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.
It’s very jarring to see such a different reaction than my own to this post. Each time it comes up (was posted in a friend discord as well recently) I’m in awe and love the explanations.
Some folks don’t want others to be happy. I had someone in my life recently complain that someone they met was too happy and thus toxic and ignorant of the world’s atrocities.
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...
> (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.)
Makeup air unit and exhaust fan, just like a commercial kitchen, sans the hood and fire surpression.
The exhaust fan should have a slightly higher cfm that the makeup air unit to maintain negative pressure so the body odor does not escape the gaming cave :)
It was an old (circa 1890, ish), 2-story industrial building made from concrete. The whole thing was big by gaming cave standards, and quite small by modern industrial standards. Another section of it once had equipment that was driven by an overhead lineshaft.
Our area of it featured an interior natural gas well that we did not question much. It was just back there in one corner, with extraction equipment, sitting idle; we built a wall faced with clapboard in front of it that we hung neatly-bundled cables from.
DSL had just been introduced to the area wherein DOCSIS was not yet a thing, so we had a lot more bandwidth than some of the participants did at home. 10/100 switching hubs were all the rage in affordable networking gear. LAN parties and gaming happened.
Rent was very inexpensive and we were much younger. One year, rent was paid by putting a fresh layer of muck on the roof over the course of a few days.
The primary intended purpose was for it to be used as a recording studio (we could lay down 12 digital tracks at once!), and we did manage to make it pay its own bills most months, but those bills were tiny.
They'd have all laughed at me if I sent a hat around the room to collect for a heat exchanger to get some fresh air inside and reduce the stink. ;)
(But the original comment was mostly about the people. They showed up. 18? Probably. Maybe more, but often less. Getting enough folks to show up was always the easy part.)
> The biggest problem was that the first ~couple of hours were spent getting all of the PCs connected, updated, and working properly-enough.
Every lan party would have that one guy who turned up with nothing pre-installed or patched, and would finally, after a couple of hours, get their copy of Unreal Tournament working and join the game just as everyone had grown tired of it and were ready to hop into another game instead. This would rinse and repeat for almost every game.
I had some sympathy, but not too much, because we were generally fairly organised about sending out game lists in advance.
There was something delightfully chaotic about trying to get a good game of anything actually played, because even without technical problems, you'd get a situation where at most a third of the players were keen, another third were mildly amused and another third were basically just barely tolerating it because they wanted to play something next and didn't want to ruin the vibe, but clearly would much rather be playing almost anything else. Of course, as games rotated, so did these groups.
There was also that corner of people who had no intention of playing anything and were just there to utilise the ability to privately swap their terrabyte sized "anime" collections across fast ethernet ( or via physically handing over hard-drives ). I tended to leave them well alone.
I actually didn't get much gaming done on those days since I didn't usually have much of a gaming machine for myself at that time. My focus was instead mostly directed at getting everyone else up and running.
Every now and then I'd take a turn at someone else's computer. It worked fine.
Except that one day when I did bring a reasonably-capable machine with a Voodoo3 2000 card. On that day, I was the one having computer issues and it seemed like getting updated drivers from 3dfx was the correct move to make.
But nVidia had just announced their purchase of 3dfx. And 3dfx's own website was dead like it had never really existed; as if someone had walked into the closet where it was hosted and yanked the plug out of the wall. It was at that time that it became clear that the early web tendency to scatter mirrors of important things all over the place had become a lost concept.
I spent hours trying to find drivers. It felt like all of my well-honed Google-fu was a spectacular failure. But I did eventually succeed at finding recent drivers, and they did fix my problem, and games were then played.
The specificity of the occasion pins down the date very precisely: Saturday, December 16, 2000.
That's how you meet people? You invite your friends, maybe one or two of them know someone who'd be interested, they join a few times, and now they're your friends, too. There was the one picture of his three middle school friends building the computers - I imagine four people can become 18 over 20 years pretty easily.
It’s how our fantasy football league became a spin off bowling leader and some fellas started playing smash bros all anchored by one friendly dispensary owner in town.
I’m lucky I got in with them but when I moved to this small coastal town from a huge city (Houston) i promised myself I’d say ‘yes’ to almost any social occasion and it has been life changing.
I went from many friends to no friends when I immigrated to USA then back to many friends (although heavily work linked) in Houston over 20 years to zero friends here again.
I guess you get better at it like anything else or you give up and atrophy socially totally.
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...
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.
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.
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, living 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 "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.
Yeah, I can't claim I wouldn't live in it if given the chance (even if I'd redecorate). I think you are correct about the wood. If I reflect on it some amount of it is that everything looks like the same yellow laminate I am most used to seeing on office furniture, and have spent a bunch of time sat at. Maybe darker wood tones would completely change the effect this has on me
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.
I think you are correct about the lighting. It was seeing the kids bedroom that made me feel the most taken aback, but I think with some warmer light the effect would be less stark
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
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.
For a decade I hosted numerous large parties with food and alcohol. With a good core group and “selective pruning” (mostly of creeps) we never had any problems. My kids were always at my ex’s house though.
It's the dream, isn't it? Make enough money to do something like this. Keep enough friends over the years and moves to have a tribe around you that enable this. Find a partner who also enjoys this.
Honestly this is the best part and even more notable than the awesome house.
LAN parties? Wealth's not really required, it's possible to have those with laptops and a router. High school friends that not only kept in touch but continued to game together for over a decade? That's rare.
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.
It was more the indoor parts, ie the human-less doors. We had plans for them into the utility which is where their trays are but just couldn't fit the cat doors in (the human doors are crittall, ie glass so couldnt put them into the door itself.
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.
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.
> 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.
I mean the coat on my brick wall (and ideally roof), that will reflect most of the infrared and UV.
I've used a white paint like this on the conservatory and white walls outside, and along with a solar-reflective foil outside of my windows it's the biggest factor to having a nice temperature inside. I might also actually consider painting the interior walls with something like this as well - there's less he t escaping through radiation if it's reflected back, right?
We stayed in a hotel in Reims, France which had them. Controlled by a remote, and when they were down they completely blacked out the room too. Awesome.
Oh, we figured this out, maybe I should update the page.
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.)
There is a common anti-pattern for heat pumps being installed in large houses. They are almost always more powerful than needed, just to be safe it will be enough, better safe than sorry. But overpowered heat pump will use significantly more electricity. Simply put that would be wasted energy.
Just saying for anyone reading this, it is worth it to ask for a second opinion before heat pump install.
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 instead of spending 30 seconds of my day to scoop some poop and feel quite silly.
The litter robot is fine, it's just a turning globe that dumps into a box. The main issue is the sensors corrode so you have to pop the globe off and replace them. I just take it outside and hose it lol
> 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.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 27.3 ms ] threadHN is a massively nicer place if the author is present to interact. The people who are inclined to criticize don't want to do it to people's face, and the people who want to act questions are more eager if someone is there to answer.
Some folks don’t want others to be happy. I had someone in my life recently complain that someone they met was too happy and thus toxic and ignorant of the world’s atrocities.
Keep smiling at have a good day :)
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 difficult to arrange at short notice :)
Friends of friends would show up. Not everyone knew everyone else and this was fine. Cold drinks of every sort were available at the carry-out next door, and some would bring things to share. Donations were had for pizza or burgers (sometimes nowhere near enough donations, and sometimes more than plenty; it averaged OK). The social aspects of it really worked OK. Cleanup wasn't bad.
The biggest problem was that the first ~couple of hours were spent getting all of the PCs connected, updated, and working properly-enough.
By providing gaming stations, this dude has the big problem completely solved: All of these machines can be known to be on the same page when things start.
(The second-largest problem -- the smell -- is a different issue entirely. It usually ramped up pretty well by the time the first problem was approaching being solved.)
I'm guessing that's where his spending a shit ton on HVAC comes in...
Makeup air unit and exhaust fan, just like a commercial kitchen, sans the hood and fire surpression.
The exhaust fan should have a slightly higher cfm that the makeup air unit to maintain negative pressure so the body odor does not escape the gaming cave :)
Our area of it featured an interior natural gas well that we did not question much. It was just back there in one corner, with extraction equipment, sitting idle; we built a wall faced with clapboard in front of it that we hung neatly-bundled cables from.
DSL had just been introduced to the area wherein DOCSIS was not yet a thing, so we had a lot more bandwidth than some of the participants did at home. 10/100 switching hubs were all the rage in affordable networking gear. LAN parties and gaming happened.
Rent was very inexpensive and we were much younger. One year, rent was paid by putting a fresh layer of muck on the roof over the course of a few days.
The primary intended purpose was for it to be used as a recording studio (we could lay down 12 digital tracks at once!), and we did manage to make it pay its own bills most months, but those bills were tiny.
They'd have all laughed at me if I sent a hat around the room to collect for a heat exchanger to get some fresh air inside and reduce the stink. ;)
(But the original comment was mostly about the people. They showed up. 18? Probably. Maybe more, but often less. Getting enough folks to show up was always the easy part.)
Every lan party would have that one guy who turned up with nothing pre-installed or patched, and would finally, after a couple of hours, get their copy of Unreal Tournament working and join the game just as everyone had grown tired of it and were ready to hop into another game instead. This would rinse and repeat for almost every game.
I had some sympathy, but not too much, because we were generally fairly organised about sending out game lists in advance.
There was something delightfully chaotic about trying to get a good game of anything actually played, because even without technical problems, you'd get a situation where at most a third of the players were keen, another third were mildly amused and another third were basically just barely tolerating it because they wanted to play something next and didn't want to ruin the vibe, but clearly would much rather be playing almost anything else. Of course, as games rotated, so did these groups.
There was also that corner of people who had no intention of playing anything and were just there to utilise the ability to privately swap their terrabyte sized "anime" collections across fast ethernet ( or via physically handing over hard-drives ). I tended to leave them well alone.
I actually didn't get much gaming done on those days since I didn't usually have much of a gaming machine for myself at that time. My focus was instead mostly directed at getting everyone else up and running.
Every now and then I'd take a turn at someone else's computer. It worked fine.
Except that one day when I did bring a reasonably-capable machine with a Voodoo3 2000 card. On that day, I was the one having computer issues and it seemed like getting updated drivers from 3dfx was the correct move to make.
But nVidia had just announced their purchase of 3dfx. And 3dfx's own website was dead like it had never really existed; as if someone had walked into the closet where it was hosted and yanked the plug out of the wall. It was at that time that it became clear that the early web tendency to scatter mirrors of important things all over the place had become a lost concept.
I spent hours trying to find drivers. It felt like all of my well-honed Google-fu was a spectacular failure. But I did eventually succeed at finding recent drivers, and they did fix my problem, and games were then played.
The specificity of the occasion pins down the date very precisely: Saturday, December 16, 2000.
I’m lucky I got in with them but when I moved to this small coastal town from a huge city (Houston) i promised myself I’d say ‘yes’ to almost any social occasion and it has been life changing.
I went from many friends to no friends when I immigrated to USA then back to many friends (although heavily work linked) in Houston over 20 years to zero friends here again.
I guess you get better at it like anything else or you give up and atrophy socially totally.
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.
That said, I thought the games room with rows of hide-away PCs looked like a call centre or at best a 90s internet cafe.
It’s likely just his preference. My wife and I also rather like a relatively “IKEA” aesthetic so I think it’s just preference.
The author literally labeled that room the "Upstairs Office".
The rest of the house (kitchen, living 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 "cozy". But others would disagree and think of it as "grandma's house" and as I've aged, I tend to agree. I'd like to eventually dial it back and redo the interior to be more minimalistic but I have other higher priorities than remodeling the house.
Pretty much what you'd expect from techies that never really thought too hard about their living space beyond functionality.
I mean, I'm the same, so no judgement, but I did hire an interior decorator for my own place. Definitely worth the money and my house has all kinds of funky fun stuff and colors going on (on top of being 130 years old and super wonky everywhere, ha ha).
Saying that, I'd live there in a heartbeat.
Like I notice zero food or drink in the pictures, and there's a very good reason for that when you have groups of people. So I guess they eliminated one of the primary friction sources early. Wonder how the bathroom situation is...
It would be interesting to see how this worked out.
The pair behind the house have two children, which I can't even envision combined with this. Yes, someone is going to romanticize how great it is for the kids...but it simply isn't.
I'm glad someone is getting to live the dream :)
Honestly this is the best part and even more notable than the awesome house.
LAN parties? Wealth's not really required, it's possible to have those with laptops and a router. High school friends that not only kept in touch but continued to game together for over a decade? That's rare.
11/10.
We want(ed) to do something similar (re the cats needs) when renovating our house but just could never decide!
It worked out fine in the end!
Naah, even a small risk is unacceptable in such case.
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.
Alright.
External window blinds work wonders with that - your AC doesn't have to work hard to get the heat out of the greenhouse you inadvertently built if you avoid the heat getting in in the first place. But yeah, these might be more widespread over here in Europe than in the US...
I'm curious about this. Do you mean a layer of paint-like substance that makes the walls isolate better?
I mean the coat on my brick wall (and ideally roof), that will reflect most of the infrared and UV.
I've used a white paint like this on the conservatory and white walls outside, and along with a solar-reflective foil outside of my windows it's the biggest factor to having a nice temperature inside. I might also actually consider painting the interior walls with something like this as well - there's less he t escaping through radiation if it's reflected back, right?
Root cause analysis complete.
It turns out at installation time the installer set all the fans on "high", and I left them that way stupidly thinking: "Well, I like circulation, and the power meters show the fans aren't actually using much power, so I'll just leave it like that."
Changing them all to "auto" fixed the problem.
It turns out that while the fans themselves weren't using a ton of power, their activity caused the heat pumps feeding them to work harder. In retrospect it seems not that surprising and I feel pretty dumb about it.
(And yes there are a lot of windows but they are not south-facing and they are all tinted in a way that blocks most of the sun's energy.)
Just saying for anyone reading this, it is worth it to ask for a second opinion before heat pump install.
Zoom out buddy
Clumping litter works surprisingly well. It's really a minor thing.
Really cool house, but describing the cabinets as "bunch of wood, cut into fairly large pieces. Maybe a few screws and hinges" shows little understanding of what goes into building something like that.
It's hard to tell from the pics if the cabinets are made of sheet goods with veneer or solid boards glued into panels. But at the very least, the trees need to be grown, they need to be managed, they need to be felled, sent to processing for sheet goods, dried and milled for solid wood. Even then you've got to get everything cut to size and square, then build the cabinets with all the specific sizes, then finish them, transport to site and install everything and the trim.
It's two ends of the manufacturing scale. For transistors, you've got mass production at an impossibly difficult level of accuracy for a human and for cabinets you've got single production (at the install level) at very difficult level for a human.
But again, very, very cool house. I especially like the cat doors but not nearly half as much as I imagine the cat does.
I mean, the whole place looks like a cookie cutter office block. The lack of appreciation and want for good design goes far deeper.
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