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Direct Current Data Centers

https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/direct-current-data-centers/
32•jk_tech•11h ago

Comments

Havoc•1h ago
Slightly OT, but I see the Chinese are talking about space DCs now too which would suggest they reckon it could work too. (Unlike me and others here)
hhh•1h ago
datacenters in space are a great way to claim vast amount of viable orbit space for a stupid project to eventually sell the slot for something else when it’s rarer.
Galanwe•41m ago
Not a physician, but wouldn't space be terrible for heat dissipation?
ErroneousBosh•1h ago
Why are we wasting resources on toy chatbots?
Joel_Mckay•30m ago
Borrowing state money that ultimately indentures a country with over-engineered massive boondoggle projects.

That regulatory capture con strangled more emerging economies than most like to admit. =3

"The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics" (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith)

boxed•13m ago
If you think this is what LLMs are, then you are a bit behind the times. Opus 4.5 is a huge step up. The previous generation was good for starting basic hobby projects, now we can do pretty big time-consuming changes with it.

I have been extremely skeptical and dismissive of LLMs for a long time, but after a certain level of improvement you have to realize that at least for programming the advantages are substantial.

hambes•1h ago
it is difficult to comprehend for me that soneone spends all this time thinking through and calculating how to harness as much energy as possible and then wants to use it for large language models instead of something useful, like food production, communication, transport or any other way of satisfying actual human material needs. what weird priorities.
stingraycharles•1h ago
Sometimes (often) solving the problem is the most fun part, regardless of how it’s used.

The scale of AI energy consumption is quite unique from what I heard, and there’s a lot of money flowing into that direction. So that seems to me a decent reason to think about that.

I haven’t heard yet that food production is constrained by these kind of things.

It appears to make that you’re just taking a cheap jab at AI.

hjoutfbkfd•56m ago
if anything we are producing too much food

and what communications you find lacking?

scellus•52m ago
the main bottleneck for the civilization in communications currently is the sparsity of cynical, negative HN comments
phtrivier•23m ago
Food distribution is still a problem in vast part of the world.

Handling food waste is another issue.

Climate related shortage are coming soon for us (at the moment they only manifest as punctual price hikes - mustard a few years ago, coffee and chocolate more recently, etc...

https://www.euronews.com/green/2025/02/13/goodbye-gouda-and-...

https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/adverse-climatic-conditi...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/noelfletcher/2024/11/03/how-cli...

I don't know if the electricity going into compute centers could be put to better use, to help alleviate climate change impacts, or to create more resilient and distributed supply chains, etc...

But I would not say that this is "not a problem", or that it's completely obvious that allocating those resources instead to improving chatbots is smart.

I understand why we allocate resource to improving chatbots - first world consumers are using them, and the stock markets assume this usage is soon going to be monetized. So it's not that different from "using electricity to build radios / movie theater / TVs / 3D gaming cards, etc... instead of desalinating water / pulling CO2 out of the air / transporting beans, etc...

But at least Nvidia did not have the "toupet" to claim that using electricity to play Quake in higher res would solve world hunger, as some people claim:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwerner/2024/05/03/sam-altma...

bob1029•1h ago
From a purely engineering perspective I think it becomes difficult to argue with the gas turbine once you get into the gigawatt class of data center. The amount of land required for this much solar is not to be understated. In many practical scenarios the solar array would need to be located a distance away from the actual data center. This implies transmission infrastructure which is often the hardest part of any electrical engineering project. You can put a gigawatt of N+1 generation on a 50 acre site with gas. It's dispatchable 24/7/365 and you can store energy for pennies on the dollar at incredible scale.

Having both forms of generation available at the same time is the best solution. Once you put a data center on the grid you can mix the fuel however you want upstream. This should be the ultimate goal and I believe it is for all current AI projects. I am not aware of any data center builds that intend to operate on parking lot generators indefinitely.

hjoutfbkfd•58m ago
they are talking about covering the desert with solar panels. why would you not put the data center in the middle of it?
sethops1•47m ago
Simply because latency is a competitive advantage, one worth paying for. At the speed of light, making a trip out to the desert and back is too slow.
hjoutfbkfd•24m ago
20 ms extra, for models which respond in 5 minutes
cinntaile•39m ago
If you have predictable demand at that scale, nuclear might make more sense than the combination of gas and solar.
phtrivier•19m ago
I'm curious about Handmeier's opinion on location of data centers.

Should they be close to the solar arrays (that is, in the desert, with data networks connecting them to were the tokens are used)

Or close to their customers (which mean far from the solar arrays, with electricity networks)

He's talking a lot about removing movable parts, but aren't the wires going to be an limiting factor ?

Automatic Programming

https://antirez.com/news/159
93•dvrp•1h ago•57 comments

Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings

https://antirender.com/
1325•iambateman•15h ago•310 comments

Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024)

https://archaeologyworlds.com/5500-year-old-sumerian-star-map-recorded/
56•griffzhowl•4h ago•22 comments

Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/30/euro_firms_must_ditch_us/
79•jamesblonde•1h ago•27 comments

Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones

https://simedw.com/2026/01/31/ear-pronunication-via-ctc/
260•simedw•11h ago•95 comments

Insane Growth Goldbridge (YC F25) Is Hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/goldbridge/jobs/78gGEHh-forward-deployed-engineer
1•alvinsalehi•2m ago

Direct Current Data Centers

https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/direct-current-data-centers/
32•jk_tech•11h ago•18 comments

A Step Behind the Bleeding Edge: A Philosophy on AI in Dev

https://somehowmanage.com/2026/01/22/a-step-behind-the-bleeding-edge-monarchs-philosophy-on-ai-in...
26•Ozzie_osman•1d ago•3 comments

A novelist who took on the Italian mafia and lived

https://www.thetimes.com/culture/books/article/sicilian-man-leonardo-sciascia-rise-mafia-struggle...
48•Thevet•3d ago•31 comments

My Ridiculously Robust Photo Management System (Immich Edition)

https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-photo-management-system-immich-edition/
45•jmathai•2d ago•21 comments

Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

https://peerweb.lol/
269•dtj1123•15h ago•92 comments

We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency

https://blog.globalping.io/we-have-ipinfo-at-home-or-how-to-geolocate-ips-in-your-cli-using-latency/
11•jimaek•2h ago•3 comments

Show HN: Phage Explorer

https://phage-explorer.org/
72•eigenvalue•6h ago•16 comments

Naples' 1790s civil war was intensified by moral panic over Real Analysis (2023)

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/foundational-anxieties-modern-mathematics-and-the-political-i...
52•OgsyedIE•8h ago•12 comments

An anecdote about backward compatibility

https://blog.plover.com/2026/01/26/#wrterm
45•speckx•4d ago•7 comments

Moltbook

https://www.moltbook.com/
1488•teej•1d ago•710 comments

HTTP Cats

https://http.cat/
393•surprisetalk•22h ago•67 comments

CERN accepts $1B in private cash towards Future Circular Collider

https://physicsworld.com/a/cern-accepts-1bn-in-private-cash-towards-future-circular-collider/
26•zeristor•2h ago•12 comments

Show HN: SF Microclimates

https://github.com/solo-founders/sf-microclimates
36•weisser•5d ago•31 comments

Ashcan Comic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcan_comic
38•benbreen•1d ago•7 comments

Kimi K2.5 Technical Report [pdf]

https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-K2.5/blob/master/tech_report.pdf
310•vinhnx•19h ago•116 comments

Disrupting the largest residential proxy network

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/disrupting-largest-residential-proxy-net...
169•cdrnsf•2d ago•149 comments

htmx: Server Sent Event (SSE) Extension

https://htmx.org/extensions/sse/
18•tosh•1h ago•2 comments

Stonebraker on CAP theorem and Databases (2010)

https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/04/stonebraker-on-cap-theorem-and-databases/
67•onurkanbkrc•12h ago•30 comments

Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon

https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/01/27/surely-it-has-to-be-soon/
339•Wilsoniumite•1d ago•458 comments

Coding is when we're least productive

https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/coding-is-when-were-least-productive/
42•vinhnx•9h ago•20 comments

Archyl – The modern platform for C4 model documentation

https://www.archyl.com/
6•eko•4d ago•4 comments

The engineer who invented the Mars rover suspension in his garage [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKSPk_0N4Jc
330•UltraSane•4d ago•48 comments

Designing a Passively Safe API

https://www.danealbaugh.com/articles/passively-safe-apis
28•dalbaugh•4d ago•4 comments

P vs. NP and the Difficulty of Computation: A ruliological approach

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/p-vs-np-and-the-difficulty-of-computation-a-ruliologi...
77•tzury•14h ago•33 comments