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We built our house for LAN parties (2024)

lanparty.house

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Re: We built our house for LAN parties (2024)

#281

Post by bityard »

rpdillon wrote: post #240
kentonv wrote: post #183

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…

I can tell the world is getting squeezed. This has been posted to HN several times in the past 20 years, and it usually receives a great reception because of the hacker ethos involved, the love of lan parties, and the success in tech. It's just cool as hell. 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:…

HN drew me in years ago because it had a higher signal-to-noise ratio, and deeper conversations than you'd find in other places popular with tech nerds. There was an overall culture of technical optimism, which I like to sum up as:

Learn cool technology, build cool things, meet cool people.

Now, HN is one of the more pessimistic communities I frequent. Most posts are berating or belittling the author, the technology, someone's politics, other commenters, capitalism in general, and so on. It's all so tiresome to read and the amount of time and energy wasted doesn't hold a candle to whatever the AI companies are doing. It's gotten to the point that I pretty much never scroll past halfway down the comments page, because that is almost always about where the useless and most whiney comments tend to start. It used to be lower, like 10-20%. It may be creeping up even higher.

I would love to find an online community where the pessimists don't rule the roost. Haven't found it yet, but if anyone wants to drop me a hint, my contact info is in my profile.

Re: We built our house for LAN parties (2024)

#282

Post by kubb »

jebarker wrote: post #203
kubb wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 argument…

> and is being wasted Why is this use of their money a waste?

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

A proper Internet cafe could serve thousands per week.

Re: We built our house for LAN parties (2024)

#283

Post by remuskaos »

kentonv wrote: post #259
remuskaos wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 liter…

FWIW, the 4070 was $600 at the time. You could indeed build a great gaming machine around a 4070 at much lower cost, but a few things inflated the price for me: * I included the fairly nice 4k monitors ($750) in the price. * The motherboards were stupidly expensive ($450) since I wanted something with 10G networking onboard, to support the netboot setup. * The super-long fiber optic HDMI and USB cables are on the ord…

I really appreciate the answer and the detailed breakdown.

I should've stated more clearly what particular part of that statement I found untrue: the "computers being cheap" part when you pary 3k for a decent, but not great, gaming pc ;)

I absolutely believe that you paid 75k for 22 machines (I've used 20 in my post above in error). From the photos I can clearly and quite enviously see that no part of that setup could have been cheap.

Re: We built our house for LAN parties (2024)

#284

Post by kubb »

throwayay4929 wrote: post #248
kubb wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 argument…

You don't get to decide whats useful and what's not useful for other people. It's extremely disrespectful. I'm sure you'd hate it if someone were to look at your life and label parts of it that way.

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

Re: We built our house for LAN parties (2024)

#285

Post by kubb »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #206
kubb wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 argument…

This has to be some sort of record. Not only did you set up a strawman to facilitate a shallow dismissal, rather than tilting at it yourself you simply assured us that AI is capable of shredding it. Somehow you've managed an even more offensive variant of the "condescendingly hand out a reading assignment to strangers" trope.

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

In my opinion it’s even more disrespectful to pretend that a simple counter argument doesn’t exist, and keep doubling down on the cliche.

Just that ignorance is not an excuse anymore. We have knowledge conveniently available.

Re: We built our house for LAN parties (2024)

#287

Post by mixmastamyk »

wraptile wrote: post #100

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.

I recently tried to hook up a few games and was sadly surprised they make it hard to work on a LAN, even old FOSS games push you towards internet play.

Re: We built our house for LAN parties (2024)

#288

Post by joebig »

kentonv wrote: post #214
vachina wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My dad was able to pay for me to attend the University of Minnesota. More importantly though was that my parents fed my childhood fascination with computers, making sure I had the opportunity to learn to code early (a volunteer at my school taught me BASIC at age 8; my parents bought me a PC so I could continue experimenting) and then they gave me a lot of free time to spend building things and learning. After I grad…

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

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

Re: We built our house for LAN parties (2024)

#289

Post by wafflemaker »

kentonv wrote: post #249
onionisafruit wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone wants to post a lan party yacht, I’m here for that too

Hmmmmm..... Just kidding. Gotta say I never understood the appeal of yachts. What does a yacht give you that a fancy house doesn't? It's on the water? So what? It's not like it goes fast enough to be a worthwhile form of transportation... I do totally get private jets. They are fancy, but also get you somewhere. LAN party jet? That'd be a cool way to pass a long flight. Hey guys let's LAN party to Tokyo! (I do not ex…

It's like your own villa that can sit in any party place you like. Ibiza, French Riviera, Crete, Barcelona.

And when you get bored with Europe, you pay someone to sail it to Caribbean and can fly there to party again.

And if you're poor and only have a few million dollar yaht next to your by the river apartment, then you can at least have a party on the yacht when it's parked, cos you don't want to get caught drunk & sailing.

Not that I ever thought about what it would be like to have a yacht. But once broke onto one and me and my 2 friends had a before party on it. We didn't damage anything or litter. We just didn't have any place to stay, because the last bus to the city arrived at 19:30 and clubs didn't open until 21 and it was cold.

Re: We built our house for LAN parties (2024)

#290

Post by jader201 »

bityard wrote: post #281
rpdillon wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell the world is getting squeezed. This has been posted to HN several times in the past 20 years, and it usually receives a great reception because of the hacker ethos involved, the love of lan parties, and the success in tech. It's just cool as hell. 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:…

HN drew me in years ago because it had a higher signal-to-noise ratio, and deeper conversations than you'd find in other places popular with tech nerds. There was an overall culture of technical optimism, which I like to sum up as: Learn cool technology, build cool things, meet cool people. Now, HN is one of the more pessimistic communities I frequent. Most posts are berating or belittling the author, the technology,…

> HN drew me in years ago because it had a higher signal-to-noise ratio, and deeper conversations than you'd find in other places popular with tech nerds. There was an overall culture of technical optimism

I feel like people are much more pessimistic towards technology in general, vs. the days you're referring to. Big Tech was still "cool" then, the wealth divide wasn't as big as it is now, social media wasn't (as) toxic, and AI wasn't actively making everything worse.

Nowadays, it's hard to be optimistic for how technology is progressing. People do hack away and share interesting, fun, and (often) useless projects, and those still draw less pessimistic discussion. But these are the exception, among other news of how technology is getting worse, or making things worse.

So I guess my point is, it not so much that HN or the community has gotten worse, but there's just less to be excited about in tech these days.

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