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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

I kind of wonder if this or something similar could somehow nullify timestamps so you could compare two logfiles...

further would be the ability to compare logfiles with pointer addresses or something

I'm not confident that I understand what you're asking for, but couldn't you just sed off the timestamp from every line? Or for a more extreme example, I have occasionally used ... tr, I think? to completely remove all numbers from logs in order to aggregate error messages without worrying about the fact that they kept including irrelevant changing numbers (something like tail -5000 logfile | tr -d [0-9] | sort | uniq -c | sort -n or so).

how would you do it if your logs were printed on paper with a printer, each line printed with stochastic timing (due to a bug), with an ink containing a chemical tracer with halflife `h` (after being put to paper), but the ink is randomly sampled from several (`m`) inks of different halflives `h1`, h2`,... `hn`? assume `p` different printers scattered across the 10 most populous US cities. you may use standard unix utilities.

Have interns shovel it all into scanners, run the result through tesseract, then do the thing I said before. Nonetheless, I don't think your question is sincere; what point are you actually trying to get at?

Sorry, I was just trying to make a joke (about both insane systems and interview questions) since the question you answered was a bit unclear. Guess it didn't land, haha.

Ah, that makes much more sense. It read as somewhat aggressive in a way that I couldn't quite make sense of; my best guess was that you were insinuating that the unix tools I was reaching for were arcane and unwieldy. Thanks for clarifying.

A different but more powerful method of ensuring reproducibility is more rigorous compilation using formally verifiable proofs.

That’s what https://pi2.network/ does. It uses K-Framework, which is imo very underrated/deserves more attention as a long term way of solving this kind of problem.

You could just trap time systems calls to always return zero via LD_PRELOAD

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