Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by MoonWalk 34 days ago
The article neglects to define "DHT" before using it.
3 comments

Distributed hash table - ButTorrent extension for discovering torrent's seeders by advertising its hash across known peer pool, think of it as a distributed tracker. Contrary to traditional way of asking a known tracker for peers of that torrent.

Its algorithm is very elegant, using binary search on peers' and torrents' hashes, narrowing down to peers that are more likely to be seeders (or at least know some).

https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0005.html

Not a P2P innovation with Bittorrent, FWIW. Kademlia DHT (used in eMule/LimeWire/Gnutella P2P networks) long predates Bittorrent.
Thanks!
> The BitTorrent community has responded to these trends by deploying decentralizing tracking systems based on distributed hash tables (DHTs).

No it doesn't. Before you try to correct me, the abstract never counts ;)

Downvote all you want, but a fact is a fact: The article doesn't define the abbreviation before using it.
I'm not sure why you're saying that in the HN comments. As far as I know the authors aren't there, and the paper is from 2010. It's not like it will get updated now.

One search tells you what DHT in the context of wikipedia is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainline_DHT

Because someone saw fit to downvote it.

For some reason it's fashionable on HN to promote douchily obscure posts, and condemn those who call for better.