3 ms·

It's possible to solve, you just make users download a zip file which includes 10 papers including the one they're interested.

by petra 10y ago

aninhumer 10y ago
Bitorrent 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 ago
  Yeah, 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 ago
    I 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 ago
I 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.

It's possible to solve, you just make users download a zip file which includes 10 papers including the one they're interested.

by petra 10y ago

It's possible to solve, you just make users download a zip file which includes 10 papers including the one they're interested.

aninhumer 10y ago

Bitorrent 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 ago
Yeah, 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 ago
  I 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 ago

I 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.