12 HN users recommended this demo9 months2022–2025score 11.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN treats it as a favorite example of silly but educational computer science, recommended often when threads touch odd storage hacks.
Tom7 (suckerpinch) builds and evaluates a series of absurd hard drives, including storage made from ping packets across the internet. The video accompanies his paper and mixes deep technical hacking with comedic storytelling.
His Harder Drive paper was amazing [ [this video] ], most especially the ending that considered a surprisingly common configuration of utterly useless, inefficient mass data storage that solves a problem nobody actually has.
Amazing absurd data storage project with a memorable ending.
Suckerpunch did a video on “harder drives” where he implemented a block storage device by storing data in ping packets. It’s one of my all time favourite technical talks - his style is amazing, and he’s an incredible story teller. [this video]
Block storage built from ping packets, with great storytelling.
As the other commenter said, everything on his channel is gold. Just the other day I was rewatching "Automated 3dfication of Nintendo games" [link] and "Harder Drives" [this video]
This idea is covered during the first part of one of my favorite Tom7 videos. If this comment is the first you are hearing of Tom7... strap in and enjoy: [this video]
> harder drive Here's the direct YouTube link[0] I'd * HIGHLY* recommend this video to anyone here. It is exactly that fun silly computer science stuff where you also learn a shit ton. His channel is full of this stuff. Don't ask why, ask why not Is essentially the motto of his channel, and it is the best. Leads to lots of innovations and I think we all should encourage more of this kind of stuff. [0] [this video]
They're also useful for representing IPv4 space. Tom7 had a nice video where he does this after pinging the whole (IPv4) internet [0] [0] [this video] at about 6 minutes, though I recommend the whole thing.
Visualizes the pinged IPv4 space as a Hilbert curve.
That's a really nice view! Made me think of this map of IP addresses arranged as a Hilbert curve i saw in this Tom7 video: (the rest of the video is wildly good if you haven't seen it) [this video]
Maps IP addresses on a Hilbert curve; rest of video is great.
This article is wonderful, I love the working knowledge. A lot of the idea feels similar to the recent Tom7 Harder Drive video: [this video] I had never seen some of this IP charting and stuff and in his video he does a lot of similar stuff.
Similar IP charting and exploration in Tom7's video.
Funny, I actually tried finding tricks exploiting the cache from Vercel, but it didn't work. Initially I thought I could find a way to use it to share data across users, but nothing worked. Do you have any links to resources that could help getting a datastore from the Vercel cache? I will try adding things you mentioned, and I'd love to find way to also have stupidly complex/convoluted storage systems, inspired by tom7's harder drives: [this video]
This is my favorite kind of small fun projects, reminds me of the video about harder drives [1], where the author used ICMP echo requests to store data [1] [this video]
Hilbert curves (or similar) are often used for graphing billions of nodes[1]. However this will not by default show the relationships between nodes in a graph. Depending on your data you may be able to write a function to map from your edge list to a node index that hints at proximity. Note that visualizations are limited by human perception to ~10000 elements, more usefully 1000 elements. You might try a force directed graph, perhaps a hierarchical variant wherein nodes can contain sub-graphs. Unless you have obvious root nodes, this variant would be interesting in that the user could start from an arbitrary set of nodes, giving different insights depending on their starting point. 1 - An excerpt from "Harder Drive", a rather silly implementation of a unix block device using ping latency with any host that will let him. He visualizes the full ipv4 address space in a hilbert curve at this offset: [this video]
I wonder if registrars provide lists of bought domain names vs. trying to map IPV4 which has multiple domains pointing to same ip would be interesting to do mapping yourself though probably pointless with how much effort/time it would take does remind me of this fun video [this video]
You can turn Anubis into Proof of Storage by appending large amounts of random data to the session cookie and then hashing it on each request. Combined with per-session-cookie limits, you can effectively force the LLM bots to store all the data you want if they want to scrape your site. Maybe suckerpinch can work it into a sequel to Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need [0]. [0] [this video]
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