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Comment by Anechoic | Hacker News Reader

Nobody wants to be next to the "noisy" data center, but at the same time everybody wants access to the internet. If we had sane city design in the United States of America which emphasized density, walkability, alternative forms of transportation, and accessible and highly available public transportation. Nobody would care if a data center is out in the middle of nowhere.

The downside is that instead of being exposed to noise from data centers, you're exposed to noise from nearby buildings, neighbors, transit, etc. We get plenty of work in city centers from folks annoyed by noisy neighbors (residential and commercial).

You're not wrong about the US needing to better emphasize density, but it's not a panacea.

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> The downside is that instead of being exposed to noise from data centers, you're exposed to noise from nearby buildings, neighbors, transit, etc. We get plenty of work in city centers from folks annoyed by noisy neighbors (residential and commercial).

It's worse than that. In his proposed carless utopia where everyone lives in high density housing and walks or bikes or takes public transit, the data centers would be built in the city because that's where the workers are. They wouldn't built them out in the middle of nowhere because public transit generally is not going to go to the middle of nowhere.

This is a disingenuous reply. Giving people more and better mobility options does not imply banning cars altogether.

The comment I was referring to also used the phrase "2 ton death machine" instead of calling them cars. That's usually a good sign that what a person is advocating for is more than merely adding more non-car transportation. :-)

And indeed, checking their other comments they also want to greatly reduce parking spaces for cars in cities. That would make it so most people in cities could not own cars, and greatly raise the cost of parking for those that do own cars meaning cars could probably be owned by people in the top income groups.

So I think my inference that the type of city they are advocating would be one where data center employees would very likely not have cars, and so data centers would not be in the middle of nowhere.

Many data centers are on industrial estates; hardly in the middle of nowhere. For those who truly work in the middle of nowhere, I'm sure a permit scheme could be worked out.

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