We built our house for LAN parties (2024)
lanparty.house
lanparty.house
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 glad someone is getting to live the dream :)
Honestly this is the best part and even more notable than the awesome house.
LAN parties? Wealth's not really required, it's possible to have those with laptops and a router. High school friends that not only kept in touch but continued to game together for over a decade? That's rare.
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.
Nerds always thinks they're special :) This is the same for most people in the world.
This is difficult to arrange at short notice :)
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...
Makeup air unit and exhaust fan, just like a commercial kitchen, sans the hood and fire surpression.
The exhaust fan should have a slightly higher cfm that the makeup air unit to maintain negative pressure so the body odor does not escape the gaming cave :)
Our area of it featured an interior natural gas well that we did not question much. It was just back there in one corner, with extraction equipment, sitting idle; we built a wall faced with clapboard in front of it that we hung neatly-bundled cables from.
DSL had just been introduced to the area wherein DOCSIS was not yet a thing, so we had a lot more bandwidth than some of the participants did at home. 10/100 switching hubs were all the rage in affordable networking gear. LAN parties and gaming happened.
Rent was very inexpensive and we were much younger. One year, rent was paid by putting a fresh layer of muck on the roof over the course of a few days.
The primary intended purpose was for it to be used as a recording studio (we could lay down 12 digital tracks at once!), and we did manage to make it pay its own bills most months, but those bills were tiny.
They'd have all laughed at me if I sent a hat around the room to collect for a heat exchanger to get some fresh air inside and reduce the stink. ;)
(But the original comment was mostly about the people. They showed up. 18? Probably. Maybe more, but often less. Getting enough folks to show up was always the easy part.)
Every lan party would have that one guy who turned up with nothing pre-installed or patched, and would finally, after a couple of hours, get their copy of Unreal Tournament working and join the game just as everyone had grown tired of it and were ready to hop into another game instead. This would rinse and repeat for almost every game.
I had some sympathy, but not too much, because we were generally fairly organised about sending out game lists in advance.
There was something delightfully chaotic about trying to get a good game of anything actually played, because even without technical problems, you'd get a situation where at most a third of the players were keen, another third were mildly amused and another third were basically just barely tolerating it because they wanted to play something next and didn't want to ruin the vibe, but clearly would much rather be playing almost anything else. Of course, as games rotated, so did these groups.
There was also that corner of people who had no intention of playing anything and were just there to utilise the ability to privately swap their terrabyte sized "anime" collections across fast ethernet ( or via physically handing over hard-drives ). I tended to leave them well alone.
I actually didn't get much gaming done on those days since I didn't usually have much of a gaming machine for myself at that time. My focus was instead mostly directed at getting everyone else up and running.
Every now and then I'd take a turn at someone else's computer. It worked fine.
Except that one day when I did bring a reasonably-capable machine with a Voodoo3 2000 card. On that day, I was the one having computer issues and it seemed like getting updated drivers from 3dfx was the correct move to make.
But nVidia had just announced their purchase of 3dfx. And 3dfx's own website was dead like it had never really existed; as if someone had walked into the closet where it was hosted and yanked the plug out of the wall. It was at that time that it became clear that the early web tendency to scatter mirrors of important things all over the place had become a lost concept.
I spent hours trying to find drivers. It felt like all of my well-honed Google-fu was a spectacular failure. But I did eventually succeed at finding recent drivers, and they did fix my problem, and games were then played.
The specificity of the occasion pins down the date very precisely: Saturday, December 16, 2000.
I’m lucky I got in with them but when I moved to this small coastal town from a huge city (Houston) i promised myself I’d say ‘yes’ to almost any social occasion and it has been life changing.
I went from many friends to no friends when I immigrated to USA then back to many friends (although heavily work linked) in Houston over 20 years to zero friends here again.
I guess you get better at it like anything else or you give up and atrophy socially totally.
I know plenty of people with enough friends to fill a little LAN like this. And setting one up is fairly cheap, if you don't want to build a house just for it, (a few switches and some cables); but not many adults I know have enough time or free enough calendars to get together for such an event more than once a year.
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.)
The reactions to my first (much smaller) house in 2011 were very similar.
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...
Staying in your own yacht means that you have all the things arranged like you like it. You can't repaint your hotel room. You can't control how firm the bed is in your hotel room. Most hotels give you a choice of pillows - but you have to do something with the ones you don't like without taking them out of your room. Your yacht/house is never booked when you want to go - which can be a big deal.
There is no reason someone with a yacht can't stay in a hotel. I suspect many with a yacht spend more nights in a hotel than all their houses/yachts combined.
You can have a lot of midgets on a yacht, but where would you keep the donkey?
And when you get bored with Europe, you pay someone to sail it to Caribbean and can fly there to party again.
And if you're poor and only have a few million dollar yaht next to your by the river apartment, then you can at least have a party on the yacht when it's parked, cos you don't want to get caught drunk & sailing.
Not that I ever thought about what it would be like to have a yacht. But once broke onto one and me and my 2 friends had a before party on it. We didn't damage anything or litter. We just didn't have any place to stay, because the last bus to the city arrived at 19:30 and clubs didn't open until 21 and it was cold.
Do you actually drive it around or is it permanently moored?
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.
Your house is inspiring!
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.
May I suggest the problem is not with the questions then?
You're completely welcome to make a post that raises those questions, but I think its irrelevant here. I don't think its productive for every fun project posted to have an inquisition in the comments on whether or not the project deserves to exist.
> May I suggest the problem is not with the questions then?
It's against the guidelines to make swipes like this.
I find it frustrating that people cannot have a conversation about what enables a project to exist without people going shhh just look at the shinies.
To me, it is a very surface level uncritical attitude directly counter to the hacker ethos of looking at how systems work.
We tend to examine projects by their inputs and outputs. I don't think it's fair to exempt capital and resources, one of the key inputs, from examination.
That's not to say this isn't a cool house or the person building it did anything bad themselves, they're just an actor in the bigger incentive system.
Learn cool technology, build cool things, meet cool people.
Now, HN is one of the more pessimistic communities I frequent. Most posts are berating or belittling the author, the technology, someone's politics, other commenters, capitalism in general, and so on. It's all so tiresome to read and the amount of time and energy wasted doesn't hold a candle to whatever the AI companies are doing. It's gotten to the point that I pretty much never scroll past halfway down the comments page, because that is almost always about where the useless and most whiney comments tend to start. It used to be lower, like 10-20%. It may be creeping up even higher.
I would love to find an online community where the pessimists don't rule the roost. Haven't found it yet, but if anyone wants to drop me a hint, my contact info is in my profile.
I feel like people are much more pessimistic towards technology in general, vs. the days you're referring to. Big Tech was still "cool" then, the wealth divide wasn't as big as it is now, social media wasn't (as) toxic, and AI wasn't actively making everything worse.
Nowadays, it's hard to be optimistic for how technology is progressing. People do hack away and share interesting, fun, and (often) useless projects, and those still draw less pessimistic discussion. But these are the exception, among other news of how technology is getting worse, or making things worse.
So I guess my point is, it not so much that HN or the community has gotten worse, but there's just less to be excited about in tech these days.
When we were all younger it seemed the sky was the limit
But we've gotten wiser and realize the ceiling with tech like iPhones and PS5
Hedonic treadmill just goes in a loop of experience. Consumer tech is just attention seeking codependency on the part of corporate
The real cool stuff going on with tech is in domains like regenerative and longevity medicine; see Michael Levin at Tufts for truly sci fi Wolverine healing type mind blowing ideas
Ive got so many crazy tech fantasies though, im actually afraid to describe them for fear of giving the ruling class more ideas.
It doesn't mean the signal has disappeared from places like HN. It just means the noise has become much noisier, and now it's much harder to find the signal. And it's true not only for HN, but for all forums/communities I've used over the last ~15 years. Kind of a natural process, I think: more people on the internet, more people in tech -> less quality in discussions on average.
I'm still trying to find interesting discussions and useful information, but taking more conscious approach: not reading every article from frontpage or using some kind of ranking system to select content for me.
I built a small tool for this and use it myself (e.g., I found your comment using it :) ). If you're interested, you can try it: https://knoless.app
I remember i was banned from every single front page subreddit for asking a question about mask policy during covid. I think one week they said masks provided very little protection and they were in limited supply so individuals should stay home and save the masks for healthcare workers and then the next week they said everyone should wear a mask even if you have to reuse an old one for a week straight and even if your entirely alone. So i asked why the sudden change from one week to the next and might have said something like the previous advice made more sense to me and got banned from basically all of reddit.
And that was when i finally managed to kick my reddit addiction. So now i stumble across HN and it seems just like an early reddit except with one main community instead of a bunch of smaller ones. But i see a very similar trend already in the few months ive been lurking and the few weeks ive been commenting, ive seen what looks like political based moderation rather than conduct based.
Im all for keeping discussions civil and engaging but when you try to control which arguments are allowed to be made or block anyone from making a decent argument to favor one side over another then i lose all interest in anything discussed there because you cant have a discussion when one side cant speak. Thats why reddit is so empty today. You can have empty memes and pointless joking around but you cant talk about anything real unless your just a ranting raving lunatic because thats what you become when you dont have anyone to push back against your crazy ideas. Echo chambers are full of lunatics because echo chambers create lunatics. So if you want to keep this space full of actual discussion then dont allow it to become an echo chamber which means you have to defend the right for people you disagree with to have a voice in this space even if its just so that others can explain to them where they may have overlooked something when forming their argument.
Politically i find myself in the center because i tend to disagree with democrats about as often as i disagree with republicans but i can understand where they are coming from and often agree with the idea but i disagree with the implementation. But in my experience the only people who try to stop me from speaking are democrats. The only sites which have a censorship problem are run with a clear democrat bias. Personally id rather have a hate filled platform where people are free to discuss and associate than a locked down platform with no disagreement or hate or mean words where people arent allowed to talk freely.
I value civility but i value the freedom to discuss and thus the freedom to think about and articulate ideas far more.
Good moment to pull specifics from hn.algolia.com. In my experience on the site it has the best moderation on the internet. Not every site moderator is interviewed by the New Yorker.
Go comment with an independent perspective under r/conservative and watch what happens.
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!
you are a good person!
It is crazy to me that you not only have that many friends free to visit at the same time, but also that they're all interested in PC gaming. All while having kids (or at least you do).
I was at a LAN party a few months ago, but it was with a retro PC club more than a group of friends (altough I am friends with a couple of those guys). Someone setup Netware and had a dashboard connected to a big screen showing machines connected over IPX. Worked great for games like Doom II. But I can't imagine wanting to do that more than like, once a year. I'm more of a small group of friends + board games person.
Thanks for sharing this awesome project!
One thing I'm wondering about (and was happy to see) is how you seem to have your (childhood) friends close by, at least on occasion.
I live in Europe and am considering what a move somewhere else in Europe (+/- 1000km) would mean. Seeing much less of my long-time friends, I imagine. But Austin seems much further from the earlier places you've stated you've lived. Did some of your friends just move with you? Are they visiting often?
Regarding the lack of patch panel, while not ideal it probably isn't going to make any difference as the cables can probably survive being handled 100s or 1000s of times without any real chance of issues.
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...
I'm curious about this. Do you mean a layer of paint-like substance that makes the walls isolate better?
I mean the coat on my brick wall (and ideally roof), that will reflect most of the infrared and UV.
I've used a white paint like this on the conservatory and white walls outside, and along with a solar-reflective foil outside of my windows it's the biggest factor to having a nice temperature inside. I might also actually consider painting the interior walls with something like this as well - there's less he t escaping through radiation if it's reflected back, right?
Root cause analysis complete.
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.)
Just saying for anyone reading this, it is worth it to ask for a second opinion before heat pump install.
FWIW he justifies it further here: part of his job, as he saw it, was to show up in public looking like a guy who could afford brand new clothes whenever he was seen, and he had a public appearance of some kind every day. The interviewer also mentions at the start that it came up in his episode of Cribs, so I'm pretty sure that's the one you're thinking of. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEQvb6hCtog
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 :)
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!
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.
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.
No extra latency from these?
Zoom out buddy
Clumping litter works surprisingly well. It's really a minor thing.
I remember part of the fun for us was getting all the PCs hooked up. It was so janky, but it was our janky and we loved it. Even file sharing felt fun.
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
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.
There are good arguments that as a whole the wealth distribution in your country does not have any serious issues, but this article strongly suggests that it is not true in this particular case.
I mean the author, trying to be as transparent as possible, literally says that he can not say how much money they spent on building of this house. Generally that implies keeping your private lives private, but his article strongly suggests that is not the concern of the author. And considering that, there are only bad reasons remains on why he would want to do it.
1. Tax payment fraud. 2. Government subsidy fraud 3. Income from criminal activities
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.
I love the cat doors everywhere! Great idea to keep the litter boxes sequestered.
Howdy from Houston fellow Texan!
Alright.
> I actually find it funny how cheap computers are.
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.
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-...
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!
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.)
I should've stated more clearly what particular part of that statement I found untrue: the "computers being cheap" part when you pary 3k for a decent, but not great, gaming pc ;)
I absolutely believe that you paid 75k for 22 machines (I've used 20 in my post above in error). From the photos I can clearly and quite enviously see that no part of that setup could have been cheap.
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.
By 2030 they probably will...
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I manage engineering teams by day, so I've seen my fair share of folks that have these traits. They're not bad people, but they don't care about the quality of their work, and they're not thinking very hard about what they're producing.
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.
Life is all shades of precarious, unfair, galtonboard-ish, windfall-ish. Pareto-powerlaw-nonergodic-pissed off pikachu-ish. Have fun. Somebody's got to.
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...
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.
Debatable
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.
While we may say the cowardly bystander has less moral character than the one who would risk their life to attempt to stop the murder, surely you cannot mean the witness is as guilty of judgement as the murderer? You cannot mean they deserve the same sentence.
I will, for the sake of my own sanity, assume you mean that the witness is a coward. You are indicting their moral character. There is a degree of self-sacrifice that you might personally find more or less agreeable in a man. Fine.
But merely witnessing the murder is not complicity, just as merely working at Google is not complicity. Whether society is "ok" with the cowardly bystander not preventing murder is not, in my eyes, what this discussion is about.
What next? Will we compel all men to live to our standard?
> complicit /kəm-plĭs′ĭt/
adjective Associated with or participating in an activity, especially one of a questionable nature.
--
A witness is not participating in a murder and by only a stretch of the word is associated with it by means of them recording a version of the events in their brain.
I have to say you clearly write effectively, but surely you see that you're the one "sneaking in" philosophy here?
Pretending that slow, oppressive, plodding, calculated, rising control of a population of workers by means of wage control, obfuscation of responsibility, and simple lying to a public about goods or services is somehow murder is completely intellectually dishonest.
It is possible and necessary to recognize that there is more than one category of crime, and that each category of crime deserves its own social understanding and justice.
If I worked for a "defense" company a year or two before while they sold a gun toting robot dog, I would be complicit in its usage to kill people; if I stay there, I continue to be. I did not have to touch a single human being to be morally judged that I participated or was associated with a questionable activity.
If I worked for Facebook while they actively experimented on teenagers and children and adults to influence their minds and choices to determine their levels of suicidal tendencies without regard to their safety, I would be complicit in their actions.
I take no pleasure in saying this, because I don't know who you are, where you come from, or what you do or don't believe. What I can point as is you have tried to take a word "complicit" as a perfectly accurate word, stretch it to an invalid comparison, and then from that comparison, create a meaningless argument unrelated to my point.
That is the type of action, thinking, and wordplay I do not trust.
Yes. Working for Google is complicity in all their affairs. Witnessing a murder is not complicity in its timeline. Association by external sensory intake is not the same thing as association by direct participation, and direct participation or association with a murder is very obviously something we can morally judge.
For the sake of my own sanity, I'll assume you're simply not understanding the word choice of complicity, or are assuming that being complicit is somehow a binary judgement of quantitative punitive punishment.
> 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".
Indeed, which is to say not clean at all.
"Only slightly dirty" and "much dirtier than mine" are fine judgements to console yourself of your involvement, but if you intend to indict a man, you'll need much stricter standards than this.
To be completely clear: I agree with your moral assessment. I too would not work for Facebook due to my moral qualms with the company. However, it is a terribly dangerous game to begin judging a man's choices when you know nothing about him.
Before long you'll convince yourself that you're the only decent man around and the rest are less-than-human.
I don't want to indict anyone. I am not a judge or prosecutor. I am saying that my own moral shortcomings do not justify his.
> Before long you'll convince yourself that you're the only decent man around and the rest are less-than-human.
There is this kinda old book that has some stories in it. I never got to read the whole thing back-to-back, but the Cliff's Notes of it is pretty much that we all are imperfect beings, that we are not able to fix everything on our own and that the best we can do is to recognize and forgive the mistakes we all made.
> it is a terribly dangerous game to begin judging a man's choices when you know nothing about him.
Love the sinner, hate the sin.
I don't need to know anything about a person working for Facebook to know that the product of their labor is bad for society. Saying "this thing you are doing is evil" is NOT the same as saying "you are an evil person". People will end up creating all sorts of rationalizations for their actions, especially when their identities are attached to it. If we don't call out on evil, then it becomes accepted.
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...
"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.
It’s rich, yes. And the author acknowledges that. Still a cool build!
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.
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.
Why is this use of their money a waste?
A proper Internet cafe could serve thousands per week.
I don’t need to design any world changes to go with that. So your line of inquiry makes it seem like you’re fighting some phantoms or replicating debate strategies that you’ve observed. That’s unnecessary. The statement still holds up.
The only objection you can make is the silly one: actually it’s not up to me to decide what’s misguided, it’s up to those people who have the means. Or you can say doing useless crap is actually good which is not even a valid objection in my book.
Maybe they should be shamed for vanity projects and not admired?
Maybe admitting that the phenomenon exists is the first step before any ideas can even be discussed? Clearly it’s extremely difficult for people to recognize.
In my opinion it’s even more disrespectful to pretend that a simple counter argument doesn’t exist, and keep doubling down on the cliche.
Just that ignorance is not an excuse anymore. We have knowledge conveniently available.
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.
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.
I mean, the whole place looks like a cookie cutter office block. The lack of appreciation and want for good design goes far deeper.
Once you've done that, just add the computer chips.
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!
[1]: https://lanparty.house/images/office-action-overhead.jpg
My own memories of lan parties were much messier. People bringing their own assembled machines and running cables around the place to get this to work somehow, swapping cards etc.
Much appreciated, thanks for sharing! Really!
But also I wrote this in 2024, which was before I used AI to do anything.
Thanks again!
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.
the view for the new house is insane! congrats, well earned!
I mean, the American Express office looks like a track stop or mall you will find along the highway.
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.
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.
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).
Saying that, I'd live there in a heartbeat.
Trackball.
The other big thing in my opinion is the furniture that hides everything away when not in use. I am surprised it cost as much as you say. Well, I suppose that there is a lot of it. Taking a few mental notes here as well.
I have fond memories of university, where we would play UT99 (and DOOM I, believe it or not) in the computer room on Windows XP computers. Staff eventually found out that most of us were playing games over lunch break, so they tightened up the firewalls. However, one of the PC didn't have password protection on the BIOS, so I retrieved the necessary files, and cracked the admin password offline. Good times! The games went on for years.
Back then, around half of us were in a boarding school for a couple years, fully wired with Ethernet and no client isolation despite an extremely restrictive external firewall (that had us using free proxies ~15kB/s to launch Steam, I even saw some students play League of Legends with up to 13s of latency). But LAN was the thing. We had shared NAS, local bittorrent clients, and played soo much UT2004, some Sins of a Solar Empire, supreme commander, dawn of war II, minecraft & a few others.
Unfortunately this friend group is all over the place now, and I don't even allow myself to spend time playing single player games these days. Still, I hope that I'll settle down a bit at some point, and make more local friends. It's easier than people seem to think (for me at least), you don't have to be rich either. Meet a few people, meet their friends, etc.
We used to have LAN parties with my high school friends too, maybe we should try to reconvene, though much driving would be involved.
Even earlier in my life, I was figuring out the rudiments of networking (including these pesky crossover cables) playing Halo 2 with multiple Xboxes.
So yeah, this build resonates with me, thank you for sharing. I've had something similar in mind for a wile, though I think I'd do it a bit differently:
* probably use Linux as a host. On a single or a couple of servers: older games aren't too demanding, and half the fun is in the nostalgia.
* If using a single host, a single link is needed for USB, and can be split over multiple hubs in the gaming room.
* Maybe use GOG installers, they work well for LAN: no DRM, no Internet access required. People can buy a copy if they like the game.
It's tempting to multiplex displays and I/O over the network, but I am concerned about the necessary bandwidth and latency increase. It's also feasible to send all the data in a single optical fiber over multiple wavelengths, however I just looked it up: DP-SFP converters (fiber KVMs) seem to cost more than $1k, so $30 cables are a better option.
Wow. Imagine having this budget and then doing this.
Naah, even a small risk is unacceptable in such case.