We built our house for LAN parties (2024)

I'm glad someone is getting to live the dream :)

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.

Friends of friends would show up. Not everyone knew everyone else and this was fine. Cold drinks of every sort were available at the carry-out next door, and some would bring things to share. Donations were had for pizza or burgers (sometimes nowhere near enough donations, and sometimes more than plenty; it averaged OK). The social aspects of it really worked OK. Cleanup wasn't bad.

The biggest problem was that the first ~couple of hours were spent getting all of the PCs connected, updated, and working properly-enough.

By providing gaming stations, this dude has the big problem completely solved: All of these machines can be known to be on the same page when things start.

(The second-largest problem -- the smell -- is a different issue entirely. It usually ramped up pretty well by the time the first problem was approaching being solved.)

I know plenty of people with enough friends to fill a little LAN like this. And setting one up is fairly cheap, if you don't want to build a house just for it, (a few switches and some cables); but not many adults I know have enough time or free enough calendars to get together for such an event more than once a year.

nerd life seems to get lonelier the older you get.

This is the first time it's been posted where most of the comments appear to be resentment that you could afford to do the project at all. Money isn't the point: some people have it and some people don't, and that can change over time. What's interesting is how you use the money. And in this case, designing a living space around hosting lan parties is a really interesting hack! I like the fold-away keyboard monitor setups especially.

You didn't have to write about any of it, and yet you did, and you keep the post up, and it continues to be something interesting to discuss. So thank you!

Thanks for sharing this awesome project!

It is crazy to me that you not only have that many friends free to visit at the same time, but also that they're all interested in PC gaming. All while having kids (or at least you do).

I was at a LAN party a few months ago, but it was with a retro PC club more than a group of friends (altough I am friends with a couple of those guys). Someone setup Netware and had a dashboard connected to a big screen showing machines connected over IPX. Worked great for games like Doom II. But I can't imagine wanting to do that more than like, once a year. I'm more of a small group of friends + board games person.

Your house is inspiring!

My buddies and I do quarterly lan parties to play Q3, unreal tournament, tribes, l4d2, and a bunch of others stuff we find. We also bbq and hike. It's a great way to keep friend groups going!

you are a good person!

It turns out at installation time the installer set all the fans on "high", and I left them that way stupidly thinking: "Well, I like circulation, and the power meters show the fans aren't actually using much power, so I'll just leave it like that."

Changing them all to "auto" fixed the problem.

It turns out that while the fans themselves weren't using a ton of power, their activity caused the heat pumps feeding them to work harder. In retrospect it seems not that surprising and I feel pretty dumb about it.

(And yes there are a lot of windows but they are not south-facing and they are all tinted in a way that blocks most of the sun's energy.)

Root cause analysis complete.

Monoprice.com in particular sells these under their "slimrun" line -- that's what I used in the house.

They are often technically not spec-compliant but work just fine in practice.

And then of course once it's over fiber, nearly any length desired is easily achieved

Clumping litter works surprisingly well. It's really a minor thing.

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)

Not to say anything negative of that, I think it's just a byproduct of the free wheeling and fast paced times back then, but if you're not prepared for it then it can rub you the wrong way sometimes.

> I actually find it funny how cheap computers are.

That’s 130 m^2. A fucking bachelor pad.

"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

It’s rich, yes. And the author acknowledges that. Still a cool build!

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.

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.

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.

- He's been in big (huge) tech since 2005

- She is an angel investor

- Moved to Austin

...

Does privileged just mean wealthy/successful now?

Once you've done that, just add the computer chips.

I mean, the whole place looks like a cookie cutter office block. The lack of appreciation and want for good design goes far deeper.

But also I wrote this in 2024, which was before I used AI to do anything.

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.

Saying that, I'd live there in a heartbeat.

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).

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.

Naah, even a small risk is unacceptable in such case.