores, though at a somewhat higher price. And that’s just CPU—storage is waaaaay more than 5× faster; if you are still on a ten year old hard disk drive, updating to a solid state drive alone will increase task performance for many things far more than fivefold; make it NVMe with a new PC and some things you do may genuinely be more than a hundred times as fast.

Per your chart, single-thread performance has been basically flat since 2012. There's also negligible difference between SATA and NVME SSDs for regular desktop work (there are many videos demonstrating this).

I have a six-year-old computer (i5-4670k) and there isn't really much tempting me to upgrade. I can even still run contemporary games on high settings at 1440p (after upgrading GPU to a GTX 1060). The only thing that might eventually clinch it is that DDR3 RAM is very expensive at larger sizes, and it would be nice to have 64 or 128 GB for some workloads (requiring upgrading CPU + mobo to support DDR4).

> plus then you can consider different graphics cards

I can't speak for Nvidia but modern midrange AMD cards support 6 4K monitors (you'll typically need a DisplayPort MST hub).

Always interesting to see other people's setups.

I'm curious how that ZigBee graph was generated. Would be really cool to see under the hood of the network my Hues have formed. He mentions a "ConBee II sniffer". I skimmed Google for ConBee II, and indeed it's a ZigBee gateway, but I couldn't find any explicit sniffer functionality?

> I ended up with an Eaton 5P 850VA / 600W Line Interactive Tower UPS

It bothers me to no end that UPS's are rarely specified by their Energy capacity (e.g. Amp-Hours or Watt-Hours); only the maximum Power. Often times the Energy capacity isn't even specified anywhere obvious; you have to dig to find it. Bonkers.

> The main consideration was whether I should get 3 x 4K screens or go with an ultrawide which tends to be a lower pixel density.

Having gone Ultrawide, I regret it. It sounds good on paper, but it has proven to be far more hassle than it's worth. The problem is: if you tile windows into two halves, they're a little too big; if you tile into thirds, they're a little too small.

A third is fine for watching a video on the side, or working on a terminal. But it's too cramped for code.

Plus if you split it in halves, you end up moving your eyes and/or head a _lot_ to look from the left half to the right half. Remember, you're going to be at this screen for 8+ hours a day. The last thing you want is more mileage on your eyes and neck.

On a regular monitor, half a screen-width is "just right" as Goldilocks would say. So between Ultrawide versus two or three regular monitors, I'd rather go back to regular monitors.

I also thought it would be great for gaming, and to be fair it does deliver. The view in Subnautica is amazing! But the extra FoV and pixels are _expensive_, and one would need to account for that by pouring more money into their GPU. Realistically, I would rather have spent more money on upping my FPS than my FOV.

That said, any movies shot in ultrawide ratios look great on it...

>Having gone Ultrawide, I regret it. It sounds good on paper, but it has proven to be far more hassle than it's worth. The problem is: if you tile windows into two halves, they're a little too big; if you tile into thirds, they're a little too small.

Even better, rotate one of your three monitors into portrait mode. All the websites that have tons of whitespace on the sides because they are optimized for mobile phones in portrait mode are suddenly just right again. TikTok videos are fullscreen. Scientific Papers and other PDFs display perfectly. D&D character sheets fit just right. It's great!

My setup is a 3K landscape and a 1200p portrait. Having a portrait screen is really useful - I can use the full height for documents and paper, or test runners, or I can split it vertically. It's a great setup.

I like having two portrait 16:9 monitors side-by-side, typically above my laptop screen.

> if you tile windows into two halves, they're a little too big; if you tile into thirds, they're a little too small.

This depends on what you mean by "ultrawide". I have a 49" widescreen and thirds are perfect for almost everything - though occasionally it's necessary to use a 2/3-1/3 split. Six terminals side by side provides more than 80 columns per terminal.

Most operating systems make it unnecessarily difficult to use a large display effectively out-of-the-box, though. On macOS, Magnet is the saviour, I'll have to try the tool mentioned in the article for Windows.

You're quite right; it depends on the ratio. For reference mine is 21:9. A higher ratio might prove more useful.

> Most operating systems make it unnecessarily difficult to use a large display effectively out-of-the-box, though. On macOS, Magnet is the saviour,

1000x yes. I've always liked the freedom of a standard window manager combined with tiling shortcuts. On macOS I'm still on the defunct Spectacle, though. Is Magnet a worthwhile (having to re-learn shortcuts) upgrade?

Ah yes, mine is 32:9, which is far more useful IMO!

Re: Magnet, I switched from Spectacle when I got my first ultrawide a few years back, and haven't experienced any issues with it. The default shortcuts are quite reasonable (ctrl+alt+{d,f,g} for thirds), and the edge drag zones are nice. I don't really recall what Spectacle was like in day to day use though, sorry.

Re conbee2:

Checkout https://phoscon.de/en/conbee2 You can control a wide range of Zigbee devices without installing a gateway. From Philips Hue or Ikea lamps to plant sensors from Aliexpress.

List of supported devices: https://github.com/dresden-elektronik/deconz-rest-plugin/wik...

You would integrate the devices with an OpenSource HomeKit or HomeBridge implementation on a Raspberry or similar into your home.

That's a cool setup. Surprised that he went with a prebuilt though given that he clearly weighs all options carefully. ie thinks carefully about the hdmi adapter off ebay but doesn't pick a case that doesn't annoy him

What does this guy need dual xeons, 128gb ram and 900w PS for? From his site, it looks like he does powerpoints and video conferences. I understand the monitors but the rest is totally overkill, even if its for a tax break. If he wants reliability, he's better off buying 2 identical machines for redundancy and using a SAN so he can switch machines if one breaks. It would cost more and therefore be a bigger write-off.

Analysing data dumps for https://haveibeenpwned.com is one of the data intensive things he’ll do. That’ll suck the life out of the computer.

From the website [1]:

> Fortunately, today's modern cloud services like Microsoft Azure make it possible to do this without breaking the bank!

So I'd guess it's not for that.

[1] https://haveibeenpwned.com/About

In the post, but easy to miss:

>I do a lot of data processing in SQL Server which can be really memory intensive (no, the cloud is not always the solution to this, I've got a draft blog post on that)

Add to that: video/photo editing, live-streaming, development, and general purpose usage, and it's not an unreasonable setup.

seems like the sort of thing that would be better suited to an AWS instance (or azure, if you're a regional director at microsoft) rather than running a crazy power-hungry computer as your primary workstation.

He may very well have it locally for better security when doing some of tne analysis and other work for getting those dumps.

Maybe just stealth Lenovo marketing.

tl;dr: Troy went into the rabbit hole of buying a bunch of high-cost gadgets and accessories [that he legitimately needed] to get tax deductions.

And due to changes in the home office deduction in 2018 most people can't even do the same for themselves.

I'm kind of surprised that congress critters are not focusing on home office deductions as part of the incentives. The $1200 is an advance (not free money), but an actual deduction would be useful come around next year.

Deductions are a tax break for people who have time or resources to strategise their interactions with the tax system.

Not sure your point, but if you're attempting to say that deductions only work for people that don't file 1040ez, then yeah, you're right. Surely, you have more of a point than that though, yeah? Hiring a CPA or even just an accountant to do your taxes can be more expensive, but it has never failed to yield a large enough reason to not incur that expense, for me.

Your response proves my point. As you are someone who knows that that an accountant saves you enough in taxes to justify the expense, you are a person who has time or resources to strategise their interactions with the tax system.

Many people don't have the luxury of strategising any of their interactions with the tax system. Either because their situation isn't covered by any deductions, or because they don't posses the knowledge, or because they don't possess sufficient free time to investigate.

Last I checked max you can claim for purchasing home office equipment in Australia is $300. Although he claim the decline in value every year. Which would probably get you $300 again.

https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Income-and-deductions/Ded...

If he is running haveibeenpwned, he is probably purchasing through a company with instant asset write-off.

Could instant asset write-offs apply?

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