inactive-useron Lobsters • Recommends
Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need
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#tom7#sigbovik#esotericstorage
Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need
suckerpinch
202K subscribers • 15 videos on Hallway
- Recommended by 13 people: 12 on Hacker News and 1 on Lobsters.
- Presented by Tom Murphy VII, computer scientist
Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.
2M views4 years ago13 recommendations
Systems programmingHardwareData structuresNetworking and protocolsRetro computing
Tom7 demonstrates several highly impractical and creative hard drive implementations, including storing data in internet ping packets.
In this video we make and evaluate several hard drives that we didn't want. Drawing some inspiration from vexing current events, we find that creative, structured thought on adjacent (but frivolous) problems is a sort of digestive act, and one that is ultimately laxative. Paper, source code, ringtones (and for a limited time, the data and viewer from pinging the whole internet): tom7.org/harder Errata (thanks to all pedantic viewers who catch this stuff): - I got the escape velocity off by a factor of 1000! It's 11 km/sec, not 11,000 km/sec. I think the other calculations are correct; I just mistook a period for a comma in my bleary-eyed late-night editing. - I got the size of the genome wrong due to a very silly bug from bleary-eyed late-night programming. It is 29903 base pairs, which can be stored in an economy-sized 7476 bytes. For SIGBOVIK 2022Why it's here
13 people recommend thisWhat people say. Highly recommended as an incredibly entertaining and educational exploration of esoteric data storage concepts.
shadowgovton Hacker News • Recommends
On “I ran the length of every street in Pittsburgh: PAC TOM [video]”
His Harder Drive paper was amazing [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.
josephgon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Store files inside of YouTube videos”
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. link to this video
alserioon Hacker News • Recommends
On “GradIEEEnt half decent: The hidden power of imprecise lines [video]”
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" link to this video
mk_stjameson Hacker News • Recommends
On “NASA sends cat video over laser from 80 lunar distances”
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: link to this video
godelskion Hacker News • Recommends
On “Vramfs: Vram Based Filesystem for Linux”
> harder drive Here's the direct YouTube link0 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 link to this video
Lt_Riza_Hawkeyeon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Store files inside of YouTube videos”
Maybe it doesn't have a post of its own, but I found these esoteric storage methods greatly entertaining as well: link to this video
mtlmtlmtlmtlon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough”
I love this! Reminds me of Harder Drive by Tom 7: link to this video It's better to go in unspoiled so I won't reveal any details.
cbm-vic-20on Hacker News • Recommends
On “Happy 50th Birthday, Ethernet”
See also Tom7's "Harder Drive" video. The whole thing is great, but the part relevant to the parent comment starts at 2:31. link to this video
nick-of-timeon Hacker News • Recommends
On “GradIEEEnt half decent: The hidden power of imprecise lines [video]”
Mine are "Harder Drives"1, "ELO World"2, and "Printable x86"3 1 link to this video 2 link 3 link
anitilon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Space-filling curves, constructively”
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 link to this video at about 6 minutes, though I recommend the whole thing.
alexwassermanon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need (2022) [pdf]”
There's a fantastic associated YouTube video that talks through these too: link to this video It's a rabbit hole that had be fascinated for quite a while.
makizaron Hacker News • Recommends
On “Visualizing all books of the world in ISBN-Space”
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) link to this video
TheGoodBarnon Hacker News • Mentions
On “A Census of Minecraft Servers”
This article is wonderful, I love the working knowledge. A lot of the idea feels similar to the recent Tom7 Harder Drive video: link to this video I had never seen some of this IP charting and stuff and in his video he does a lot of similar stuff.
Elzearon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Show HN: List and demo of 20 costless serverless databases”
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: link to this video
yonatan8070on Hacker News • Mentions
On “TabDB: Using browser tabs as a database like only a maniac would”
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 link to this video