this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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[–] RussianBot8453@lemmy.world 97 points 22 hours ago (3 children)

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?

[–] zenpocalypse@lemm.ee 26 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] psivchaz@reddthat.com 2 points 10 hours ago

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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[–] person420@lemmynsfw.com 24 points 22 hours ago (3 children)

Some interesting facts about excel I learned the hard way.

  1. It only supports about a million or so rows
  2. 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.

[–] driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 8 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (2 children)

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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[–] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 18 points 17 hours ago

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

[–] jkercher@programming.dev 36 points 20 hours 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.

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[–] sirdorius@programming.dev 68 points 22 hours 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 33 minutes 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 23 hours 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 21 hours ago* (last edited 18 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 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours 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 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 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.

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[–] zenpocalypse@lemm.ee 19 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 20 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".

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[–] GoodEye8@lemm.ee 24 points 22 hours 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.

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 20 points 22 hours ago

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

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[–] Psaldorn@lemmy.world 195 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] _stranger_@lemmy.world 81 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] morbidcactus@lemmy.ca 37 points 1 day ago

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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[–] Professorozone@lemmy.world 16 points 19 hours ago (3 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?

[–] melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 17 hours ago

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.

[–] ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 10 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 19 hours ago (9 children)

it is, in the select event that your platter bearing fails, in which case it would be very, very obvious.

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[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 35 points 22 hours ago

Hard drive was made by Tesla

[–] tiefling@lemmy.blahaj.zone 139 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 136 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 47 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 54 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 73 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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[–] vk6flab@lemmy.radio 360 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 214 points 1 day ago (36 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.

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[–] madeinthebackseat@lemmy.world 63 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 61 points 1 day ago (7 children)

I cannot believe these people make more than me lol.

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