Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
Top comments
Some pedantry... Raw RAM space is not the issue... it's indexing and structure of the data that makes it process-able. If you just need to spin through the data once, there's no need to even put all of it in RAM - just stream it off disk and process it sequentially. If you need to join the data, filter, index, query it, you'll need a lot more RAM than your actual data. Database engines have their own overhead (system tables…
There's just a huge amount of waste in many cases which is very easy to fix. For example, if we have a list of fractions (0.0-1.0): * Python list of N Python floats: 32×N bytes (approximate, the Python float is 24 bytes + 8-byte pointer for each item in the list) * NumPy array of N double floats: 8×N bytes * Hey, we don't need that much precision, let's use 32-bit floats in NumPy: 4×N * Actually, values of 0-100…
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
HN stats
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 370
- Total comments
- 303
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-02-12 | Does my data fit in RAM?First breakout · Best thread | louwrentius | 216 | 162 |
| 2022-08-02 | Does my data fit in RAM?Latest 20+ point return | louwrentius | 150 | 141 |
| 2023-11-05 | Does your data fit in RAM? | capableweb | 2 | 0 |
| 2024-06-20 | Does your data fit in RAM? | mulmen | 2 | 0 |