Oh no

You people keep thinking this kind of reasoning is some kind of gotcha. It really isn't. All citizens of the US carry responsibility for the crimes you did over the last half century.

"Russians have withdrawn back across the border, the strikes on datacenters will stop."

I'm also surprised that people can't see this simple solution to the situation.

I am not a Russian shill. I fully support Ukraine and do not support the Russian war crimes. This doesn't help stop them, it just harms random people who happen to live in a war criminal dictatorship.

I don't blame Ukraine for doing this. I understand it fully. Russia invades and attacks them, they defend and attack back. That's what war is. But I don't understand the people on HN saying this attack is somehow "good" for anyone.

It's likely much higher considering the completely destroyed cities and towns. E.g. Mariupol had a population of 450 000 before the war.

1) The invasion started at least in 2014 (you could argue before that)

2) The UN estimate is considered on the low end because it looks into confirmed deaths while many civilians were killed in cities that became occupied and we have no numbers from there.

> And of course not a word about the people in Russia killed by Ukranians (Kursk region and daily killings by drones, of civilians, which the west is "not aware of").

Russia could stop this invasion any time and not a single Russian would be hurt. Pure Kreml propaganda on HN, how sad.

The highest, by far, death numbers come from Mariupol. It's a city close to the Russian border that was attacked very early in the war, but didn't surrender quickly like most other cities in the South. The estimates are somewhere close to 25K dead in this city alone. Civilians were unable to evacuate, and it was the time when Russia had plenty of resources, especially artillery munitions to expend and their tactics were to do massive artillery bombardment (often with rocket artillery) before massive motorized assault. So, lack of precision, or as some jokingly call it "accuracy through saturation".

Since Mariupol fell to Russia, they never counted the dead. There are horror stories of the bodies not being buried for month after surrender, and in some cases, Russians simply pawed over the places with many dead (a prominent example is the theater in the city center, but there were more).

The numbers you are quoting are the "counted" ones. Mariupol, Sieverodonetsk, Kherson, saw a lot of deaths that were never counted.

Sorry to bring another conflict into the picture, but it's useful to illustrate the point. In Gaza, the "health ministry" used a different "technique" to count the dead. Normally, to establish that someone died, there has to be a qualified medical professional at the scene, they also have to get a hold of identifying documents (or else, they will be counted as "John/Jane Doe", but in the morgue, much later). In some "special" cases a non-medical professional may record a death (they are usually defined using the language like "the head is more than 50 cm away from the rest of the body" etc.) But they switched to "incorporating reports from the news sources" (i.e. if some newspaper reported X people killed in some event, they just added X to the tally).

After the front line stabilized in Ukraine, they had no reason (or excuse) to count their civilian casualties in the way Gaza administration did, so, they never incorporated those who were never properly reported. And that's why we have a relatively "low" numbers. If Ukraine is ever able to regain control of the territory captured after 2022, these numbers are bound to go much, much higher, as they will have to deal with eg. property ownership and would have to either declare the previous owners as deceased, or actually find them.

[–] | on: 3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit

Why is my comment downvoted? (Rhetorical question, of course, I know what you are.) It is the reality that Russian civilians are killed daily by the Ukranian drones, guided also by your starlink satellites.

You may not like to hear this, but this is how things are.

US-owned datacenters in the middle east were already blown up with the drone family that Russia has been mass-procuring from Iran

The best the world can do is move away from US treasuries and importing from the US, causing long term economic decline. This applies the pain broadly to the US electorate who voted for this.

Why do you make it sound like a rhetorical question?

One goal is probably to show average Russians that the war is not just something which happens somewhere else in the world - a side-note on the news, no need to bother about.

The question why people who do not agree with the government should also pay the price for a war started by their government/country is not specific to this war.

You make it seem as if they are not active targets for many. Its just really, really hard to attack a datacenter in the US with a ballistic missile. Israel gets hit pretty regularly as well.

The beautiful thing about US war is that it never gets back home. The moment it starts, the populance starts pulling back support. But if you are shooting random people in the desert and middletown nowhere's McDonald's are functioning, its all gravy.

I remember that during the Wagner rebellion there was a 24h-48h time frame of no Russian bot activities. Was kinda surreal.

A few racks or even a couple of dozen racks could be called a datacenter, but nothing on any real scale. Enough to host important and niche things? Sure. I was referring more to like the size of what you might see in Quincy, WA.

Lots of people have built commercial, non-military, boutique scale stuff in hardened facilities, nobody I'm aware of has done it at scale. There's certainly money to be made from selling expensive "we put datacenter stuff deep down inside a mine" maybe to some weird enterprise and government customers, so the revenue per rack (or per theoretical 208V 30A circuit?) is probably a lot more than commodity colo. But I would very much like to see the aerial photos, if anyone can link them, to a claimed large scale underground or hardened datacenter.

It's a severe engineering challenge to hide massive heat exchangers on the scale of the datacenters built in the industrial area near Dulles (coordinate example: 38.9817915,-77.417775). Find those on a map and observe the scale of their cooling and generator systems and then try to find anything comparable that's been built underground.

It's sad that we have moved away so far from the decentralized web from the 90s and the P2P boom of the 00s. Just like solar panels on every house as a source of energy are much harder to take out than just a few power plants, local P2P storage, messaging, source management, etc. are much harder to take out.

But yeah, the economic incentives are creating unicorns and centralizing compute/capital/etc.

I don't have specific information about Yandex but don't forget how heavily involved Amazon were with things like: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/world/europe/ukraine-cybe... it wouldn't be a huge stretch to suggest that a lot of cloud hosting providers are neck deep in national security.

Also Russia has been targeting Ukrainian digital infrastructure so they make these things fair game IMO.

Military personnel use the same Yandex services as regular people: delivery, maps, taxi, etc.

Also Yandex is a large cloud provider, they host a lot of government-connected companies.

That's probably not going to help much. Ukraine has been able to hit targets very far inland with drones. They are also rapidly making advances in ballistic missile development. FP-7 has a range of 200-300km, their new FP-9 will have a range of up to 855km and an accuracy of 20m. I know that Russia is (extremely) large, but with development going at this pace...

Until someone blows up a satellite and creates enough shrapnel that every other satellite is destroyed.

Except that doing this at scale is currently still a pipe dream. Space is a near-vacuum, so it's hard to get rid of the heat.

The active thermal control system (ATCS) on the ISS uses an ammonia loop and radiators measuring 13.6 x 3.12 meters, or about 42.5 square meters. It can dissipate 16 kW, which is enough for 16 H200s, or one-quarter of a rack on Earth. For 200 kW, you would need a system 12.5 times larger, about 531 square meters—2.6 times larger than the solar array. The satellite would be enormous, larger than the ISS, and all of that for only three racks.

https://codedtrip.com/en/blog/data-centers-in-space-disastro...

> awkward comparisons to certain other warmongering nations

What Russia is doing in Ukraine is closer to America in Vietnam or Israel in Gaza than anything even Trump has done recently.

Sadly, this applies also to Ukraine. No one in their right mind will risk their limbs for clique of oligarchs and mini-oligarchs. Coincidentally children of oligarchs and mini-oligarchs left both countries as well. They basically wiped out their male millenial generation entirely, as this demographics had it the most difficult to leave these countries.