Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

asmedigitalcollection.asme.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 535 posts

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#361

Post by jeffbee »

matherial wrote: post #8
nemomarx wrote: post #4

Out of curiosity, how are large data centers zoned?

Zoning is a per-city and per-county thing. Traditionally, they usually occupied some sort of commercial / light industrial zones, the same as office parks and warehouses. But hyperscale stuff often requires one-off variances / rezoning.

The zoning for Mesa AZ is some of the craziest I've ever seen. The obviously unsustainable car-choked sprawl near NTT PH1 is listed in the growth plan as "sustain" while the industrial area is listed as "evolve". The industrial/commercial strip is between two sprawl neighborhoods. In the general plan the car-oriented cul-de-sac hellscape is noted to be "traditional residential" while the data center area is "regional employment". It appears online that the city of Mesa actively encourages data centers in their "technology corridor"

https://selectmesa.com/business-environment/incentives-progr...

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#362

Post by techbrah9000 »

WarmWash wrote: post #137
sjoedev wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re building data centers in the U.S. at an unprecedented and increasing rate [1]. Is it so hard to imagine that something which was fine at one scale may begin to cause issues at some massively higher scale? If I drink one glass of wine per day, it’s probably fine. If I drink three bottles per day, I’m gonna start having problems. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/monthly-spending-data-cen...

Yeah, but when we account for that scale, and look at resource usage, datacenters aren't topping the charts, or even really getting in the top 5, for anything. You have people who eat meat at every meal losing their mind over water usage and people who set their AC to 68 panicking over energy usage.

When you account for post build runtime use it never looks like a big deal

Account for the runtime of the extra mining, production of materials... the scale blows up exponentially when externalities of all those extra screws and zip ties are appropriately accounted. An issue with Americans in particular as capitalism propaganda completely ignores externalities like kids in textile sweatshops not given a choice of college or the mines

3c global increase by 2050 is locked in. Meaning another 10-15 degrees local warming.

If Exxon could predict the min-max of the exact trend in the 1970s.

Physical reality doesn't give a shit about our rhetorical ability to blame a corporation or rich person; everyone consuming this shit is part of the math of the problem.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#363

Post by jeroenhd »

adamsb6 wrote: post #267

Something smells wrong. You could dump a gigawatt into resistive heating and not see such temperature rises so far away.

Luckily, modern cooling techniques like heat pumps are much more efficient than resistive heating, 300% to 500% efficiency is easily attainable. You can keep the inside of a data center nice and chilly at room temperature even in the middle of a heat wave.

Then there is also the heat island effect. Concrete boxes will heat up an area more than dirt or wood, even if those boxes are completely empty inside. If you build them near where people live, people are gonna notice. Houses have gardens, industrial complexes such as data centers and factories don't.

Also, the effect is more concentrated downwind, so the heat effect is not some kind of uniform distribution in all directions.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#364

Post by murderfs »

rpdillon wrote: post #316
joaovnunes wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't one glass a night already lack of moderation? by drinking a glass a night, or even weekly such as every friday night you're creating habit and dependency.

It works very differently for different people, I think. Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction. Others, like me, metabolize it very fast and that makes it quite a bit more addictive. Risk factors like ADHD increase this. All that said, no one I've ever met said a glass of wine on Friday nights isn't "drinking in moderation…

> Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction.

This is the opposite of how it works, ethanol is the active ingredient for all of the fun parts of drinking, the metabolite, acetaldehyde, is the cause of all of the unfun parts (nausea, headache, flushing).

A significant percentage of East Asians have one or both of a superactive alcohol dehydrogenase (which converts ethanol to acetaldehyde) and a defective aldehyde dehydrogenase (which converts acetaldehyde to acetic acid), and they have significantly lower rates of alcoholism.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#366

Post by rpdillon »

murderfs wrote: post #364
rpdillon wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works very differently for different people, I think. Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction. Others, like me, metabolize it very fast and that makes it quite a bit more addictive. Risk factors like ADHD increase this. All that said, no one I've ever met said a glass of wine on Friday nights isn't "drinking in moderation…

> Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction. This is the opposite of how it works, ethanol is the active ingredient for all of the fun parts of drinking, the metabolite, acetaldehyde, is the cause of all of the unfun parts (nausea, headache, flushing). A significant percentage of East Asians have one or both of a superactive a…

My doctor indicated it was more of a risk for me because my liver worked quickly, but your mention of acetyldehyde I know to be correct. I need to better understand this, thanks for the correction.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#367

Post by bb88 »

jjice wrote: post #317
bryan0 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I do think the quality has gone down over my seven-ish years on HN, but that could be me just remembering "the good ol' days". Still so much better than Reddit though. It's not close. Reddit has a much lower quality set of posts and comments on average across technical subreddits.

I remember the Ivermectin/Hydroxychloroquine fights where people were gaslighting others for some unknown reason. People sharing dubious studies, with questionable results.

Meanwhile many of those people had a secondary agenda to keep the FDA from releasing the covid vaccine. America's Frontline Doctors (the group) promoted drugs over vaccines, etc.

Granted there was a lot of fear in the air back then. But this site is not immune from toxicity.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#368

Post by rpdillon »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #343
rpdillon wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works very differently for different people, I think. Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction. Others, like me, metabolize it very fast and that makes it quite a bit more addictive. Risk factors like ADHD increase this. All that said, no one I've ever met said a glass of wine on Friday nights isn't "drinking in moderation…

> Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction. Others, like me, metabolize it very fast and that makes it quite a bit more addictive. I never heard this theory before, but on the surface, it sounds reasonable. Is there any published literature about it? One thing to keep in mind when discussing "drinking in moderation": I think…

There's something to what I wrote, but I'm realizing I don't understand it as well as I thought.

As for what moderate is: I can absolutely believe it'cultural. I was intending to post from a US/EU perspective, as that's what I'm most familiar with, but your explanation makes sense.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#369

Post by jacquesm »

ben_w wrote: post #341
jacquesm wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it have to be consistent? I've seen so many things be said and be done that do not mesh at al that this is really a very minor thing. Think about it, the list is just about endless by now it's hard to tell the lies from the intentions and the character deficits.

I want to understand how his mind works. Not sure what value this is, now I think about it: I'm unlikely to time a bet against him well enough to win it. So, for this point, I don't care that the words and actions he emits have no apparent rational long-term coherency, but I do care about the coherency of the system behind them which generates them. Think of it like me wanting to learn how an LLM works so I don't get…

You'd have to become a billionaire first and that takes a particular mindset. The two might be mutually exclusive.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#370

Post by user43928 »

ansley wrote: post #105

With all the data centers being built - who is using all of this compute? Am i really underestimating how demanding it is to be using ChatGPT or whatever for basic tasks? The benefit to effort ratio seems fishy to me.

Even at today's demand Anthropic and OpenAI often return 'model overloaded' errors.

Amodei, who used to research cancer biomarkers at Stanford, said this:

>I think it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years

Pessimists are going to say he is lying or crazy.

Given the trajectory of progress over the last year, I do not see where they get the confidence to say with certainty that AI will not change the world.

If there is even a small chance for the biomedical breakthroughs mentioned, this to me justifies any data center buildout, a hundred times over, and I still would not need to think twice.

The benefit to effort ratio is great already today, and the upside basically has no known limit.

Post reply on HN