this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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[–] zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 109 points 1 day ago* (last edited 2 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?

[–] 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 23 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours 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

[–] 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.

[–] T156@lemmy.world 2 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

In my experience, the only time that I've taxed a drive when doing a database query is either when dumping it, or with SQLite's vacuum, which copies the whole thing.

For a pretty simple search like OP seems to be doing, the indices should have taken care of basically all the heavy lifting.

[–] AThing4String@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 day ago

I literally work with ~750,000 line exports on the daily on my little Lenovo workbook. It gets a little cranky, especially if I have a few of those big ones open, but I have yet to witness my hard drive melting down over it. I'm not doing anything special, and I have the exact same business-economy tier setup 95% of our business uses. While I'm doing this, that little champion is also driving 4 large monitors because I'm actual scum like that. Still no hardware meltdowns after 3 years, but I'll admit the cat likes how warm it gets.

750k lines is just for the branch specific item preferences table for one of our smaller business streams, too - FORGET what our sales record tables would look like, let alone the whole database! And when we're talking about the entirety of the social security database, which should contain at least one line each in a table somewhere for most of the hundreds of millions of people currently living in the US, PLUS any historical records for dead people??

Your hard drive melting after 60k lines, plus the attitude that 60k lines is a lot for a major database, speaks to GLARING IT incompetence.

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Pretty sure I run updates or inserts that count over 60k fairly often. No overheats. Select queries sometimes way higher.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 17 points 1 day ago

You've got it all wrong, in traditional computer terminology the "hard drive" is the box that sits under the desk that collects cat fluff and cigarette tar.

/s .....?

[–] Fuck_u_spez_@sh.itjust.works 6 points 23 hours ago

I don't think I've seen a brand new computer in the past decade that even had a mechanical hard drive at all unless it was purpose-built for storing multiple terabytes, and 60K rows wouldn't even take multiple gigabytes.

[–] baldingpudenda@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

Reminds me of those 90s ads about hackers making your pc explode.

Musk gonna roll up in a wheelchair, "the attempt on my life has left me ketamine addicted and all knowing and powerful."

[–] wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 1 points 20 hours ago

I have when a misconfigured spark job I was debugging was filling hard drives with tb of error logs and killing the drives.

That was a pretty weird edge case though, and I don’t think the drives were melting, plus this was closer to 10 years ago when SSD write lifetimes were crappy and we bought a bad batch of drives.

[–] zenpocalypse@lemm.ee 19 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours 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".

[–] T156@lemmy.world 0 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

Unless they actually mean the hard drive, and not the computer. I've definitely had a cheap enclosure overheat and drop out on me before when trying to seek the drive a bunch, although it's more likely the enclosure's own electronics overheating. Unless their query was rubbish, a simple database scan/search like that should be fast, and not demanding in the slightest. Doubly so if it's dedicated, and not using some embedded thing like SQLite. A few dozen thousand queries should be basically nothing.

[–] GoodEye8@lemm.ee 24 points 1 day ago (3 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.

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 20 points 1 day ago

They have temp sensors. But have never heard of a overheating drive.

[–] carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Hard drives do get hot and need some cooling but not at 60k rows. Its either made up or their computer case is made of thermal cladding

[–] zenpocalypse@lemm.ee 10 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

You could query 60,000 rows on a low tier smart phone. Makes no sense at all.

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 4 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

Can we think of any device someone might have that would struggle with 60k? Certainly an ESP32 chip could handle it fine, so most IoT devices would work...

[–] T156@lemmy.world 2 points 15 hours ago

Unless the database was designed by someone who only knows of data as that robot from Star Trek, most would be absolutely fine with 60k rows. I wouldn't be surprised if the machine they're using caches that much in RAM alone.

[–] zenpocalypse@lemm.ee 4 points 22 hours ago

Right? There's no part of that xeet that makes any real sense coming from a "data engineer."

Terrifying, really.

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 9 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

Imo if they can't max out their harddrive for at least 24 hours without it breaking, their computer was already broken. They just didn't know it yet.

Any reasonable SSD would just throttle if it was getting too hot, and I've never heard of a HDD overheating on its own, only if there's some external heat sources, like running it in a 60°C room

[–] T156@lemmy.world 1 points 15 hours ago

Hard Drives might do it if the enclosure is poorly designed (no ventilation), but I can't imagine a situation where it would overheat like that that quickly, even in a sealed box. 30k is nothing in database terms, and if their query was that heavy, it would bottleneck on the CPU, and barely heat the drive at all.

dude is 100% talking about ssds. NVME ones at that, he's just stupid.

[–] Adalast@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

Why? Because they feel the need to have local copies of sensitive financial information because... You know... They are computer security experts.

[–] SharkAttak@kbin.melroy.org 4 points 1 day ago

Or they're doing it on a Diamondmax 9.