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TIL: The Data Furnace

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_furnace
8•sans_souse•2h ago

Comments

beAbU•1h ago
Computers are basically resistive heaters with extra steps. The watts going into them can't go anywhere else except be exhausted as heat. Conversation of energy and all that.

I have not done the math, but if the economic value of the compute is high enough, then it's probably cheaper to heat a home with compute compared to more efficient heat-pump technology. I think this must have been the case in the home bitcoin mining days.

Alternatively, if you are going to need the compute regardless (e.g. high-end gaming), and you need to heat your home anyway, then you might as well use the joules your PC is pumping out into your room.

The problem is heating is cyclical: we don't always need to heat our homes, yet compute wants to run at 100% 24/7 in order to extract as much value out of the upfront hardware costs. With other types of heating you can switch it off if you don't need it.

So the solution is probably not to have a rack in every home - you need a way to get rid of unneeded heat, which increases cost and complexity of an installation. Rather have a DC near a neighbourhood, with pumped district heating coming from the DC. If the homes don't need the heating then the DC can dump it in a conventional way.

okramcivokram•1h ago
During the Ethereum GPU mining craze I used ~10GPUs as a primary heat source for the whole house during the winter. It was awesome. For the first time I didn't have to care about using only 'cheap' electricity as it was not getting 'wasted' on heating only, but doing 'useful' work (mining). The only downside was the noise.

AI-Powered Text Response Generator for Girlfriend Chats

https://textherright.base44.app/
1•tchantchov•1m ago•1 comments

Advocates raise alarm over PFAS pollution from datacenters amid AI boom – PFAS

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/04/pfas-pollution-data-centers-ai
1•JeanKage•2m ago•0 comments

Exit the Feed: The Best Coders Should Walk Away

https://abner.page/post/exit-the-feed/
1•birdculture•2m ago•0 comments

Make Rebuildworld

http://www.rebuildworld.net/
1•stargrave•3m ago•0 comments

Seeking advice on a licensing gray area: "Derivative work" or not?

1•ototsu_yume•4m ago•0 comments

Non-Obvious Haskell Idiom: ViewPattern Argument Transform

https://entropicthoughts.com/non-obvious-haskell-idiom-viewpattern-argument-transform
1•ibobev•6m ago•0 comments

Fedora 43 Landing Change to Increase /Boot Due to Nvidia GPU Firmware Bloat

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-43-Bigger-Boot-Firmware
2•rbanffy•10m ago•0 comments

Tell HN: Microsoft Removed My Edge Extension Without Notification

2•jerrygoyal•12m ago•0 comments

Using Microsoft's Copilot to Expose Private GitHub Repositories

https://www.lasso.security/blog/lasso-major-vulnerability-in-microsoft-copilot
2•irememberu•13m ago•0 comments

I Won a Class Action Lawsuit Against a Parking App. They Gave Me a $1 Credit

https://www.thedrive.com/news/i-won-a-class-action-lawsuit-against-a-parking-app-they-gave-me-a-1...
2•speckx•13m ago•0 comments

Ted Cruz picks a fight with Wikipedia, accusing platform of left-wing bias

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/ted-cruz-picks-a-fight-with-wikipedia-accusing-platfo...
1•rbanffy•13m ago•0 comments

Shields Creative – Animated Badges for GitHub Readme

1•anzizdaouda0•13m ago•1 comments

Rebuilding Every 20 Years Renders Sanctuaries Eternal

https://www.japanfs.org/sp/en/news/archives/news_id034293.html
1•ipnon•13m ago•0 comments

Quantum Datasets Hub for Reproducible Benchmarks and QML

https://aqora.io/blog/aqora-s-quantum-datasets-hub-for-reproducible-benchmarks-qml
2•Kraji•15m ago•1 comments

Beyond 10k Hours: The Path to Mastery

https://www.leadinginproduct.com/p/beyond-10000-hours-the-path-to-mastery
1•benkan•16m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What do you wish existed? (October 2025)

1•pwlm•16m ago•1 comments

Could black holes help explain high-energy cosmic radiation?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/10/251005085639.htm
1•benkan•18m ago•0 comments

Siloed Visibility: Defining a New Governance Risk in the Agentic Phase of AI

https://zenodo.org/records/17285065
1•businessmate•18m ago•1 comments

Indian court tells doctors to fix their handwriting

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0r88nrx70o
1•benkan•18m ago•0 comments

He Was Expected to Get Alzheimer's 25 Years Ago. Why Hasn't He?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/health/alzheimers-gene-mutation.html
1•curtistyr•19m ago•0 comments

Birth of Prettier

https://blog.vjeux.com/2025/javascript/birth-of-prettier.html
2•ibobev•22m ago•0 comments

Using Information Entropy to Make Choices / Choose Experiments

https://blog.demofox.org/2025/10/05/using-information-entropy-to-make-choices-choose-experiments/
1•ibobev•22m ago•0 comments

Tech News Updates Discussion Session No 04

https://www.patreon.com/posts/tech-news-no-04-140464056
1•techwrath11•23m ago•0 comments

Shopina – Web App UI Kit ECommerce Mobile Template

https://www.patreon.com/posts/introducing-web-140266592
1•techwrath11•24m ago•0 comments

Reasons Not to Implicitly Memoize

https://max.engineer/3-reasons-not-to-memoize-2
1•furkansahin•27m ago•0 comments

Deloitte issues refund for error-ridden AUS government report that used AI

https://www.ft.com/content/934cc94b-32c4-497e-9718-d87d6a7835ca
1•throwaway2037•28m ago•0 comments

Slide Over is back. Is Apple listening?

https://www.eliseomartelli.it/blog/2025-10-07-slide-over
1•furkansahin•29m ago•0 comments

The MMT Case for Governments Funding Open Source Software

https://bytepawn.com/modern-monetary-theory-open-source.html
1•mohi-kalantari•30m ago•0 comments

The fix to the iPhone Antennagate in 2010 was 20 bytes

https://hachyderm.io/@samhenrigold/115330105694760262
2•todsacerdoti•32m ago•0 comments

The Palm Jumeirah as an Analogy via J-Invariants and Curve Selection

https://codingpirate.com/elliptic-curve-method-visualization-for-integer-factorization-the-palm-j...
1•hackbotone•33m ago•0 comments