Hacker News Reader

Comment by kenty | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The last tech job I worked at which had a bonus structure had the bonus amount set at 100 euros (not a typo).

> most cars are in the ballpark

If you’re in the Bay, maybe, otherwise it’s $35-50k depending on how new

That's why I wrote "depending on where you are"

Brand new cars, yes, most people are NOT buying brand new that is another privilege.

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.

I don't think the 75k number is what's shocking. It's a house that costs 7 figures. That is not remotely attainable for most people in this country.

It's not surprising given the author's background. What I don't get is the part right before about not being able to afford a family-sized house in Palo Alto. Guessing the answer is yeah, they could afford it, but they don't want to pay that much for something still not very large.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/naacp-...

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!

He is an American so 'first world' is kind of debatable now with Trump. /s

This is from (2024) fyi

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.

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.

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.)

I really appreciate the answer and the detailed breakdown.

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.

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.

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.

"Sorry"

Sorry.

I always marvel at technology the same way: $200 gets you a whole lot of TV, or a coffee table that will not survive two moves. Also I cut and trimmed a cat door into our laundry room so the girls could do their business, so I very much approve of going a little bit over the top for your kitties. Maybe when my son is old enough for the cats to see him at night I'll work on a solution similar to yours.

> One would almost expect the computer to cost millions of dollars

By 2030 they probably will...

He spend more than 10 yearly salaries of me. Why not get 20 junk computers and lan party classics or opensource incarnations?

> 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.

Yes, the whole post just screams / drips of extreme privilege.

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.

Are people that much larger in the US? I’d happily raise three European-sized kids in the 130 sqm bachelor pad.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Where do you eat meals?

At the table in the living room?

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

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

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.

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.

Do you think there's any good decision making and hard work involved too, or just pure dumb luck?

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.

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.

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)

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.

I agree with your core point that luck is necessary, but thinking that everybody works hard is simply fiction.

I hear a lot about these mythical slobs and slackers that we're all so much better than. I very rarely meet them. I mostly run into people doing their best with the resources they've got available to them.

The failure mode is not people that are supposed to work eight hours a day and then only work seven or six. And I don't really think of them as slobs or slackers. What they do is they come into the job and they turn the crank. They don't really think deeply about the impact they're trying to have. They do sort of what they're told, even if it leads to a dead end. And then maybe at some point they'll report that they hit a wall and you can loop back with them and adjust the plan. Iteration loops with these sorts of folks tend to be quite long. Decisions take more time than they should, and simple tasks turn into complex negotiations.

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.

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.

100%. It's hard work and good luck/timing, not privilege.

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.

The dad is an architect. So probably rich enough to afford (good) education and putting Kenton in the right place at the right time.

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.

You are likely engaging as a good sport (and the anecdata are fun) but you don't really need to explain yourself, if that's what you are trying to do.

Life is all shades of precarious, unfair, galtonboard-ish, windfall-ish. Pareto-powerlaw-nonergodic-pissed off pikachu-ish. Have fun. Somebody's got to.

Yeah I just think it's fun to tell the story.

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...

And luck creates privilege!

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.

Who cares? They got lucky or worked hard or whatever. Congrats to them. Their success does not make your life worse.

> Their success does not make your life worse

Debatable

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.

I mean the guy is coming from Google so they actually made the world worse.

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.

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.

The word "complicit" is sneaking in a lot of philosophical baggage into your statement. Surely you cannot mean that being witness to a murder (while failing to prevent it) and committing the murder are the same sin? Or that they should be held to the same degree of judgement?

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?

No, my word choice is not sneaking in any philosophy.

> 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.

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".

> They are as clean as they can be

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.

> but if you intend to indict a man, you'll need much stricter standards than this.

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.

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?

What part of providing half of the internet's infrastructure is supposed to be the "orphan killing" part?

“Just following orders” eh?

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.

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".

> 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...

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

> and is being wasted

Why is this use of their money a waste?

How many people will get to use this for LANs? A couple dozen once every couple of months?

A proper Internet cafe could serve thousands per week.

What is the mechanism by which you imagine that this private individuals $75K becomes a public internet cafe?

You mean 1.075M? The house was the bulk of it. But that’s the point. A private individual will use his economic power on vanity spending and it won’t materialize into anything efficient or useful.

OK - what is the mechanism by which you believe this private individual’s $1.075M should be turned into a public internet cafe?

Why would I need to believe in some mechanisms? What are you on about?

You seem to be suggesting that there's a problem with private individuals spending their money as they see fit because that leads to what you see as wasteful vanity projects. So I'm asking how you think the world should change to compel these individuals to spend on things you believe are more efficient and less wasteful? I would point out that spending $1.075M on food for starving people probably scores more utilitarianism points than an internet cafe though in your zero sum world.

When I say that people (or as you refer to them „private individuals”) using their economic means (and therefore resources and time of others that they hire) on misguided projects is a negative phenomenon, that’s a whole complete statement.

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.

I noticed you edited your original post to point out these “silly” objections. The point of saying “private individuals” is that they have the right to determine for themselves what is a good use of their money and your opinion about whether it’s wasteful is irrelevant. I was assuming you had some ideas about how to reduce the waste but apparently not, you just wanted to tell everyone about your personal preferences for how other people spend their money.

They do have that right and it results in waste.

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.

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.

I’ve gotten two separate responses reaffirming the very same “strawmen”, so I guess the cliches exist?

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.

Make the argument yourself, directly, in your own words or GTFO.

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!

So like 10 people.

For one event, yeah!

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.

That’s the cliche. Only people with accumulation get to decide.

This is not crazy at all for anyone from the Bay Area. A rundown house in a not so great part of the bay is seven figures minimum. 75k is a typical bonus at a company like Facebook or Google. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of tech workers that are at this level of wealth.

the amount of people pretending this post is anything but rich rich level of spending is staggering

Wait a bit... everybody loves looking at and admiring sports cars, even if they are poor and can never afford them. Nobody would hate the car or the owner just because it is out of reach for them. What's the difference here?

Or they just cashed in some stock options.

> 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.

If ever there was a case for cloud gaming.. However these days those machines may be appreciating assets.

> 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.

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?

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".

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Yeah, HN today is not the same HN as 10 years ago. A lot more Foucault, a lot less Paul Graham.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com