HenryR

You might not be aware that this is one of, if not the, seminal paper in distributed systems.

Lamport clocks, described briefly in the review, are an answer to the general problem of establishing an order between events that happen on different machines that respects causality. They’re still practical to this day, over 50 years after this paper was published.

There are lots of in-depth descriptions of the paper and its contributions elsewhere. I’d totally recommend finding them - it’s a great paper and not a hard read at all.

Companies usually provide the space and will sponsor pizza and drinks, at least in SF. That’s about all the costs beyond the time of the organizers which is offered for free.

Authors try to compare their work against hash tables because, usually, HT represent an upper bound on the performance of point-lookups; we don't know how to do much better in general.

So if your data structure supports range queries _and_ point lookups, you should measure against hash tables to understand how far off the ideal you are. If it's not far, and your data structure is strictly more general, that's compelling.