When the only thing that is stopping kids from dismantling your government is an O(N^N) algorithm
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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From the same group that doesn't understand joins and thinks nobody uses SQL this is hardly surprising .
Probably got an LLM running locally and asking it to get data which is then running 10 level deep sub queries to achieve what 2 inner joins would in a fraction of the time.
You're giving this person a lot of credit. It's probably all in the same table and this idiot is probably doing something like a for-loop over an integer range (the length of the table) where it pulls the entire table down every iteration of the loop, dumps it to a local file, and then uses plain text search or some really bad regex's to find the data they're looking for.
Considering that is nearly exactly some of the answers I've received during the technical part of interviews for jr data eng, you're probably not far off.
Shit I've seen solutions done up that look like that, fighting the optimiser every step (amongst other things)
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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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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?
Have you ever heard of case of overheating hard drives within the last decade?
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
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I'd much sooner assume that they're just fucking stupid and talking out of their ass tbh.
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
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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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" ?
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.
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“I store my records on vinyl. You’ve probably never heard of them.”
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?
60k is laughably, embarrassingly small. It's still sqlite-sized.
i mean its even excel sized depending on how many columns. This is seriously sad and alarming
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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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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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Hard drive was made by Tesla
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.
When an HDD works continuously it can heat up to above 60 °C if proper air circulation is not allowed, which can cause a very premature failure. In fact, it should be kept under 40 °C to achieve the intended lifespan. Unfortunately, PC cases are usually not great at removing heat from the HDD by default.
As for your drive, it most likely has a temperature sensor so it can be displayed by various utilities.
I have a 12v fan running at 5v spitting air on my hdds, and that's enough for them to go from 55°C to 29°C, lol.
I did that too, the tiny fan is pretty much silent at 5V. The HDD has so much surface area it only needs a little air circulation.
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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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Good lord.