I will now attempt a full comment ... brace your hard drives
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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I smell something, but it's not overheating electronics.
I've processed over 5 million records on a laptop that's almost 10 years old. it took two days to get my results.
there's no way 60,000 records overheated ANYTHING.
Doesn't actually say that 60k overheated his drive. He says that he ran a run on 60k, and that he couldn't do the whole database due to overheating. Two unrelated statements except that 60k is the lower bound for what he could process.
Doesn't mean he knows what he's doing though, as pretty huge datasets are processable on quite modest hardware if you do it right.
that's somehow worse.
a "data analyst" couldn't cut up the work into a parallel processes and run them synchronously? what the actual fuck?
"sorry, I can only do 60k at a time."
just fucking split them up into 6 parallel batch processes running 10k at a time. it's fucking math, not rocket science. I'm not even an analyst and I could fucking do that much.
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I'm a data engineer that processes 2 billion row 3000 column datasets every day, and I open shit in Excel with more than 60k rows. What the hell is this chick talking about?
Seems like a good excuse to someone who doesn't know what they're doing and needs an excuse because why they haven't completed it yet?
The whole post is complete bs in multiple ways. So weird.
It sounds like Hollywood tech lingo. Like when you're watching a movie or a TV show and the designated techy character starts just saying computer words that make no actual sense in the real world, but I guess in CSI: Idiottown the hard drives have severe overheating issues.
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Some interesting facts about excel I learned the hard way.
- It only supports about a million or so rows
- It completely screws up numbers if the column is a number and the number is over 15 digits long.
Not really related to what you said, but I'm still sore about the bad data import that caused me days of work to clean up.
It completely screws up numbers if the column is a number and the number is over 15 digits long.
I work in insurance in Brazil, by standards of our regulatory body, claims numbers must be a string of 20 numbers (zfill(20) if needed). You can't imagine the amount of times excel had fucked me up rounding down the claim numbers, this is one of the first things I teach to my interns and juniors when they're working with the claims databases.
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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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“I store my records on vinyl. You’ve probably never heard of them.”
When the only thing that is stopping kids from dismantling your government is an O(N^N) algorithm
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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.
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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?
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
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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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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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.
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it is, in the select event that your platter bearing fails, in which case it would be very, very obvious.
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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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Hard drive was made by Tesla
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?
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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