Frame from Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need Plays with YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need

Open on YouTube First HN thread

12 HN users recommended this demo in 9 different months between 2022 and 2025.

2007–2026
5 strong recommendations 7 recommendations 7 citations 1 joke HackerTube score 11.5

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.

Pull quote: “recommend this video to anyone here.” (HN, 2025)

Also tagged: esoteric data storage, tom7, ping storage, hilbert curve, hacks, humor

What Hacker News said

20 labeled comments from the HN archive; up to 20 are kept per video, favoring different commenters. Each one links back to the original thread.

Strongly recommends shadowgovt December 2022 under I ran the length of every street in Pittsburgh: PAC TOM [video]
Amazing absurd data storage project with a memorable ending.
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.
Strongly recommends josephg February 2023 under Store files inside of YouTube videos
Block storage built from ping packets, with great storytelling.
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]
Strongly recommends godelski March 2025 under Vramfs: Vram Based Filesystem for Linux
Silly computer science that teaches a lot.
> 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]
Recommends cbm-vic-20 June 2023 under Happy 50th Birthday, Ethernet
Whole video is great; a relevant part starts at 2:31.
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]
Recommends anitil July 2024 under Space-filling curves, constructively
Visualizes the pinged IPv4 space as a Hilbert curve.
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.
Recommends makizar February 2025 under Visualizing all books of the world in ISBN-Space
Maps IP addresses on a Hilbert curve; rest of video is great.
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]

Citations, criticism and jokes

Cites it TheGoodBarn April 2022 under A Census of Minecraft Servers
Similar IP charting and exploration in Tom7's video.
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.
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]
Read the full comment
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]
Cites it ge96 June 2025 under Ask HN: How can we keep (part of) the web human?
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]
Makes a joke kmeisthax March 2025 under Anubis: Proof-of-work proxy to prevent AI crawlers
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]

Keyboard shortcuts

/
Search
j k
Next / previous video in a list
Enter
Open the focused video
l
Like (on a video page)
w
Watch later (on a video page)
?
This help
Esc
Close