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Yandex data center in Finland loses power due to contract termination
- 88840-8855 4y ago
- mantas 4y agoArabs could have easily sanctioned US and the rest of West back then. Or maybe people were happy to see Husein go... While in this case the world has a different opinion.
- LudwigNagasena 4y agoNo one can easily sanction the US, even if it invades a country against all UN rules. Countries that opposed the invasion didn’t even leave NATO.
- lazylizard 4y agothe whole world is sorta experiencing chinese sanctions now? haha
- mantas 4y agoAnything is not possible till the moment it actually happens. I remember when countries with McDonalds attacking each other was impossible.
- shapefrog 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_sanctions_against_the_United_States#List_of_current_sanctions_against_the_United_States_of_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_sanctions_against_the... Apparently not.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- llampx 4y ago
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoI would like to know why Yandex though that opening data centers in western counties would be a good idea. Surely they knew that, as a Russian company, if their government ever becomes aggressive, they'll also be targeted by sanctions.
- CamperBob2 4y agoI don't think anyone expected them to go quite as berserk as Putin has. It's easy to forget that for several years, Putin was actually a halfway-decent steward of the Russian economy. That's what makes this whole thing so weird... he could have gone down in history as one of Russia's more respected leaders. All he had to do was not rock the boat. Instead, he literally sank it. Putin simply had no reason -- certainly no reason that Yandex management could anticipate -- to tank his country's reputation along with his own. I feel incredibly bad for anyone who was trying to play by the rules and run a legitimate business in Russia. (Whether that describes Yandex, of course, is an entirely different point of debate.)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- megous 4y agoWhich years?
- ivan_gammel 4y agoIn his first term he delivered a number of useful economic reforms with a team of liberal economists. Taxes, land ownership, banking, bankruptcy etc. The economic block in the government remains very professional and impartial even now. The only thing Russia really needed to become a normal state was to reform judicial branch, police and security services.
- watwut 4y agoThat would be 20 years ago? And then he created up own Oligarchs groups. > Taxes, land ownership, banking, bankruptcy etc. The economic block in the government remains very professional and impartial even now. Russia has one of highest inequalities and quite poor population. It is also heavily corrupt. The macroeconomics works, but lower levels don't. > The only thing Russia really needed to become a normal state was to reform judicial branch, police and security services. That is kind of problem, given that Putin is former KGB agent, surrounded himself by alike people, became president duet to former KBG agents cooperating on gaining power ... Also, used both judicial branch and police against political opponents including journalists from day 1. They are corrupt basically as a matter of policy. Putin did reformed judicial branch, police and security services. Just not the way we would like.
- changoplatanero 4y agoHow hot does waste heat from data centers get? Is it up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit? Seems like it would be difficult to efficiently transport that heat into nearby homes.
- changoplatanero 4y agoOh I see that they can use heat pumps to concentrate the heat and make its reuse more efficient
- m_eiman 4y agoYes, the water is heated to 90-120 Celcius before being circulated.
- cmutel 4y agoThe Nordic countries are famous for pioneering low temperature district heating. This can be as low as 50 C. Sorry, no citation, this is what I heard at a project meeting on district heating networks in Switzerland. District heating with such (relatively) low temperatures is no problem, the energy to pump is much less than the energy to heat. My house is heated from nuclear waste heat pumped more around 10 kilometers.
- Hamuko 4y agoMy apartment will be heated by Microsoft Teams calls. https://yle.fi/news/3-12363215 https://yle.fi/news/3-12363215
- Symbiote 4y agoThis is the English part of the website for the Danish District Heat Association. My apartment and office (like much of Copenhagen) are heated through incinerated waste. https://www.danskfjernvarme.dk/sitetools/english https://www.danskfjernvarme.dk/sitetools/english
- brtkdotse 4y agoA lot of housing in Sweden is heated using left over heat from the industry (“spillvärme”). The industries actually rely on this for cooling. From what I hear, it’s usually pretty expensive compared to ground/air-to-water heat pumps (1 SEK vs 0.4 SEK per kWh of heat)
- nicce 4y agoArticle is misleading. Yandex is not part of the sanctions yet. Electricity was cut simply because they failed to make a new contract. Finnish source: https://www.hs.fi/kotimaa/art-2000008786328.html https://www.hs.fi/kotimaa/art-2000008786328.html
- ex3ndr 4y agoWonder why since it is completely controlled by pu
- Ndymium 4y agoYep, their electricity sales contract ~~expired~~ (EDIT: ended for unspecified reasons) and they don't have a new contract. Their electricity transfer contract is still valid because their Finnish company is not a part of sanctions. (Electricity sales and transfer is separate in Finland.) When they get a new electricity sales contract, then the transfer company will reconnect power. I think the only matter here related to the war could be that electricity sales companies might be reluctant to sell a contract to them, due to PR reasons. But I bet one of them will, and they will get their power back.
- Hamuko 4y agoAs far as I understood, their electricity contract did not expire, or at least that was not explicitly mentioned. The transfer company, which now cut them from the grid, was their electricity seller until the end of 2021, and from the beginning of 2022 they had another seller provide them electricity, but that has ended for reasons unknown. >"Hänen mukaansa aiemmin sähköä myi Yandexille Nivos Energia, mutta sopimus päättyi jo vuodenvaihteessa. Tilalle tuli uusi sähkönmyyjä, joka on nyt lopettanut sähkönmyynnin."
- Ndymium 4y agoYou're correct, though I wonder what the reason could be other than expiring. Thinking out loud, maybe they've had trouble paying due to money transfer issues between Finland and Russia. In any case it's not directly due to any sanctions as the company is not sanctioned.
- RamRodification 4y agoRBC calculates that running a 40MW data center on diesel would require 12,000 liters of diesel fuel per hour Holy crap
- bob1029 4y agoI hope figures like this make developers think twice about about throwing yet another layer of abstraction on to the pile. How many VMs does an average business actually require, assuming the software wasn't written like total ass?
- tut-urut-utut 4y agoIt can't happen unless software buyers were ready to pay for more development time. That abstraction layer and total-ass quality is frequently the only way to meet the deadline and budget. If people were ready to pay some upfront costs, it would be possible to lower long-term costs, but that's CAPEX vs OPEX decision that is not in the hands of the software developers.
- FartyMcFarter 4y agoIf one is aware of the basics of performance optimization, you can often find low hanging fruit even in Python. Basic profiling can often find bottlenecks that are easy to fix, usually just a result of a simple oversight. No one is asking for every piece of software to be rewritten in Assembly whilst taking advantage of every possible algorithmic improvement.
- yetihehe 4y ago> Basic profiling can often find bottlenecks that are easy to fix, usually just a result of a simple oversight. But it requires already scarce developers to spend even more time on one task. Those same developers which aready have two missed deadlines in their task queue. What should be done is always nice, but typically doesn't match reality.
- 4y ago
- paulcarroty 4y ago
- Proven 4y ago
- nuker 4y ago> Tigran Khudaverdyane was forced to resign when he was hit with sanctions by the European Union. So, did he got sanctions lifted? If yes, what was the point? It is not a musical chairs game, it is a bloody war.
- avianlyric 4y ago> So, did he got sanctions lifted? No, and nothing in the article suggested they had been. He remains sanctioned, and can’t work at Yandex.
- can16358p 4y ago> at a current price of €2.175 per 1 liter What? €2175 per liter of diesel? Am I missing something? /edit: nvm I misinterpreted decimal point as a thousands seperator.
- ginko 4y agoI guess the . is supposed to be a decimal point.
- julius_deane 4y ago
- medo-bear 4y agoin some places across EU decimal points are thousands separators and commas indicate decimals. i find this confusing too
- dustymcp 4y agoLiving in a country that does this, it is very confusing.
- jeroenhd 4y agoThe comma is used as a decimal separator in almost all European countries, with only English-speaking countries, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland using the full stop. Luxembourg uses both, confusingly, but in Europe people using the full stop as a decimal separator are the odd one out. I find long versus short scale for numbers like billion vs milliard a lot more confusing. I also would have a hard time adjusting to the lakh/crore system used elsewhere in the world. The decimal separator, though? That's just applying reason. Fuel prices may be high right now but they definitely haven't increased a thousandfold.
- Guillaume86 4y agoSome places = everywhere except UK and Ireland basically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#/media/File:DecimalSeparator.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#/media/File:...
- ped4enko 4y ago
- ThrustVectoring 4y ago> If the situation so requires, we would have to replace waste heat mainly with Russian natural gas and light fuel oil. Why wouldn't this just be using the electricity freed up by not powering the data center? Thermodynamically, the data center is just a resistive load, so assuming the electrical distribution system can handle the load, it should be a drop-in replacement.
- namibj 4y agoThere are no resistive heaters feeding the district heating system, only burners.
- ukd1 4y agoThat also assumes the other (non data center) parts of the system could take that load. I'd guess it's unlikely to have been over-engineered by 40MW. Then they'd also have to have the resistive heaters, which is doubtful as they aren't needed normally.
- obsrvatlarge 4y agoMaybe it is a question of money or actually currency. Here in Finland electricity is paid for with euros. Good luck for Yandex trying to find a supplier in Finland willing to accept Russian roubles these days.
- jeroenhd 4y agoIt should be said that the European Yandex probably uses euros as well, though I'm not sure if their European income is significant. You can visit their tax evasion office over at Schiphol Boulevard 165, 1118 BG Schiphol, The Netherlands, right next to Schiphol Airport. If their European counterpart isn't profitable or their tax evasion setup routes all funds through Russia then they may have trouble paying, but I think it's more likely that the political situation of the war itself is to blame.
- freeflight 4y ago> I think it's more likely that the political situation of the war itself is to blame. The ban on paying in ruble is also a political decision, pretty much the whole Western response to Russian military action in Ukraine has been solely political to a hypocritical degree. I don't remember the world banning the US dollar as a valid payment option over the invasion of Iraq, even tho that would also have been a very apt response to what happened back then [0]. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/feb/16/iraq.theeuro https://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/feb/16/iraq.theeur...
- freeone3000 4y agoGeopolitics is political, and other hacker news insights.
- account42 4y ago> I don't remember the world banning the US dollar as a valid payment option over the invasion of Iraq, even tho that would also have been a very apt response to what happened back then [0]. I don't remember the US preemptively threatening to nuke the world should anyone interfere in Iraq.
- gumby 4y ago> In early April, Nivos Energia announced it is buying a bioheat center from local firm HansHeat, which uses wood pellets or grain as fuel. [Emphasis mine] Grain seems like a rather inefficient way to generate power. Do they mean the waste straw left behind after harvest!
- seunosewa 4y agoDried grains are actually very energy dense, even though they are rarely used directly as fuel. Their high protein content is problematic for burning, though.
- gumby 4y agoThey certainly are energy dense (that’s why we eat them!) but given the amount of oil input typically used in growing them (fertilizers, fuel etc) I wonder if it’s really thermodynamically viable. Ethanol vehicle fuel in the USA has this problem: it would pollute less to just burn the oil directly.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoDidn’t think I would live to see a search engine be a causality of war.
- fareesh 4y agoYandex is not sanctioned, and should not be - it has nothing to do with the war, and neither do its users. Yandex offers a decent email service for free, and you can use your own domain. I had set up one for a few non-profits who are trying to get up and running. They really have nothing to do with the war, so having an outcome where their day-to-day operations are inconvenienced is a really thoughtless turn of events. I have read articles about unwelcome Russian dogs and cats and Russian artists who are losing livelihoods for no reason. Either Putin is a democratically elected leader, or he is a dictator. If he's a dictator why does it make sense to punish normal everyday Russians? Oligarchs and henchmen I can understand, but a cat? or a singer? Or Dostoevsky? This kind of reaction in the west is really something else. The rest of the world just wants NATO and Russia to get along but instead there is a proxy war and the Ukranian people are suffering most of all. It was obvious to expect this sort of thing from Putin, which is why it's even more surprising that there has been such an obsession with poking the bear. What did western leaders think will happen? And was it really worth so many millions of Ukranians having their lives ruined? And for what? NATO membership? They just wanted to go about their lives. The absolute neocon brazenness of the USA where folks like John McCain was addressing crowds of protesters in Maidan saying that the USA supports their political cause, and then a civil war broke out that has now lasted 8-10 years and now most of those same people are likely homeless. The foreign policy of the west is just dumbfounding, truly. So many parts of the world and so many people have had their lives ruined because of it.
- juanani 4y ago
- chelical 4y agoIt makes sense to punish Russia in the same vein we punished the citizens of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Putin was legitimately elected even if there were discrepancies, he's still extremely popular. The war has elevated his approval within Russia. The rest of this post operates under the premise that Ukrainians wanting to be a part of the EU/NATO was manipulated by the West. Even if that were the case, the invasion and the ongoing war crimes are committed by Russia.