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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Whereas I made a mistake and bought an underspeced MacBook and my 512GB disk is constantly on the brink of full as I reclaim the last 40 GB over and over from different caches, downloads, and wherever else and had to simply give up on several projects because of their disk usage.

Disk isn't free, especially now.

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Exactly my experience, even worse because for me it's 2x256GB drives. Eventually I bit the bullet and upgraded one of them to 1TB, but not the one my root partition is mounted on (too lazy for that), so now I find myself moving various large directories across to my "extra" drive and symlinking them. Funnily enough I don't remember this ever being a problem back when 50GB was considered a lot.

Yea, I remember when the family computer had a 40MB hard drive and it was never ever filled to capacity. Now I’m wondering how many new disks to add to my ZFS pool, and when. And how to budget for it.

We upgraded our 40MB harddrive to a 210MB, as it was constantly getting filled up. I was wondering what on earth to do with all this space, it seemed limitless.

A week later I was cleaning up disk space again...

Because when 50gb was a lot, by the time you filled it, 200 GB was cheap and a non event.

I don't disagree. But if you're in that position, surely you'd be better off emptying the cache and disabling it?

The things which use my disk are things like package caches in several languages, build artifacts in both release and debug, multiplied by worktrees, things like iOS device support and release files + simulators, docker containers and related.

I had to give up on things like Lean theorem prover projects and VM projects because the disk space wasn't there.

The causes of disk waste are manifold and usually can't just be disabled and even when they can the result is constant rebuilding, redownloading, etc.

Too many developer products act like disk and memory is free to waste and the consequences have gotten ridiculous.

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