[HN Gopher] Investigation report on the OVH data centre fire in ... ___________________________________________________________________ Investigation report on the OVH data centre fire in Strasbourg on 2021-03-10 Author : speedgoose Score : 26 points Date : 2022-06-08 20:41 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (lafibre.info) (TXT) w3m dump (lafibre.info) | nraynaud wrote: | I can't imagine the phone call to Germany: "Hi, it's the clown | neighbor again, we are sending you smoke, probably laced with | lead. Sweet Dreams." | Kuinox wrote: | Well that's fair, they send us their coal fumes all the year. | sofixa wrote: | It'd be funny if it weren't so tragic. Germany really should | have shut down coal (i know it's easier said than done and | there's a significant industry around it, all the more reason | to start with it and not postpone) before nuclear. | adamredwoods wrote: | Interesting read (Google translated). | | >> Safety lessons in building design | | >> In the field of building design, we will retain two safety | lessons. | | >> First of all, the requirements applicable to battery charging | rooms, when they are located inside a building, require a | sufficient degree of fire resistance to prevent its propagation | to the rest of the building. The existing regulations already | seem complete to us, and the OHV accident does not call their | technical relevance into question. | | >> However, two configurations, in the current state of the | regulations, deserve particular attention: | | >> - When the batteries used are not likely to generate hydrogen | during charging (if lead batteries are now mainly used in energy | storage in data centers, lithium technology offers one more | alternative more competitive which tends to develop); | | >> - Or when these load rooms are located outside. | | >> On the first point, the BEA-RI considers that the prescription | relating to the constructive provisions should also concern the | other battery technologies for which electrical failure and | thermal runaway cannot be physically ruled out. This type of | failure can lead to major fires and justify specific construction | measures. | | >> On the second point (outdoor charging rooms), the BEA-RI | recalls the recommendations issued in its report MTE- | BEARI-2021-004 on the battery container fire in Perles and | Castelet (09) | | >> Finally, the report points out that protecting the battery | room is not sufficient, given the outbreak of fire at the level | of the inverter: | speedgoose wrote: | > Could a water leak on an electronic board of an inverter be the | cause of the beginning of the disaster? | | The report is in French, but you can look at the pictures or use | an online translator. | | https://deepl.com usually provides much more convincing French- | English translations compared to Google Translate. | naniwaduni wrote: | Note that "more convincing" isn't necessarily a _good_ thing; | the deception of fluency can totally be used to convince you of | something _wrong_. | lucb1e wrote: | I've had good experiences with deepl, but certainly a good | point. Translating definitely has an interpretation aspect to | it. I'd be curious if anyone tried tricky texts on different | translators and how they fared. I'm not enough of a linguist | myself to know of different categories of tricks (to give a | fair assessment rather than things randomly coming to mind), | or what even the jargon for such things would be to look them | up. | naniwaduni wrote: | Well, this went around my circles the other day: | https://twitter.com/Xythar/status/1405660710382706694 | | It turns out that the "tricks" don't necessarily have to | get very sophisticated, because, well, the target user of | machine translation services can't understand the source | text. | | (I mean, the fr-en language pair is probably better off | than ja-en, but I don't know enough French to know whether | it can be trusted!) | Mordisquitos wrote: | I'm not sure what to make of this. | [deleted] | mananaysiempre wrote: | As an aside, there seems to have been a dramatic change | in Google Translate's underlying approach several years | ago: before it, the fr>en and zh>en pairs were reasonable | (if stilted and occasionally ungrammatical) while both | de>en and ja>en absolutely sucked (just made no sense | whatsoever over groups of more than three or so words); I | suspect the difficulty being the "global" transformations | needed to translate SOV to SVO word order. It would be | very interesting to know what they did (there are old- | style statistical approaches that involve learning pairs | of corresponding syntax trees, but I didn't get the | impression they were practical?). | lucb1e wrote: | > in truth it's like 10 times more likely to just make | complete shit up if it doesn't understand the source | | I use this to learn German. Instead of translating a text | EN->DE and not practicing any writing skills, I'll write | my best attempt at German and see if it's understandable | by running it through the DE->EN or DE->NL translator. | (In cases where I care about the quality, I'll then patch | up the English/Dutch if necessary, run it NL/EN->DE, and | use that version.) | | For this purpose, I'm glad that it makes a best guess at | what my broken German must mean, and it usually does a | fair job (easy to say because I know what I meant, so no | validation issues there). Of course this is not great for | every use-case, for example it would be better if it | additionally displayed confidence (e.g. slightly graying | out subsentences below 80% confidence), but it also has | advantages to make a good guess at the meaning of the | source. | | And when I put in something unintelligible, | unintelligible stuff comes out. It's not _really_ just | making something up, at least not in my experience with | EN /DE/NL. No idea what happened there with that Japanese | example. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-06-08 23:00 UTC)