32 points by anonymzz 6 days ago
I am studying distributed computing and struggling to understand how Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) work. Can you recommend any resources, such as books, articles, or anything else, to help me?
The most widely used DHT is Kademlia from Petar Maymounkov and David Mazières. It is used in Ethereum, IPFS, I2P, Gnutella DHT, and many other applications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia
https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~petar/papers/maymounkov-kademlia...
https://web.archive.org/web/20120128120732/http://www.cs.ric...
If you scroll to the bottom, I've a linkdump worth considering: https://h0p3.nekoweb.org/#Outopos%3A%20DHT
Here is an description for the BitTorrent DHT
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1332107/dht-in-torrents#...
The link one answer down is more explanatory
Also understand how they can be used for unique hard to detect "Scams" like MaidSafe. "We came up with a brand new amazing way to dht! like ants!"
This all sounded technically interesting and useful, and only after ingesting huge amounts of all the technical details do you realize the whole plan was to force everyone to re-write all internet applications over again (dumb) and then it evolved into some slow scam where after 10 years or something they pretend its still being worked on, but nothing ever finishes.
Please, please avoid recommending LLMs for problems where the user cannot reliably verify it's outputs. These tools are still not reliable (and given how they work, they may never be 100% reliable). It's likely the OP could get a "summary" which contains hallucinations or incorrect statements. It's one thing when experienced developers use Copilot or similar to avoid writing boilerplate and boring parts of the code - they still have competence to review, control and adapt the outputs. But for someone looking to get introduced to a hard topic, such as the OP, it's a very bad advice as they have no means of checking the output for correctness. A lot of us already have to deal with junior folks spitting out the AI slop on a daily basis, probably using the tools they way you suggested. Please don't introduce more of AI slop nonsense into the world.
It's getting down-voted because it is a very bad advice, one that can be refuted by already known facts. Your comment is even worse in this regards and is very misleading - the LLMs are definitely not going to "accurately explain everything you need to know", it's not a magical tool that "knows everything", it's a statistical parrot which infers the most likely sequence of tokens, which results in inaccurate responses often enough. There is already a lot of incompetent folks relying blindly on these un-reliable tools, please do not introduce more AI-slop based thinking into the world ;)
You left out the "for common algorithms like this" part of my comment. None of what you said applies to learning simple, well-established algorithms for software development. If it's history, biology, economics etc. then sure, be wary of LLM inaccuracies, but an algorithm is not something you can get wrong.
I don't personally know much about DHTs so I'll just use sorting as an example:
If an LLM exlains how a sorting algorithm works, and it explains why it fulfills certain properties about time complexity, stability, parallelizability etc. and backs those claims up with example code and mathematical derivations, then you can verify that you understand it by working through the logic yourself and implementing the code. If the LLM made a mistake in its explanation, then you won't be able to understand it because it's can't possibly make sense; the logic won't work out.
Also please don't perpetuate the statistical parrot interpretation of LLMs, that's not how they really work.
Exactly this. The thing which irritates and worries me, is that I notice a lot of junior folks tend to try and apply these machines in solving open-ended problems the machines don't have the context for. The lawsuits with made-up referent cases are just the beginning I am afraid, we're in for a lot more slop endangering our services and tools.
Read the research paper about the Chord algorithm: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/chord:sigcomm01/chord_sigc..., then implement the algorithm on your own (paper contains pseudo code).
Or start here, generally read high level details about the algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_(peer-to-peer).