My New FiberHouse in Kansas City | Hacker News Reader

My New FiberHouse in Kansas City

feld.com

75 pointspash45 comments

What innovations are enabled by founders possessing gigabit fiber to the home? Is there any evidence from other houses of this nature suggesting that fast to-the-home internet enables some sort of workflow or product development that's not possible with conventional ~20mbit cable internet?

It seems to me like most bandwidth-critical businesses also require a datacenter anyway, and while fast to-the-home internet may enable the delivery of innovative technology (like high-definition gaming in the cloud) a fast connection to the home isn't necessary for the creation.

With that being said I do appreciate the concept: if building high-speed fiber can attract entrepreneurs (regardless of if it actually helps them), the incentive for municipalities to encourage high-speed buildout grows.

Its a lot cheaper to buy the fastest consumer cpu + 32gb ram + ssds and have it in the home office than it is to rent that same server in a good data center.

Having a 1gbps network would let you run more of your hardware at home where it's cheaper. This makes sense for certain specific cases.

For startups that need this power, hosting at home can save money. Also you can't beat the security of having physical access and control of your hardware.

For my app streamjoy.tv I run all the intensive tasks on a core i7 at home and then just push the rendered results to a $5 a month digital ocean vps.

For the kind of computation that I am doing it is much less expensive and faster to use my local hardware and push static pages to my nginx server at digital ocean.

If I had a 1gbps connection I would run even more of my setup at home. Its not that important for the features I have coded so far but in the future it would be helpful.

While this is a valid point. I assume you are probably violating the ToS laid out by your ISP. In general a "home" or "personal" account is not allowed to run a webserver. There is usually strict language in the ToS regarding this.

Can anybody comment on whether or not this any different with Google Fiber? Are they fine with you running whatever you want on that connection?

"Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you do so, you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection"

http://support.google.com/fiber/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...

(Whether they will enforce this remains to be seen.)

I am not talking about hosting the web server locally, and I don't for my setup. In my opinion however ToS that prohibit running local web servers are an outrage. The ISP should be a dumb pipe, and this betrays the spirit of net neutrality.

> For startups that need this power, hosting at home can save money. Also you can't beat the security of having physical access and control of your hardware.

Really? You can't beat the security of hosting servers in your basement with a top-tier datacenter with armed guards, mantraps, insurance, fire suppression, redundant power and internet, etc.?

My AWS instances are likely orders of magnitude more secure than a server sitting in my house.

In addition to physical security there's hardware longevity as datacenters tend to be both more efficiently cooled and cleaner than the average home, efficient network interconnect rather than consumer-grade hardware on consumer-oriented last-mile infrastructure, redundant power... the list goes on and on.

It seems like the grandparent poster really should rent part of a co-located rack instead.

I don't think there's much sense in hosting locally in a home environment with Google Fiber for almost any use case regardless of their ToS or the service's quality: for a system serving user requests a home doesn't deliver reliability or redundancy, for a lightly-utilized offline processing system a cloud provider is almost universally cheaper, and for a heavily-utilized offline processing system power and cooling costs become competitive with a datacenter relatively quickly (not to mention the cost of downtime - if you're at high utilization, downtime will cause your job queue to build rapidly and possibly insurmountably when you can't supply burst capacity).

> It seems like the grandparent poster really should rent part of a co-located rack instead.

For my use I need the fastest CPU + ram + IO I can get for as little as possible. The network does not need to be the best because this is not serving user requests.

I do not want to take the time to make my code run in parallel. An Intel Core i7 3770k with SSDs is the cheapest scaling I can get.

I use the same machine as a workstation for coding.

This setup saves me $180 a month at the cheapest dedicated host I could find + I have a blazing fast work station.

> Really? You can't beat the security of hosting servers in your basement with a top-tier datacenter with armed guards, mantraps, insurance, fire suppression, redundant power and internet, etc.?

Yes, a data center has armed guards. Those armed guards are not loyal to you and they are not observable to you.

If you are a startup with a trade secret written in code that is incredibly valuable and absolutely can not get out, self hosting gives you a kind of physical security that is hard to get running your code on rented machines.

I am not saying that this is my case, but I could see a case where it would apply.

Lets say you have developed extremely profitable algo trading strategies. If they are the kind of strategies where millisecond execution is paramount, of course you have to co-locate.

If your strategy is not under that kind of time constraint I would want my algos on machines only I could access.

So use your vastly profitable strategy to build or acquire a dedicated facility and hire or build a security system loyal to the company, not put machines in a random basement in Kansas City.

Production servers really don't belong in houses for many reasons besides connectivity and Google Fiber sure doesn't change that.

Most algo traders try to be as physically close as possible to the exchange. NASDAQ OMX even runs colo in the same datacenter as the nordic exchanges that traders can hire into.

If it's valuable enough to bribe datacenter guards, it's probably valuable enough to break into your office/home.

There is no downside to having super fast internet in your home/office. So I think this is more about an arbitrary rallying flag for the Kanas City tech community. It gets people excited about working on tech in general in KC, hopefully enough that it can "spark" and people can go super deep on their projects / companies.

The meme of entrepreneurs moving to KC just to get gigabit seems overblown though.

I just relocated my team to KC from Boston after living in the Home for Hackers house for 3 months.

Very few entrepreneurs are moving here exclusively for Fiber, the real attraction is the super inclusive community and the extensive resources available to startup founders. Every single person I have met here is so unbelievably welcoming and will go out of their way to help you out. The Fiber is just icing on the cake.

Another huge reason people have been moving here is cost. My team just moved into a 1800sqft house for $1100/month and fiber ($79/month) gets installed in a few weeks. So much cheaper than Boston..

Oh yeah, and the Kansas Angel Investor Tax Credits [http://www.ksrevenue.org/taxcredits-angel.html] are great.

I would guess it's similar, but I know people back home in mid MO (not quite KC) that pay less in rent than long term parking I see advertised in Boston.

Grew up in St. Louis. A good friend of mine was a MO State Rep a few years ago, and he rented a 2-bedroom apartment near the capitol in Jefferson City for $275/month. It's insane.

I live in Lawrence, and have lived there for ~7 years now. I just moved into a brand-new (first person in the building) two-bedroom apartment with fiber to the building, very nice appliances, granite countertops, etc.

And I am paying less in rent than my friends in DC would pay for a broom closet.

I definitely don't think there will be a stampede out to KC.

But I think the idea of "arbitrary rallying flag" is a good one. This could be a really great way to evolve the KC tech community. They now have some validation (both Google and Brad Feld have invested there), and there is some excitement.

I think it's a good thing, and I'm excited to see what happens

We don't really know.That is the idea, they have to discover it.

Is not a qualitative change, but is a really important quantitative change. New applications that today we don't really know about will be made possible.

Living in that environment will make them able to "see the future" and design something for where the "puck is going to be."

As an example, Mr Steve Jobs "saw the future" with the network system of Apple, and Microsoft used a supercomputer to simulate their future programs when computer power were ready.

Living in what environment? Immersing oneself in the Google Fiber content experience (i.e. Google Fiber TV) isn't seeing the future; it's living in Google's research lab and still following the puck Google has already shot.

As for the network speed, plenty of colleges and research institutions have hundreds-of-megabits and higher Internet connections straight to the terminal, not to mention datacenters, Korea, and Scandinavia: I'm pretty sure we know what's possible over a gigabit network and have been able to imagine the "what if everyone had this at home" scenario for a long time.

To your analogy, it's like Microsoft using a supercomputer to imagine a future when consumers own powerful computers, except the supercomputer is a $50 gigabit Ethernet switch that's been available at your local Best Buy for years.

I don't dispute that this is a productive idea for entrepreneurs, that revitalizing the KC tech scene is a great idea, or that Brad Feld's hacker-house offering is really neat, but I still can't see how moving to an environment that's already existed in other niche areas and is very trivially simulated is going to create revolutionary ideas.

I hear you, and your distinction between creation and delivery definitely makes sense.

That said, the hope is that this new, fat internet pipe will yield creativity and new services/technologies that we just can't predict yet. We have to push these technical boundaries first, because that stretch yields new products and groundbreaking thinking.

History would seem to suggest that that's one way to help lay the groundwork for new and powerful inventions. There are literally innumerable products and technologies we use every day that are many iterations away from the enabling-technology, but would have never been discovered or applied without the initial technical push.

Agreed. If they develop something that needs that much bandwidth they can dogfood it from their couch!

Which then nobody else in America can even attempt to use?

I was thinking the same thing while reading. I like the overall idea put forth of giving hackers/entrepreneurs a free place to live and work on their projects, that's obviously a very generous offering and should be appreciated. It's also great that it is around other people who are doing similar things, as being in an entrepreneurial environment with lots of other entrepreneurs around can make all the difference.

However, I don't see why making it in KC and having Google Fiber makes any difference? Will I be able to do anything I previously couldn't with my 50/25 FiOS connection?

The most obvious advantage is cheap offsite backups and or web hosting. But, also if you have 5 people there then you still have ridiculously fast internet access where a 20mbit line will start to bog down.

I'm not sure, and I'm wondering the same thing. Same with regards to people who think the spread of high speed fiber will result in a telecommuting revolution. I don't think a jump from 20 to 100mbits is going to revolutionize anything.

I do know that hosting a server is prohibited by Google Fiber TOS, so I'm not sure how this is going to work.

This is the second house in the neighborhood that's been offered to founders rent-free. The first [0] is home to some people working on an API for 3D printing [1], an app for online jam sessions, and a couple of other projects.

Down the street is another house shared by several more startups working on things like real-time search [2], retinal authentication [3], etc. There are other similar endeavors scattered nearby, plus some web-dev shops, etc.

0. http://www.homesforhackers.com/

1. http://threed.ee/

2. http://leap2.com/about.php

3. http://eyeverify.com/

hey pash!

We just rebranded threed.ee to gethandprint.com and moved our entire team of four from Boston to KC!

@gethandprint

This is great for the area. There is a lot of unsung innovation coming out of the Midwest with Kansas City playing a large part of it. Coupled with a ton of very smart people, Kansas City is ripe to become a major player in the startup community.

Also, the city is wonderful. Beautiful, amazing food, great schools, cheap, clean, and great transportation options for vacations (out of a great airport!). As someone who lived there for 18 months before moving to San Francisco, there is a lot about Kansas City that I miss.

KC is mostly a financial tech hub. Lots of development in banking and insurance. Not much innovation really and i do agree with you that it is great for the area in that respect.

Here are some downsides (I agree/disagree with you in some things):

1. Crime rate is astonishing. There are deadly shooting nearly every other day. In fact, last one i heard involved 2 deaths at Westport, which is right where Google Fiber planted its roots.

2. City is beautiful in early spring. Summers are incredibly hot and humid and burn the entire city to the ground. Winters are freezing-cold.

3. Schools are no different than anywhere else. Some good. Some bad.

4. Public transportation is non-existent. Unless you consider waiting for a bus for 40 minutes a good transportation system. Any attempt to put rails to use failed miserably. KC is ultra-conservative. Nothing will ever happen here unless it has something to do with the Chiefs & Arrowheads Stadium. Bottom line is if you don't own a car you will have very difficult time getting around. Some neighborhoods don't even have sidewalks. Walking to a store 2 miles away would mean walking on public roads and dodging cars until you find a sidewalk.

5. This is something that everyone who lives here for more than a year complains about. There is nothing to do in KC. It's the same people and same places. Summer time is more event-friendly. Winters are dead. Nothing to do but go out to drink and eat somewhere.

6. Majority of people are overweight... and don't care. It's actually scary how much of the population is overweight. That's because you're forced to drive everywhere.

And some upsides:

1. It is VERY clean. Almost pristine.

2. Living is VERY cheap even in the center.

3. Food is amazing.

4. Airport is very convenient and conveniently placed.

5. Great place for sports. Chiefs will always have fans here. Regardless of how bad they are. Tailgating is amazing. Unfortunately, every team except for Sporting KC has been miserable for decades with no signs of recovery, but still have very solid fan bases.

6. You're 2/3 hours away from everywhere in the country.

Take what you want from this. If i were in my early/mid twenties and single I would never move here. If i had a family or looking for a place to retire, I would definitely consider KC. IMHO, if KC wants to attract young talent like Boston, New York, San Francisco or Seattle it'd have to be a bit more engaging than getting fiber installed in every house.

KC schools aren't even accredited [1], and the Fiberhoods are all in the ghetto.

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/us/kansas-city-mo-school-d...

The biggest advantage I thought of with fiber access is being able to run initial production servers from you home. This would be a decent way to keep costs down while having the physical server only an arms length away (not really necessary, but makes me feel better anyways).

As a northern Kansas City resident I am patiently waiting for Google fiber expansion to my area (Currently in "Coming Next"). Having an extra bedroom I am excited to make my home available to the Homes for Hackers project as soon as the fiber is available. It will be great to see a startup progress from my couch.

I find it exceedingly hard to fill my 85mbit connection without using some kind of synthetic bandwidth test. Obviously it's easy to do if you're aggregating enough people's usage (like at an office) but for a single user it's tough. Single stream downloads rarely if ever get that high, my nntp provider seems to not be able to do it even with 20 connections but that could be the fault of the nas thats decoding the binaries. Pretty much the only time one task fills it is when im dumping from my colo that doesn't have a bunch of other streams to fair share with.

It's not even that easy to get 1gb traffic to flow over the lan, though of course its pretty easy to get 70%-80% or so. To get sustained gigabit it pretty much has to be an ssd or array on both sides. And this is from the perspective of someone that runs three 3x1gb port channel bonds at home between a multi-tier san and a few virtualization hosts.

I could upgrade my home internet from 85 to 150 or 300 but i have no desire to - it'd pretty much be impossible to tell the difference 99% of the time.

Will this always be the case? Nope. 10 years ago it was hard to push 100mbit datacenter to datacenter. As computers & io speeds catch up and content targets higher speeds something like 1gb at the home will become much more useful.

But I sure wouldn't move to kansas city just get 1gb right now.

It's a cool idea, but has Google actually guaranteed any certain level of support? What if someone ends up creating a site with a huge amount of bandwidth, and then Google pulls the plug?

I know that the offered amount of bandwidth is drool-worthy, but realistically how much of it can be used without drawing the ire of Google and getting shut down?

Right now Fiber is only available to residential customers and the TOS restricts using your connection to serve content.

whats the typical internet speed in the US ? In europe i got 120Mbits (only 5 up though) which only comes to its limits when i use A LOT of bandwidth intensive stuff at the same time. So while Google Fiber is nice, would that really be the deal maker for entrepreneurs ? The fact that its free rent would appeal to me much more than the internet connection though :)

I'd say typical is something around 20Mbps down, 3Mbps up, but if you look it up you'll find an average quite a bit lower than that because a lot of the US (by land area) can't even get broadband.

To give an example of what the increased land area leads to: I get 1Mbit/s down and 0.5Mbit/s up for the same price that my uncle in the city gets 40Mbit/s down and 8Mbit/s up.

The reason is that I live in a rural area about 20-30 miles from major cities. If you go another 10 miles your only option is satellite or dial-up (if you have phone lines to your house).

Most DSL in the US is /dramatically/ worse than advertised. Mine advertising 20Mbps down; I'm lucky to get 3. From what I've seen? this is pretty typical. I live in Santa Clara and have an office in Sunnyvale; DSL experience at both is similar, so it's not exactly out in the sticks. In fact, there is city-owned dark fiber running past my condo. (It's business-oriented, not consumer-oriented, so it would cost me some tens of thousands of dollars to setup, and significant monthlies, but it's there.)

I'm considering switching to cable, but we will see.

As a swedish person I laugh at this.

As a Swedish person, I am annoyed and somewhat embarrassed by your comment. It does not add anything to the discussion.

intrigued by your comment; may I ask why specifically? two guesses come to mind: comparably fast internet (if not on the exact level as Fiber) is relatively standard there, or the fact that a freemium style housing arrangement for entrepreneur(ship) is more standard practice- even government supported?

I would guess that he refers to moving somewhere to get a good internet connection. Fiber has become increasingly available the past 2-3yrs. This article says that, as of 2011, 49% of Swedish household could sign up for internet speeds of least 100mb/s [1].

[1]. http://www.pts.se/sv/Dokument/Rapporter/Internet/20122/PTS-b...

More and more European countries have Fiber to the Home in urban areas.

I live in average sized town in the Netherlands. I pay Euro 50 per month ($65) for 100 Mbit up & down. That price includes unlimited bandwidth (placing servers is allowed), full cable, and a HD DVR.

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