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.)
I'm sorry so many people are hating on your house. I guess I could understand it if someone was showing off their yacht, because this isn't a boat owners forum, but a lan party house ought to be right up HN's alley. I think its awesome, and impressive yall have maintained friendships like that for so long. Some of my best memories are from the LAN parties of decades ago. Although some of the fun was in the amount of friction, like manually assigning IPs. Or when everyone got the code red worm as soon as they joined the network. Just being able to walk into something like this would literally have blown our minds back then.
I’m interested in the long DisplayPort and USB cables. I’d love to get my very loud gaming PC away from my quiet office and these would be just the trick. Thanks for making me aware that this is an option! Now I have to decide where I would want the holes in my walls. Any gotchas or are these really able to be treated as super long cables that still work?
> How much did this cost? The 22 game machines (including monitors, cables, and peripherals) cost about $75,000 in total. The house overall was a 7-digit number.
I needed like a minute to process this. These folks are privileged as hell. I understand that folks on HN are typically affluent but this is rich rich level.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not usually one to comment on other people's home decor but this house looks like living inside a generic office building. The board game room looks like somewhere you'd have a conference call. I'm somewhat fascinated. I can't imagine choosing to make your living space look like this willingly. And yet they have! So they must enjoy it and it must feel like home to them.
Agreed. It's clear that the owners have considerable financial resources, but seemingly no one thought to hire an interior designer/architect to consider how the place looks or functions outside of the gaming aspect. If that's their style, then more power to them; it just seems incredibly generic and like wasted potential.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
I used to work for a firm that did custom homes for wealthy clients. Even when we paired them up with designers some of them just preferred a very plain appearance.
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.
I guess I'm boring because I really like it :-/ Maybe some cozier lighting/plants could be nice in the LAN/party spaces. I think the bones are pretty good. Just needs some finishing touches.
>The board game room looks like somewhere you'd have a conference call.
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.
Reminds me a lot of big tech campus interior decoration. A lot of greys, neutral colors, very little color or personality.
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).
It's funny because there's a comment about the cabinetry being expensive despite it just being a 'bunch of wood' but actually if they opted for the right wood panels instead of the standard veneered chipboard used in a lot of offices, it probably would have made the whole setup look a lot more homely. They probably do need a bit of colour and some items on the wall to break it up too.
I think a lot of it is lighting - I imagine they have the "house lights" on for these photos. Turn the temperature down and it becomes a lot cozier. The normal parts of the house look great.
> The cabinetry is just a bunch of wood, cut into fairly large pieces. Maybe a few screws and hinges. Whereas the computers in total contain more than a trillion transistors, each of which had to be carefully etched in the right spot connected correctly to all the others. A trillion! That's 1,000,000,000,000!
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.
> 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.
I mean, the whole place looks like a cookie cutter office block. The lack of appreciation and want for good design goes far deeper.
I'm more or less in your boat, but I also know several folks who play D&D or warhammer every weekend in big groups. It's kind of a choices-one-makes and where-one-lives deal, I think
I can't speak to your situation, but I know that in mine the main blocker for a LAN party with adult friends wouldn't be a lack of interest nor lack of friends (though I don't have a giant pool, and can't even count 18 people I'd be able to even suggest such a thing to) it would be lack of time due to other life responsibilities, that tend to increase as we get older.
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.
This is why it is perfect to have two brothers and a brother-in-law. We can at least get the four of us together to do something. Pretty sure we could manage 8-12 with friends, but none of our houses would be big enough.
We had LAN parties like that once upon a time when we had a space that supported it.
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.)
> (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...
> We have efficient heat pumps and solar panels, but it's still a disturbing amount of energy usage and something I'm trying to debug. Perhaps we have too many windows letting in too much sunlight...
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...
Window blinds for the worst hours (can be angled so the sun doesn't enter but the view outside is retained), and solar reflective foil for the normal days.
I'm still looking for the good, transparent matte coat for my exterior walls, but I've already cut some of the cooling power use via passive means.
OK, rich couple show their home and happy family. I find it relatively boring and trivial. (I am not complaining, I can just skip on this -- no problem!)
But I would be interested in the sex dungeon parts of the rich couple's home, maybe there are some ideas that are closer to my world. Or maybe not! But ideas, that's what's interesting here, not actual cable lengths or room or computer counts. That would be interesting.
The basement is awesome, but I would not feel cozy and welcome there. From the pictures it feels like any serverroom I've ever been into. Unwanted tips: Put some plants in there, some color, some wall-to-wall gaming art prints on the closet-doors and floors. <3
This makes me really miss LAN parties. What an absolute gem of early PC culture that is sadly mostly forgotten? A reasonable replacement is phone gaming parties and I'm not kidding - it's really fun! We did Among Us phone LAN party recently and it was a blast.
MTV used to have this show called Cribs where celebrities showed their house around and cars and everything. Basically bragging about their rich life. I have the same feeling opening this site. Maybe we need an MTV Cribs SV edition.
Cribs was at its best when it was some newly rich musician living in a boring suburban neighborhood and they had basically nothing in their house except some weird piece of art that cost 300k.
There was an episode where one American rapper bragged he never wears the same socks twice. He unpacks every day a pair of brand new white socks. I have no bloody idea why this carved into my memory.
It’s been on HN a few times and I’ve always enjoyed looking at it. I think it looks great, fantastic setup, cat walks and doors. LAN parties with your friends for 30 years is awesome! Now that is hard to replicate even if one uses the house design as inspiration!
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 remember this! Its crazy because the comments section on that thread seems more curious about the setup (with albiet one long thread about home costs). Massive contrast to this one.
It's because this latest thread was posted while I was asleep. :/
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.
They are lucky, coming (at least Kenton) from a good family with money and, I surely believe, parents that pushed him in the right direction, helping him to fully develop his natural talents. And you definitely needed raw brain power (which is a natural gift) to join Google in 2005.
It's an interesting read and a wonderful experiment, but is this house still operational as a "LAN party" house? Humans in groups can be...exhausting...in very short order.
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 will never understand rich people. You won life, you live better than billions but somehow that’s not enough you have to boast about it. Even seemingly good folks like Gabe Newell is doing the same with his 360ft superyacht. As if they seek the validation because otherwise they know it’s all meaningless and empty.
I really love the idea of having all the PCs in some place far away from where I, the human am sitting, but I don’t know how to do that. HDMI and USB cables can’t work over more than a few tens of feet can they? Or maybe these are special shielded cables, or sent down shielded cat6 cabling? Would love to have even more details on how to do this.
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!
do you know of any that actually exist? All I can find are active cables that go up to 15 feet which is a lot better than the 3ft of copper but still a far cry short of running to another room easily
I don't have any personal experience with them, but Amazon and Google are full of options going up to 30m.
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.
I've been thinking about running a "mystery retro LAN party". Dig into a big cardboard box and pull out an old gaming laptop. You get what you get. Then go try to get top frag!
I really wonder where people find the time. Like two people, probably working stressful jobs, kids and still find the time to design and build something like this and probably also use it. Fascinating.
Someone once told me “you’ll make time for the things you care about” and I’m fortunate to have heard it since I have found it to be true for myself. The unfortunate truth appears to me that I care about Hacker News and other social media…
If/when widespread Netwar occurs and the US and China and other actors balkanize the internet, along with common outages, maybe we'll see a resurgence of in-person LAN gaming again.
The funnest part of this whole thing is the manual litter box, literally the worst part of having a cat, and it’s been solved through technology (litter robots). Everything in the house has tech, except the one thing that has you picking up actual shit every day.
"solved through technology" is an optimistic take on modern litter robots, in my experience ... I saw those as someone who has owned like 3 of them. Sometimes I realise I'm paying 500 bucks for an incredibly unreliable machine that gets slowly more smeared in poop over time instead of spending 30 seconds of my day to scoop some poop and feel quite silly.
While I am a bit jealous of the ability to buy a in-house gaming cafe setup for $75.000 there is little in here that is particularely noteworthy.
Everyone that has $75k can buy hardware? I guess the Netboot setup might be interesting?
Giving me MTV Cribs vibes where people pretend to be interested in a particular feature of a house while in reality it's just a 45min boast of how rich they are, broadcast in a socially acceptable way.
Just came here to say, everything about this is incredible. The house itself, the site, the FAQs but most of all, the attention that went into the cat's needs.
11/10.
We want(ed) to do something similar (re the cats needs) when renovating our house but just could never decide!
I have a "simple" PetSafe door which has a cat-chip controlled relay to open it, and our cat can just come and go whenever she wants, and she does her needs outside in our garden. Simple and effective and she lives the best of both worlds.
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.
At the former apartment, my office/work area had an opening to the living area high on the wall that might've been for a window, or something. My cat spent a lot of time staring at that opening. Not just the opening itself, but he'd work his way backwards, along some exposed AC ducting (it was a loft with 20' ceilings), trying to plot a route from the floor over the ducting to the hole. If we'd had a high enough shelf in the living area he would have gotten in.
Definitely an accomplished architect, there are a lot of fine construction details in these photos. So much that it makes the IT/low voltage installation look like a hack job.
"This house has normal parts, too!" got me triggered :)
Yeah our "normal" house : swimming pool (heated by servers?), panoramic view, guest room bigger than my whole house, roof deck, 30-mile view...
What exactly is the problem with UniFi? I’ve always thought Ubiquiti gear is generally pretty good. At least a better option than e.g. Cisco for the home/small business customer.
I disagree. This is the good part of capitalism. In an ideal world, a custom-designed housing unit should be achievable by anyone in the upper middle class. The combined property tax rate in Austin is around 1.8%-2.5% (according to https://lrgrealty.com/lrg-blog/property-taxes-in-austin-tx/), which is decently high and supports the community. ChatGPT says that they paid $52,142 in property taxes for 2025 on an assessed value of $3M.
In my opinion, the only immoral part of this is the “million dollars in profit” on the house in Palo Alto that he left which the author himself called out as ridiculous. This unearned increment is thanks to Palo Alto’s exclusionary zoning and Proposition 13’s low property taxes (around 1.25% at acquisition, but much lower for long-term investors). ChatGPT says that the author paid $11k/year and the new owner now pays $28k/year for the Palo Alto house now assessed at $2.3M.
Oh hello! This is my house! Thanks for posting!
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 key is that the author is present, rather than people having different views on wealth over time?
Views on wealth haven't changed.
The reactions to my first (much smaller) house in 2011 were very similar.
I'm sorry so many people are hating on your house. I guess I could understand it if someone was showing off their yacht, because this isn't a boat owners forum, but a lan party house ought to be right up HN's alley. I think its awesome, and impressive yall have maintained friendships like that for so long. Some of my best memories are from the LAN parties of decades ago. Although some of the fun was in the amount of friction, like manually assigning IPs. Or when everyone got the code red worm as soon as they joined the network. Just being able to walk into something like this would literally have blown our minds back then.
If someone wants to post a lan party yacht, I’m here for that too
I’m interested in the long DisplayPort and USB cables. I’d love to get my very loud gaming PC away from my quiet office and these would be just the trick. Thanks for making me aware that this is an option! Now I have to decide where I would want the holes in my walls. Any gotchas or are these really able to be treated as super long cables that still work?
I’m sorry your getting so much hate, this is a really cool and unique project.
> How much did this cost? The 22 game machines (including monitors, cables, and peripherals) cost about $75,000 in total. The house overall was a 7-digit number.
I needed like a minute to process this. These folks are privileged as hell. I understand that folks on HN are typically affluent but this is rich rich level.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Straight white males are famously lacking in privilege /s
And luck creates privilege!
> 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.
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
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.
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".
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?
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".
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.
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!
Or they just cashed in some stock options.
> 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.
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.
No need to try to reassert that cliche, the obvious counter is available to anyone via LLMs.
Yeah well my llm said the opposite, so this is obviously untrue.
Also, my llm can beat up your llm.
> and is being wasted
Why is this use of their money a waste?
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.
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.
I'm not usually one to comment on other people's home decor but this house looks like living inside a generic office building. The board game room looks like somewhere you'd have a conference call. I'm somewhat fascinated. I can't imagine choosing to make your living space look like this willingly. And yet they have! So they must enjoy it and it must feel like home to them.
Agreed. It's clear that the owners have considerable financial resources, but seemingly no one thought to hire an interior designer/architect to consider how the place looks or functions outside of the gaming aspect. If that's their style, then more power to them; it just seems incredibly generic and like wasted potential.
If you read TFA you will see that the house was architected by his father, an accomplished architect.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
Did you look through the accomplishments? I don't mean to be crass but I like a bit of weight for "accomplished".
I mean, the American Express office looks like a track stop or mall you will find along the highway.
I used to work for a firm that did custom homes for wealthy clients. Even when we paired them up with designers some of them just preferred a very plain appearance.
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.
The building was designed by his dad Richard Varda, an architect: https://vardaarchitecture.com/
It’s likely just his preference. My wife and I also rather like a relatively “IKEA” aesthetic so I think it’s just preference.
I guess I'm boring because I really like it :-/ Maybe some cozier lighting/plants could be nice in the LAN/party spaces. I think the bones are pretty good. Just needs some finishing touches.
>The board game room looks like somewhere you'd have a conference call.
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.
The will to do and the power to do does not mean well to do.
Reminds me a lot of big tech campus interior decoration. A lot of greys, neutral colors, very little color or personality.
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).
It's funny because there's a comment about the cabinetry being expensive despite it just being a 'bunch of wood' but actually if they opted for the right wood panels instead of the standard veneered chipboard used in a lot of offices, it probably would have made the whole setup look a lot more homely. They probably do need a bit of colour and some items on the wall to break it up too.
Saying that, I'd live there in a heartbeat.
I think a lot of it is lighting - I imagine they have the "house lights" on for these photos. Turn the temperature down and it becomes a lot cozier. The normal parts of the house look great.
> The cabinetry is just a bunch of wood, cut into fairly large pieces. Maybe a few screws and hinges. Whereas the computers in total contain more than a trillion transistors, each of which had to be carefully etched in the right spot connected correctly to all the others. A trillion! That's 1,000,000,000,000!
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.
> 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.
I mean, the whole place looks like a cookie cutter office block. The lack of appreciation and want for good design goes far deeper.
I would equate the wooden cabinet to the PC's metal case — the ore must be mined, the metal extracted, etc etc.
Once you've done that, just add the computer chips.
God, imagine having a big enough friend group as an adult to justify an 18-gaming-PC LAN. These folks are doing something right
I... jeepers. I dont think i have enough friends for a 4 person LAN party in my adult life.
nerd life seems to get lonelier the older you get.
I'm more or less in your boat, but I also know several folks who play D&D or warhammer every weekend in big groups. It's kind of a choices-one-makes and where-one-lives deal, I think
I shudder to think of an 18 person DND group... 5 is enough for me
I can't speak to your situation, but I know that in mine the main blocker for a LAN party with adult friends wouldn't be a lack of interest nor lack of friends (though I don't have a giant pool, and can't even count 18 people I'd be able to even suggest such a thing to) it would be lack of time due to other life responsibilities, that tend to increase as we get older.
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.
[0]: https://boardgamearena.com
> nerd life seems to get lonelier the older you get.
Nerds always thinks they're special :) This is the same for most people in the world.
This is why it is perfect to have two brothers and a brother-in-law. We can at least get the four of us together to do something. Pretty sure we could manage 8-12 with friends, but none of our houses would be big enough.
> it is perfect to have two brothers and a brother-in-law
This is difficult to arrange at short notice :)
We had LAN parties like that once upon a time when we had a space that supported it.
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.)
> (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...
From my humble experience that does not scratch the surface of this build, a heat-recovery ventilation unit does wonders.
As a bartender, I have a bunch of friends, but none of them have the same night off!
When you’re well to do everyone wants to be your friend
> We have efficient heat pumps and solar panels, but it's still a disturbing amount of energy usage and something I'm trying to debug. Perhaps we have too many windows letting in too much sunlight...
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...
Window blinds for the worst hours (can be angled so the sun doesn't enter but the view outside is retained), and solar reflective foil for the normal days. I'm still looking for the good, transparent matte coat for my exterior walls, but I've already cut some of the cooling power use via passive means.
> transparent matte coat for my exterior walls
I'm curious about this. Do you mean a layer of paint-like substance that makes the walls isolate better?
I'm putting external shutters on my house in London this winter. This summer was crazy. I've never seen them further north than Barcelona.
The house is located in Austin TX.
Root cause analysis complete.
The house is also mostly glass.
This LAN house was featured in a LTT video. There's an entire house walkthrough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Y0MVUgjOw
beat me to it :-( have an upvote
OK, rich couple show their home and happy family. I find it relatively boring and trivial. (I am not complaining, I can just skip on this -- no problem!)
But I would be interested in the sex dungeon parts of the rich couple's home, maybe there are some ideas that are closer to my world. Or maybe not! But ideas, that's what's interesting here, not actual cable lengths or room or computer counts. That would be interesting.
As someone without that much money at hand, I enjoyed reading the section further down the page. Well written and congrats on the success!
The basement is awesome, but I would not feel cozy and welcome there. From the pictures it feels like any serverroom I've ever been into. Unwanted tips: Put some plants in there, some color, some wall-to-wall gaming art prints on the closet-doors and floors. <3
This makes me really miss LAN parties. What an absolute gem of early PC culture that is sadly mostly forgotten? A reasonable replacement is phone gaming parties and I'm not kidding - it's really fun! We did Among Us phone LAN party recently and it was a blast.
MTV used to have this show called Cribs where celebrities showed their house around and cars and everything. Basically bragging about their rich life. I have the same feeling opening this site. Maybe we need an MTV Cribs SV edition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV_Cribs
Cribs was at its best when it was some newly rich musician living in a boring suburban neighborhood and they had basically nothing in their house except some weird piece of art that cost 300k.
There was an episode where one American rapper bragged he never wears the same socks twice. He unpacks every day a pair of brand new white socks. I have no bloody idea why this carved into my memory.
It’s been on HN a few times and I’ve always enjoyed looking at it. I think it looks great, fantastic setup, cat walks and doors. LAN parties with your friends for 30 years is awesome! Now that is hard to replicate even if one uses the house design as inspiration!
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.
Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42156977
I remember this! Its crazy because the comments section on that thread seems more curious about the setup (with albiet one long thread about home costs). Massive contrast to this one.
Yeah.. 2 years have unfortunately changed a lot of what privilege, ownership, wealth, and "luck" have meant.
It's because this latest thread was posted while I was asleep. :/
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.
Wholesome read. These guys are enjoying life and I loved reading the FAQ in the end, as well as them acknowledging they are very lucky!
They are lucky, coming (at least Kenton) from a good family with money and, I surely believe, parents that pushed him in the right direction, helping him to fully develop his natural talents. And you definitely needed raw brain power (which is a natural gift) to join Google in 2005.
Same. I like seeing people who have made great tech houses and seem like nice people.
It's an interesting read and a wonderful experiment, but is this house still operational as a "LAN party" house? Humans in groups can be...exhausting...in very short order.
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 will never understand rich people. You won life, you live better than billions but somehow that’s not enough you have to boast about it. Even seemingly good folks like Gabe Newell is doing the same with his 360ft superyacht. As if they seek the validation because otherwise they know it’s all meaningless and empty.
They need to buy status. In the end most of them don’t feel very good about their life and need external validation.
I've seen this so many times, and every time it makes me smile. Especially the 'how the hell did we manage this' section.
Normal room: Integrated catwalk with cat doors to other cat places.
Alright.
I really love the idea of having all the PCs in some place far away from where I, the human am sitting, but I don’t know how to do that. HDMI and USB cables can’t work over more than a few tens of feet can they? Or maybe these are special shielded cables, or sent down shielded cat6 cabling? Would love to have even more details on how to do this.
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!
USB 4/Thunderbolt explicitly supports fiberoptics-based USB-C cables and can carry 4K video, regular USB, and more.
do you know of any that actually exist? All I can find are active cables that go up to 15 feet which is a lot better than the 3ft of copper but still a far cry short of running to another room easily
I don't have any personal experience with them, but Amazon and Google are full of options going up to 30m.
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.
HDMI over fiber is readily available. USB is more annoying depending on the speeds you desire, but again USB over optical exists.
And then of course once it's over fiber, nearly any length desired is easily achieved
I've been thinking about running a "mystery retro LAN party". Dig into a big cardboard box and pull out an old gaming laptop. You get what you get. Then go try to get top frag!
I really wonder where people find the time. Like two people, probably working stressful jobs, kids and still find the time to design and build something like this and probably also use it. Fascinating.
Someone once told me “you’ll make time for the things you care about” and I’m fortunate to have heard it since I have found it to be true for myself. The unfortunate truth appears to me that I care about Hacker News and other social media…
Yeah :D But I for one don't care much about my job, yet it still takes quite a chunk of my time away from me.
If/when widespread Netwar occurs and the US and China and other actors balkanize the internet, along with common outages, maybe we'll see a resurgence of in-person LAN gaming again.
The lack of any decoration is what struck me.
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
The funnest part of this whole thing is the manual litter box, literally the worst part of having a cat, and it’s been solved through technology (litter robots). Everything in the house has tech, except the one thing that has you picking up actual shit every day.
Zoom out buddy
"solved through technology" is an optimistic take on modern litter robots, in my experience ... I saw those as someone who has owned like 3 of them. Sometimes I realise I'm paying 500 bucks for an incredibly unreliable machine that gets slowly more smeared in poop over time instead of spending 30 seconds of my day to scoop some poop and feel quite silly.
You saw they addressed that at the bottom of the page?
I've seen the insides of those automatic ones. If you think scooping lumps out of a normal litterbox is bad, try cleaning an automatic one out.
Clumping litter works surprisingly well. It's really a minor thing.
I couldn't help but notice the lack of mousepads[1]. Please get your poor guests some mousepads!
[1]: https://lanparty.house/images/office-action-overhead.jpg
All this tells me is money buys friends and happiness
While I am a bit jealous of the ability to buy a in-house gaming cafe setup for $75.000 there is little in here that is particularely noteworthy.
Everyone that has $75k can buy hardware? I guess the Netboot setup might be interesting?
Giving me MTV Cribs vibes where people pretend to be interested in a particular feature of a house while in reality it's just a 45min boast of how rich they are, broadcast in a socially acceptable way.
Yeah, have money, will spend. Water is wet.
Just came here to say, everything about this is incredible. The house itself, the site, the FAQs but most of all, the attention that went into the cat's needs.
11/10.
We want(ed) to do something similar (re the cats needs) when renovating our house but just could never decide!
I have a "simple" PetSafe door which has a cat-chip controlled relay to open it, and our cat can just come and go whenever she wants, and she does her needs outside in our garden. Simple and effective and she lives the best of both worlds.
I hope they invested similar money in their home security.
I recently landed (again) at this website while reading about Kenton Varda‘s work on Cloudflare workers. It was a nice “aha” moment!
(2024)
Worried about if they could that no one asked if they should...
Wow that's really nice house
Dude this is so freaking cool.
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.
At the former apartment, my office/work area had an opening to the living area high on the wall that might've been for a window, or something. My cat spent a lot of time staring at that opening. Not just the opening itself, but he'd work his way backwards, along some exposed AC ducting (it was a loft with 20' ceilings), trying to plot a route from the floor over the ducting to the hole. If we'd had a high enough shelf in the living area he would have gotten in.
Ngl having a house with a hot side for rack cooling sounds like homelab fun
Great landing page! (if I can call it so?)
Rich people are rich, ok I get it.
I came here to say exactly the same XD
They’re a pretty accomplished couple if you read their bio.
Yeah, but not so much that it's not relatable.
Behind every accomplished person stands an accomplished parent.
Definitely an accomplished architect, there are a lot of fine construction details in these photos. So much that it makes the IT/low voltage installation look like a hack job.
"This house has normal parts, too!" got me triggered :) Yeah our "normal" house : swimming pool (heated by servers?), panoramic view, guest room bigger than my whole house, roof deck, 30-mile view...
>All network equipment and cameras are UniFi.
Wow. Imagine having this budget and then doing this.
What exactly is the problem with UniFi? I’ve always thought Ubiquiti gear is generally pretty good. At least a better option than e.g. Cisco for the home/small business customer.
wow.
Who has enough friends past 30 to even justify a lan party? Lol
Nice flex, lol.
Late stage capitalism
I disagree. This is the good part of capitalism. In an ideal world, a custom-designed housing unit should be achievable by anyone in the upper middle class. The combined property tax rate in Austin is around 1.8%-2.5% (according to https://lrgrealty.com/lrg-blog/property-taxes-in-austin-tx/), which is decently high and supports the community. ChatGPT says that they paid $52,142 in property taxes for 2025 on an assessed value of $3M.
In my opinion, the only immoral part of this is the “million dollars in profit” on the house in Palo Alto that he left which the author himself called out as ridiculous. This unearned increment is thanks to Palo Alto’s exclusionary zoning and Proposition 13’s low property taxes (around 1.25% at acquisition, but much lower for long-term investors). ChatGPT says that the author paid $11k/year and the new owner now pays $28k/year for the Palo Alto house now assessed at $2.3M.
"Invite only", ok I get they're rich but I wonder about the airbnb potential for recouping some of that cost.
And having to restore everything (this is a house with personal items, not a loaner, anonymous flat) if someone trashes it?
Naah, even a small risk is unacceptable in such case.