Unless I’m misreading it which is possible it’s awfully late, he said he processed 60,000 rows didn’t find what he was looking for but his hard drive overheated on the full pass.
Discs don’t overheat because there was load. Even if he f***** up and didn’t index the data correctly (I assume it’s a relational database since he’s talking about rows) The disc isn’t just going to overheat because the job is big. It’s going to be lack of air flow or lack of heatsink.
I guarantee you he was running on an external NVMe, and one of those little shitty-ass Chinese enclosures. Or maybe one of those self immolating SanDisk enclosures. Hell, maybe he’s on a desktop and he slept a raw NVMe on his motherboard without a heatsink
There are times when you want a brilliant college student on your team, But you need seasoned professionals to help them through the things they’ve never seen before and never done before.
Somehow I feel over clicking without understanding of the consequences sounds like something a techbro would do
Can’t be a relational database, Musk said the government doesn’t use SQL.
He said many things.
You’re not supposed to place your laptop directly in the lap of your fur suit. Always leave an air gap for ventilation, smh.
Either she knows something novel, where processing data using voice coils is somehow beneficial, or is someone who calls their computer a ‘hard drive’, which summarily negates any legitimacy of technical competence.
Or wrote the code using AI without checking what it exactly does.
The AI probably used bogosort or something equivalent
I will now attempt a full comment … brace your hard drives
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.
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.
it is, in the select event that your platter bearing fails, in which case it would be very, very obvious.
So you’ve had this happen?
no. but generally spinning things that spin at several thousands of RPM that are spinning on a bearing, that no longer have a bearing usually sort of uh, tend to be VERY noisy.
Ok, but do you know anyone this has happened to? I don’t and I have some pretty old drives I still use. I tend to just buy more. Also most drives these days are solid state aren’t they? This just feels like a low probability event to me. Overheating RAM or the CPU or GPU, sure, but hard drive?
hard disk drives do still exist, and are useful for some stuff. mostly they’re cheaper. I think better for stuff you write to often?
SSD’s can overheat. but, again, there are usually sensors to throttle them when you’re in danger of this, and this idiot probably disabled those. because safety is for cucks i guess.
I had it happen to a random hard drive I bought, old bastard found in a bin at a local thrift store. Anyways had a big dent in it and while it started up, even booting into windows XP it cooked itself made a screeching noise and was hot to the touch. Don’t think I need to explain that the big dent was probably the source of the overheating, anyways had to use an oven mitt to relocate it to a metal bucket of water where it boiled for a minute.
So the story is plausible then?
Sure if they physically damaged the hard drive, though at that point the failure and the code were largely unrelated. Though if they were using a computer with an SSD only I would have no clue. Assuming they aren’t lying id have to look at the computer physically, perhaps even pry it open to see if there’s any noticable damage.
There’s also the possibility that they are just stupid and overheated their CPU by having too many apps open. Then they blamed their hard drive overheating because they are stupid.
not personally, i may have seen a video or two of it happening, but it’s hard to tell whether the head is dragging against the platter, or it’s the bearing, either one of those makes horrendous noise.
If you’re worried about it happening on a drive you own, you should copy that data somewhere else as a backup, ideally sooner rather than later. If you’re curious about the health of the drive you do stuff like SMART tests as well.
Yeah, most drives are solid state now, unless you’re buying hdds for archival purposes, still cheaper and denser in most cases. It’s a low probability failure, until the drive meets EOL, in which case it’s a mechanical wear part, either the motor or the bearing fails. One of them will fail first, probably the bearing.
The bearing failing would likely result in the HDD overheating as a result. Assuming the platter still spins, but that’s the only scenario i can think of where that would happen, unless you dump a very specific amount of continuous current into the read arm coils. That might also cause it, but it’s not likely at all.
An ssd “overheating” is more likely, but it shouldn’t cause too many issues, maybe premature degradation over long term use, and slowing of read/write speeds, or in some cases, an improvement, but other than that it should be business as normal. You would have to hit it with like a heat gun, to get a hardware failure or something like that.
I’m not actually worried about my drives. In fact that was kind of the point. I was kidding around because this excuse that the hard drive overheated sounds a little like a car running out of blinker fluid.
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.
If you work for a boss that fundamentally misunderstands what you are doing, then misleading them into thinking you’re ‘hard at work, making decisions with consequences’ is the theatre you put up to keep the cash flowing.
It’s one of the fundamental flows of autocracy, people try and represent what you want them to
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.
The row limitation seems, to me, like an actually-good thing. Excel is for data where you might conceivably scroll up and down looking at it and 1M is definitely beyond the ability of a human even to just skim looking for something different.
An older version of Excel could only handle 64k rows and I had a client who wanted large amounts of data in Excel format. “Oh sorry, it’s a Microsoft limitation,” I was thrilled to say. “I have no choice but to give you a useful summarization of the data instead of 800k rows (each 1000 columns wide) of raw data.”
Hard drive was made by Tesla
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?
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”.
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.
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?
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.
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 …?
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.
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.”
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
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.
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.
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.
Pretty sure I run updates or inserts that count over 60k fairly often. No overheats. Select queries sometimes way higher.
Why? Because they feel the need to have local copies of sensitive financial information because… You know… They are computer security experts.
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.
They have temp sensors. But have never heard of a overheating drive.
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
You could query 60,000 rows on a low tier smart phone. Makes no sense at all.
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…
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.
Right? There’s no part of that xeet that makes any real sense coming from a “data engineer.”
Terrifying, really.
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
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.
Or they’re doing it on a Diamondmax 9.
What in the fuck is this idiot doing? I’ve process datasets far larger than that and never once have I run into a hard drive “overheat”. I mean what level of incompetence do you have to have to get a hard drive to overheat processing a measley 60K rows of data?
I’ve met people who think their desktop PC is the “hard drive” but they’re all over 60.
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.
I have to admit I still have some legacy code that does that.
Then I found pandas. Life changed for the better.
Now I have lots if old code that I’ll update, “one day”.
However, even my old code, terrible as it is, does not overheat anything, and can process massively larger sets of data than 60,000 rows without any issue except poor efficiency.
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)
I think you’re still giving them too much credit with the for loop and regex and everything. I’m thinking they exported something to Excel, got 60k rows, then tried to add a lookup formula to them. Since you know, they don’t use SQL. I’ve done ridiculous things like that in Excel, and it can get so busy that it slows down your whole computer, which I can imagine someone could interpret as their “hard drive overheating”.
They don’t understand joins? How…
Is this a real post? I can’t seemed to find it on that website “X, formerly known as Twitter.”
some poeple have linked the discussion in other comment threads
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?
We must make better memes
I’m not even joking, the world runs on memes now. It’s fucking stupid, but we must shitpost to save ourselves
I agree some form of consistent opposition messaging is needed.
The maga world talks in consistent themes and terminology, which creates a psychological advantage. Unfortunately, it’s playground psychology, but if that’s the game being played you need to find a way to win at it.
I can’t remember the particular phrase that was used, but I heard an argument recently that we need to be more like politicians going on an interview and ensure that we’re more on message. For example, it’s fairly obvious by now that economically, the problem is wealth inequality, but I see fairly surprisingly few people discussing that.
I’ve been told violence isn’t the answer and we shouldn’t just shoot nazis and nazi enablers dead.
The way most people change their mind isn’t based on facts or figures, but emotions. Specifically, in-group belonging. For most people, and this certainly includes me and you some of the time, what our in-group believes is more compelling than an out-groups supposed facts.
They see that guy as someone in their group so they believe him. They see you as a bad outside bad bad bad liar, so nothing you say is likely to get through. (This comic is worth reading on this topic: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe )
If you want to change someone’s mind, they have to see you as in-group. Not necessarily the same group as what you’re arguing with. We all belong to many groups. American, new yorker, white guy, middle aged, yankees fan, etc etc there are many such slices. Like how you can’t get a republican to recycle by appealing to environmental concerns (because environmentalists are out-group, so fuck them), but you might be able to get them to recycle via something like “only american ingenuity can turn trash into bridges and tanks!”
This takes a lot of time and effort, and if you don’t get them to stop hanging out with the other group, you won’t make any lasting changes.
So I think you’d need a multi prong approach:
- Get them off bad media. Facebook, fox news, etc. This is reinforcing their bad beliefs. Because they see this stuff as trustworthy in-group, it goes right into the worldview.
- Get them to stop hanging out with their shitty maga-hat friends. This is the social in-group that’s reinforcing bad beliefs.
- Get them to trust you.
- Gently introduce the idea that maybe the extreme right doesn’t have their interests at heart, etc
All of which takes a lot of time and effort, and your opposite number is basically trying to do the same thing. Except they have fox news, trump, and such in their corner.
And, again, I’m told we definitely shouldn’t just shoot extreme right wingers and other nazi sympathizers dead. Nor should we burn their houses down. If we’re an emergency responder, we definitely shouldn’t let them die while thinking to ourselves “they would let so many die. without a thought, their passing deserves no mourning” or similar.
You should definitely nullify if you’re on a jury and someone allegedly did violence to a shitty ceo or red-hat, though, bu that’s getting off topic.
Wow, that was an awesome rabbit hole, thank you for the link.
If you want to change someone’s mind, they have to see you as in-group.
Maybe a less manipulative-sounding way to phrase that might be that we should remind people that we’re all in it together. The far right media and their billionaire buddies have spent the past decade and a half dividing us, and they succeeded. Idk what it would take to unite this country again, but it at least is a little comforting to have a clear problem statement.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I’m from the UK, and whilst things are less politically dire here than the US, it’s still pretty grim. Both the Conservatives and Labour seem reluctant to actually meaningfully tax the rich, even as the working class (and to a lesser extent, the middle class) are being squeezed by a cost of living crisis and general hopelessness. Parties like Reform are taking the racist “things are bad because we have too many immigrants” and I’ve recently realised that I need to stop resenting people for being taken in by that rhetoric; people are desperate and there aren’t people in the mainstream pushing for alternatives (besides Reform). These people have a lot in common with me, such as recognising that we’re being fucked but the system, but we just disagree on the solution. It’s hard, but ultimately necessary to be able to be in solidarity with people like Reform’ voters
Compelling point. I just found that arguing with „these kind of people“ (livibg in europe, so no MAGA‘s here but like-minded, conservative fundamentalists etc.) leads to nowhere. It‘s kind of like the covid-conversations. And often I heard „you can‘t make them change their minds, so just let them be“. Still, I think this behaviour leads to isolation and separates us as a people even more.
Long story short: good question. If you found the answer, let me know.
does elon only hire chip from sales guy vs web dude or something
No he also hire people who created a script to make fake ballots with a bias.
https://bsky.app/profile/denisedwheeler.bsky.social/post/3lhowh3ijgs2f
I cannot believe these people make more than me lol.
They make nothing. They’re compensated for destroying things, and considering it’s musk, they’re likely given relatively little money in return for their time.
Even if the only thing you do all day is sit on the toilet and yell at the Internet, you’re already a bigger net positive on society.
We’re going to see all of these clowns in front of a grand jury one day.
I would be absolutely shocked if we had anything approaching justice for what this administration is doing.
We barely got anything for that whole ass insurrection attempt.
The reason he recruited a bunch of incompetent college kids is because nobody with any experience or wisdom would touch this rolling crime wave with a 10 foot pole
Most likely compensation is the promise of being part of privatization of whatever the fuck they’re destroying.
They’re dumb kids. They probably see Musk as some kind of god. He gave them some line like “Hey, you guys wanna save the United States?” and they jumped at the chance.
You get to be a piece of history! Whheeeeeee
As a former dumb kid this tracks
