The French example is horrible. Barely sensical, very weird, absolutely not what a native person would write nor say. It looks like something someone who barely speaks French would produce.
Some people elsewhere in the comments are saying it's just a weird English sentence so it has a weird French sentence. My French is no good enough to critique on it's nativeness though
(Paul Graham is a very poor writer, and his image doesn't mean much to Europeans, who don't live much in individual, shoddily-made houses the way Americans do)