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Comment by Lucasoato | Hacker News Reader

> At 100m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss

Are you serious? Is there any data for this? This would make the whole area unlivable

I don’t find this wholly convincing since it’s a smaller scale search but there does seem to be some truth to noise issues: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo also some data here which seems to support OP during generator tests: https://www.lsars.com/data-center-noise

I gave this half an hour video the first 10 minutes. He

- explicitly only wanted to eval the infrasound noise burden, which is not what the guy above was referring to here (the human audible noise burden; not that this would be pointless to check)

- played back a recording where the car door slamming was way louder than ambient

- showed that the place is pretty far away from residential areas

- did not actually confirm the source of the infrasound he did record

- did not disclose the actual dB SPL figures measured

- kept derailing to talk about other things he finds objectionable, to the extent that it felt like more time was spent on those than on the actual subject of the video.

If the remaining 20 minutes are like this too, then I'm not sure he's a reliable narrator or that this is actually valuable research, at least in this context.

The video is nonsense. There’s an article that takes it down in detail here:

https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...

I would have hoped people would have been inoculated against the 'infrasound is harmful' nonsense when it was used as a complaint against wind turbines.

IDK, I remember reading something about infrasounds killing chickens in documentation of beep() function in Borland C++, so it must be true.

My kids exceed that at random times during the day.

Yes, data centers are loud. Fortunately, some time ago humans achieved magical technological breakthroughs called "earplugs" and "ear protectors".

This is not really the same thing. When people are discussing the dB output of things like data centers, it's a constant volume. While your kids may be loud, they are not outputting this volume 24/7 without rest. (If they are, consider enrolling them in Opera singing lessons.)

And furthermore, the actual acoustical impact is very different from what is measurable or what might cause physical harm.

I've spent enough time on city council noise ordnance boards and understand enough about acoustics to say that the professional sound system I own would certainly be audible and annoying to my neighbors half a kilometer away even if it were not appreciably above the noise floor of the surrounding environment.

Folks are great a signal detection and it's very annoying to them to be able to detect an unwanted bass drum or similar, which they can do at pretty long distances. Even distributed noise is still often noticeable to people.

For instance, I live in the literal middle of nowhere and I still encounter real noise pollution from gas well heads and gas processing plants that are several kilometers from my home.

Yea, and if you go beyond people, animals are much more receptive. It's one thing to have a big building nearby that's sort of annoying, it's another thing when that building means all your local wildlife leaves. No birds singing, deer, raccoons, opossums gone, etc.

Are you suggesting they just wear earplugs 24/7 if they happen to live near one if these data centers?

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