3 ms·
It's not the popular papers that are important. Those will be well spread already. It's the unpopular "rare" ones that need help. You mean the libgen torrents
by aw3c2 10y ago
It's not the popular papers that are important. Those will be well spread already. It's the unpopular "rare" ones that need help.
You mean the libgen torrents or is there something spefically branded sci-hub?
- petra 10y agoIt's possible to solve, you just make users download a zip file which includes 10 papers including the one they're interested.
- aninhumer 10y agoBitorrent kind of does this anyway, because in order to download one file, you need to download the entire block it's in. In a case like this where you have a large torrent with many small files, that will actually cover quite a few other files. If you ordered them strategically, you could even try to make sure every block has a fairly popular file in it.
- jobigoud 10y agoYeah, good idea. Sort the papers by popularity, and when grouping them find the distribution that minimizes the distance between any paper and the top-popular ones for atomic block size.
- aninhumer 10y agoI don't think you need to do anything that complex. Just find the N most popular papers and make sure there's one in each block. Or thinking about, you could put them at block boundaries so people grab two blocks when they download them, in which case you'd only need half as many popular ones.
- gherkin0 10y agoI don't think that would accomplish much. People would just delete the 9 papers that they don't care about rather than maintain them as clutter. And even if everyone did keep the extra files, would use would they be? It would be impossibly difficult to reconstruct the archive from them. It would probably be better to break down the torrents into smaller, more coherent, and organized collections that contain all associated metadata (e.g. a collection of biology papers from a certain time-span or set of publications). That way you might incentivize people to maintain smaller personal-use archives that could be recombined back into the whole, if the need arises. You could perhaps even build a system that could automatically generate, publish, and consume torrents with a particular (metadata + content) layout, but that's not restricted to a particular set of torrents. Then it could just consume certain topics from a feed of new torrents, from various sources, on the Pirate Bay.
- drivingmenuts 10y agoWhy, though? It's a waste of bandwidth to force someone to accept a bunch of information they don't need and didn't ask for.
- bloaf 10y agoI've always just thought we'd make a system where storing some extra information was just the price of entry. That is, in order to torrent the papers you want, you need to first share an extra gigabyte or so of papers chosen via some algorithm to ensure their availability.
- wernercd 10y agoI'd feel pity if you wasn't trying to get something for free... Heaven forbid you help propagate lesser used stuff as payment for getting access to the few papers that you feel entitled to get for free...
- drivingmenuts 10y ago> Heaven forbid you help propagate lesser used stuff as payment for getting access to the few papers that you feel entitled to get for free... I'd more than likely just delete the unusable stuff after setting aside what I actually needed. So, yeah, waste of bandwidth to send in the first place.
- wernercd 10y agoThe idea, especially with Torrents, is that you are sharing what you downloaded... So even if you download 10 files, and then delete 8... BEFORE You delete those 8, you can "share" them for a small period (or until you have positive "Download to Seed" ratio), thus helping others. Pay it forward and what not... That's the theory... lots of people download and stop thus leech without helping.