this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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[–] sirdorius@programming.dev 69 points 1 day ago (1 children)

When the only thing that is stopping kids from dismantling your government is an O(N^N) algorithm

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[–] zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 109 points 1 day ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (6 children)

my hard drive overheated

So, this means they either have a local copy on disk of whatever database they're querying, or they're dumping a remote db to disk at some point before/during/after their query, right?

Either way, I have just one question - why?

Edit: found the thread with a more in-depth explanation elsewhere in the thread: https://xcancel.com/DataRepublican/status/1900593377370087648#m

So yeah, she's apparently toting around an external hard drive with a copy of the "multiple terabytes" large US spending database, running queries against it, then dumping the 60k-row result set to CSV for further processing.

I'm still confused at what point the external drive overheats, even if she is doing all this in a "hot humid" hotel room that she can't run any fans I guess because her kids were asleep?

But like, all of that just adds more questions, and doesn't really answer the first one - why?

[–] vapeloki@lemmy.world 81 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Have you ever heard of case of overheating hard drives within the last decade?

[–] spooky2092@lemmy.blahaj.zone 57 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Plus, 60k is nothing. One of our customers had a database that was over 3M records before it got some maintenance. No issue with overheating lol

[–] surph_ninja@lemmy.world 30 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I run queries throughout the day that can return 8 million+ rows easily. Granted, it takes few minutes to run, but it has never caused a single issue with overheating even on slim pc’s.

This makes no fucking sense. 60k rows would return in a flash even on shitty hardware. And if it taxes anything, it’s gonna be the ram or cpu- not the hard drive.

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[–] Bosht@lemmy.world 49 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'd much sooner assume that they're just fucking stupid and talking out of their ass tbh.

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 20 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Same as Elon when he confidently told off engineers during his takeover of Twitter or gestures broadly at the Mr. Dunning Kruger himself

Wonder if it’s an SQL DB

Elon probably hired confident right wingers whose parents bought and paid their way through prestigious schools. If he hired anyone truly skilled and knowledgeable, they’d call him out on his bullshit. So the people gutting government programs and passing around private data like candy are just confidently incorrect

[–] zenpocalypse@lemm.ee 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Even if it was local, a raspberry pi can handle a query that size.

Edit - honestly, it reeks of a knowledge level that calls the entire PC a "hard drive".

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[–] GoodEye8@lemm.ee 24 points 1 day ago (9 children)

My one question would be "How?"

What the hell are you doing that your hard drives are overheating? How do you even know it's overheating as I'm like 90% certain hard drives (except NVMe if we're being liberal with the meaning of hard drive) don't even have temperature sensors?

The only conclusion I can come to is that everything he's saying is just bullshit.

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[–] vk6flab@lemmy.radio 367 points 1 day ago (28 children)

Wow.

I've been processing a couple of billion rows of data on my machine, the fans didn't even come on. WTF are they teaching "experts" these days, or has Elmo only hired people who claim that they can "wrangle data" and say "yes" ?

[–] bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 220 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Even if querying data was processing-heavy and even if somehow the ‘hard drive’ got warm during this, then there still would need to be a hardware defect in order for the drive to overheat.

[–] IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 87 points 1 day ago (34 children)

Yes, but this may be a symptom of an issue I've been seeing with younger programmers; they've siloed themselves so specifically into whatever programming they "specialize" in, that they become absolutely useless at dealing with absolutely anything else related to their job. And exasperating this issue is the fact that they've grown up with systems that "just work". Windows, iOS, and android are all at the point where fucking around with hardware issues is very uncommon for the average person.

Asking this guy to solve a hardware problem is like asking hime to tune a carburetor. He likely has not the slightest clue how to start.

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[–] jkercher@programming.dev 37 points 1 day ago (2 children)

60k rows of anything will be pulled into the file cache and do very little work on the drive. Possibly none after the first read.

You can put 60k rows in Excel 95.

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[–] tiefling@lemmy.blahaj.zone 142 points 1 day ago (12 children)

60k isn't that much, I frequently run scripts against multiple hundreds of thousands at work. Wtf is he doing? Did he duplicate the government database onto his 2015 MacBook Air?

[–] easily3667@lemmus.org 141 points 1 day ago (3 children)

60k is laughably, embarrassingly small. It's still sqlite-sized.

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 49 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Sqlite can easily handle millions of rows. Don't sell it short

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[–] naught@sh.itjust.works 57 points 1 day ago (2 children)

i mean its even excel sized depending on how many columns. This is seriously sad and alarming

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[–] 4am@lemm.ee 75 points 1 day ago (3 children)

A TI-86 can query 60k rows without breaking a sweat.

If his hard drive overheated from that, he is doing something very wrong, very unhygienic, or both.

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[–] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 19 points 1 day ago

“I store my records on vinyl. You’ve probably never heard of them.”

[–] madeinthebackseat@lemmy.world 64 points 1 day ago (11 children)

As a reasonably experienced "data guy," this seems obviously laughable, but the discussion on X is scary. This guy is a savior in the MAGA world.

We can criticize and poke fun all day, but it doesn't matter much if our message isn't challenging the mindset of those with other opinions.

How do we make better use of our time to impact outside opinion?

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[–] fossilesque@lemmy.dbzer0.com 62 points 1 day ago (7 children)

I cannot believe these people make more than me lol.

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[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 35 points 1 day ago

Hard drive was made by Tesla

[–] kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world 81 points 1 day ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (8 children)

This shit sounds like when your mom tells you that the Facebook printed out her bank statement on the fax machine. I'm not smart enough to even guess how you did something dumb enough to make that happen.

How bad are you at writing queries? How does your hard drive overheat even under 100% load? Do you have it smothered under a blanket? Did you crack it up and expose it to cheeto dust? What does running a query on your, presumably, remote database even have to do with your harddrive in the first place? Are you trying to copy the entire database locally to a laptop? Do you know how to tie your shoes yet, or are you still on the velcro?

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[–] Professorozone@lemmy.world 16 points 1 day ago (15 children)

I didn't know hard drive overheating was a thing. Should I be worried that my 5 year old hard drive is about to overheat. I mean is this actually a floppy disk or something?

it is a thing, but any competently designed computer should have things in place to prevent this.

unless you're an arrogant dipshit and disable all the hardware safeties on your computer to make it go faster and wear harder.

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[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 68 points 1 day ago (14 children)

Good lord.

These people cannot do half of what she can do.

@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io

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[–] mamotromico@lemmy.ml 69 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Maybe

Maybe

They are just making shit up and doing jack shit

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[–] ryedaft@sh.itjust.works 89 points 1 day ago (4 children)

This sounds like trying to do stuff in Excel? The computer isn't overheating but the amount of memory needed is very high which would make it run poorly. They might interpret that as overheating?

[–] monkeyman512@lemmy.world 87 points 1 day ago

It also makes sense if they are on calling the entire computer "the hard drive" like grandma and the fans kicked on.

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