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Comment by owenversteeg | Hacker News Reader

>> mm-waves can't penetrate skin, eyes or anything else.

Ah, I see you made the same mistake as basically everyone researching mm-waves: you forgot about babies. See, they're born with very thin skin, so mm-waves can go right through their dermis. Will that have any effects? Who knows! It'll be a long time till the first 5G babies will be in college.

Furthermore, a lot of things are cumulative effects. Asbestos, of course, doesn't instantly kill you; asbestosis requires a large exposure over a long period of time.

Look at the research around kHz EM waves and Alzheimer's, for example. We've all been near a HV line for few minutes, I'd bet. When they were invented, I'm sure people tested them by standing next to them for hours - they were fine, of course. Turns out you have to build up exposure over a period of some 15 years living next to a HV line... and then you have a 200% chance of Alzheimer's.

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Oh cut it out. Everybody is made of water. Even babies. Nothing penetrates.

"Think of the children!" is getting pretty tired sounding.

Excuse me?

Someone said mm-waves cannot go through skin. I mentioned that the scientific consensus is that babies' skin is thin enough that mm-waves penetrate the dermis. I was absolutely not starting a "think of the children".

>> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

The established consensus is that mm-waves do penetrante the dermis of babies. Even recent research can agree on that. Here's one recent source.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334078749_Millimete...

Its hard to take your arguments seriously when you link to a paper on military research on a weapon that "can heat the skin to a temperature of 130F" and then compare it to cellular RF emissions, which would typically encounter your skin at a power level in the range of 10^-12W (-90dBm). It doesnt matter which layers of skin that does or doesnt penetrate, its just not going to do much of anything.

Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. Not cool.

We've had to ask you this multiple times before. Continuing to do it will eventually get your account banned, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended from now on.

Yes, I regret that comment. I apologize.

Why do you think there is a risk to babies? What are you having that on specifically? It seems like you are reaching for something "untested". Also microwaves use 2.4Ghz, heat lamps are infrared, 5G is a wide array of spectrums, so what specific frequency and power do you think will harm babies and why?

(Also if something just affects babies, it doesn't make sense to talk about the cumulative effects over decades)

The established consensus is that mm-waves do penetrante the dermis of babies. Even recent research can agree on that. Here's one recent source.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334078749_Millimete...

I do not believe that anything in the tens of GHz is either safe or unsafe. The frank reality is that we simply do not know, as not one person in human history has ever lived with a mm-wave source of any power for an extended period of time.

With new RF technology, the burden is usually on the creators to demonstrate its safety, not random Internet commenters to prove its danger.

I was hoping to have an actual discussion here, but I guess people would rather just blindly defend any new technology without even a cursory look at its safety.

That's not even remotely close to being a source for what you are saying.

You need a source that shows that there is something different about babies, different about the 5G frequencies, and different from the light, infrared, microwave and radio frequencies that are currently being used everywhere.

Instead, you referenced a paper on a military pain ray that uses focused super high power 100Kw 95Ghz waves that says it penetrates 1/64th of an inch. Your microwave is 2.4Ghz, just like your router, but it works at 1kw. There is an enormous gap between saying "what about babies" and what you linked. They have basically nothing to do with each other. I think you realize that, but you keep saying "we don't know", when you really mean "I don't know".

> the burden is usually on the creators to demonstrate its safety

How can anything be deomstrated to someone who ignores what they are being told and repeats "we just don't know" while supporting their predefined beliefs with giants leaps in logic and excessively irrelevant information?

> I was hoping to have an actual discussion here

I don't believe you. You didn't even confront my original question of what frequencies and effects you are specifically worried about. All you have seemed to being up so far is heat from power 100 times what your microwave uses. 100kw is 4,000 times the power of a soldering iron that can melt tin and lead.

Oh come on. What I am saying - and I will repeat this - is "mm-waves do penetrate the dermis of human babies." No more, no less. This is the scientific consensus. I provided the first source I found, which related to military research, yes. The broader context is irrelevant, I'm not sure why you wrote a whole comment harping on that. I provided it as a simple counterpoint to someone saying that mm-waves did not penetrate skin.

And the broader context of what I am saying is not that 5G is dangerous, just that there should be more effort to determine its safety before rolling out a new type of EM radiation that humans have _never lived with before_.

Looks like I am not the only one saying existing studies do not cover things, and there is a need for further research: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6765906/

You realize that a source would be something that has to do with what you are saying right? I asked for a source on how a 5G frequency at their amplitude would affect a baby differently and you linked a 100kw military pain ray that has nothing to do with what you are saying, then said, 'i just linked the first source I could find'. That isn't a 'source'. Also your current link doesn't say anything about what you are claiming and actually contradicts it. Even what you linked says that it doesn't go as deep as the thickness of a fingernail. Wifi penetrates more and infrared heat lamps are far more powerful, so again, what frequencies and what effects are you specifically worried about?

> new type of EM radiation that humans have _never lived with before_.

It isn't a 'new' type of em radiation. It isn't a mystery, it is just a mystery to you. You just avoid confronting real information by saying "I don't know". You have been shown facts, your ignorance of the subject is your own fault at this point, but you are desperate to hang on to it.

Nah, sorry, you can't use that both ways. Either you generalize existing research to cover a range of EM and circumstances of use, or you don't. You can't just pick one when it's convenient.

>> You have been shown facts, your ignorance of the subject

OK, +1 for making me actually laugh. Dude, I am the only one of us linking any scientific studies or literature review whatsoever. You're the one sprinkling snarky one liners about routers burning you. You also still didn't respond to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6765906/

Just relax: I'm not saying 5G is the illuminati turning the frogs gay, I'm saying -maybe- we should research a new technology before deploying it to humans at an unprecedented scale.

> we should research a new technology before deploying it to humans at an unprecedented scale.

5G is an industry marketing term, not some fundamental redefining of physics. Nothing about emission of radio waves is some new or unknowable phenomenon that requires more research to understand. If you're suggesting otherwise, the burden of providing even a mildly plausible hypothesis is on you, not just "I dont understand this, therefore maybe it is bad".

All you did was link a 20 page paper without quoting what you think is relevant, and yet I already said that it contradicts what you are saying. It doesn't talk about children or infants or babies but it does talk about how shallow the penetration depth is.

I've given you real numbers from your own sources and broken them down into intuitive examples. You might not realize this, but this is just an exercise in seeing what someone does when they have to continually reject information while having none of their own to hold on to a belief that is rooted in emotion.

> I'm saying -maybe- we should research a new technology

Now you are saying that, before you were saying "what about penetrating a babies thin skin". It has been researched, you found some research, it just doesn't say what you want.

We haven't even gotten to the fact that microwave communications are already on lots of cellphone towers and used to communicate with office buildings etc. Not only that but these higher frequencies don't even go through walls. They barely go through rain or fog.

Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. It's exactly the opposite of what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We've warned you multiple times that we'd ban you for attacking other users. You've kept doing it, so I've banned you.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It looks to me like I've been banned for calling a ycombinator funded hypnosis app nonsense.

We moderate HN less when YC or YC-funded startups are the topic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... That doesn't give you a pass to break HN's rules egregiously and ignore our requests to stop. You've been doing this for a long time, including with accounts before this one, and we've warned you on many occasions. Actually we probably let you get away with it for longer than we normally would.

Looking back at your account history I noticed other cases of you attacking other users, which we didn't see at the time and certainly would have moderated and perhaps banned you for. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23186380.

I appreciate that you've also posted a lot of good comments (but then again, also a lot of snarky ones). If you genuinely want to commit to using HN as intended, we can unban you.

There is a difference between attacking someone and being blunt. If you want to ban people and scold them for being blunt then you might as well say that, but to say this is attacking someone is not reasonable. It would be different if there was some sort of uniformity to this, but it seems more like a self righteous crusade to get people to apologize to you personally for not sugar coating what they say.

I've occasionally bit my tongue really hard in not calling someone an idiot outright.

Semi-recent example (shared previously w/ dang):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22133112

The person I'd replied to ... thanked me.

Your reply reads better without the attacks.

I don't need you or anyone to apologize to me personally. The only issue is whether you'll abide by the site guidelines in the future.

Interpretation is part of applying the rules, but I don't think there's so much variance in how we interpret them. Something like that gets pretty regular and tedious after you've done it a hundred thousand times.

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