20 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
godelskiMar 2025Strongly recommends
> 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
in “Vramfs: Vram Based Filesystem for Linux” · View on HN
mk_stjamesDec 2023Strongly recommends
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
in “NASA sends cat video over laser from 80 lunar distances” · View on HN
alserioJul 2023Strongly recommends
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
in “GradIEEEnt half decent: The hidden power of imprecise lines [video]” · View on HN
josephgFeb 2023Strongly recommends
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
in “Store files inside of YouTube videos” · View on HN
shadowgovtDec 2022Strongly recommends
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.
in “I ran the length of every street in Pittsburgh: PAC TOM [video]” · View on HN
makizarFeb 2025Recommends
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
in “Visualizing all books of the world in ISBN-Space” · View on HN
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alexwassermanAug 2024Recommends
There's a fantastic associated YouTube video that talks through these too: ▶ this video It's a rabbit hole that had be fascinated for quite a while.
in “Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need (2022) [pdf]” · View on HN
anitilJul 2024Recommends
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.
in “Space-filling curves, constructively” · View on HN
nick-of-timeJul 2023Recommends
Mine are "Harder Drives"[1], "ELO World"[2], and "Printable x86"[3] [1] ▶ this video [2] [link] [3] [link]
in “GradIEEEnt half decent: The hidden power of imprecise lines [video]” · View on HN
mtlmtlmtlmtlJun 2023Recommends
I love this! Reminds me of Harder Drive by Tom 7: ▶ this video It's better to go in unspoiled so I won't reveal any details.
in “Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough” · View on HN
cbm-vic-20Jun 2023Recommends
See also Tom7's "Harder Drive" video. The whole thing is great, but the part relevant to the parent comment starts at 2:31. ▶ this video
in “Happy 50th Birthday, Ethernet” · View on HN
Lt_Riza_HawkeyeFeb 2023Recommends
Maybe it doesn't have a post of its own, but I found these esoteric storage methods greatly entertaining as well: ▶ this video
in “Store files inside of YouTube videos” · View on HN
poly2itDec 2025Cites it
Definitely one of the harder drives feasible! Tom 7 did something reminiscent of this if you hadn't seen already: ▶ this video .
in “Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest” · View on HN
ge96Jun 2025Cites it
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
in “Ask HN: How can we keep (part of) the web human?” · View on HN
_jhollandNov 2024Cites it
Another great Harder Drive to add to the list: ▶ this video Tom7 made a similar one in Tetris as part of the above video
in “Create block devices on your computer backed by Redstone Memory” · View on HN
simpaticoderAug 2024Cites it
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
in “Ask HN: What is the best software to visualize a graph with a billion nodes?” · View on HN
yonatan8070Jul 2023Cites it
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
in “TabDB: Using browser tabs as a database like only a maniac would” · View on HN
ElzearJun 2023Cites it
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
in “Show HN: List and demo of 20 costless serverless databases” · View on HN
TheGoodBarnApr 2022Cites it
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.
in “A Census of Minecraft Servers” · View on HN
kmeisthaxMar 2025Joke
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
in “Anubis: Proof-of-work proxy to prevent AI crawlers” · View on HN