Hacker News Reader

Comment by hvgk | Hacker News Reader

That’s why I don’t pirate stuff. I don’t want to hoard it and keep it. I just want to use it once and be done with it.

The only exception is content I create.

With a couple of minor exceptions that works well for me.

Historically i hoarded content and ended up with 2TB of crap I was never going to watch again. So I deleted it and now don’t have to herd hard discs.

View on HN

my man you can delete the files once youre done

LOL. Its probably too much for new generation too.

My daughter is amazingly apt at not paying for content. You’d be surprised.

While I agree with you, it's not as simple as it seems. One of the crucial skills we have to learn in the digital age is to discard information. Historically, we have evolved as hoarders: keeping valuable things usually pays off.[0] With information, it's no longer the case. You don't have scarcity like with physical goods: there is more available than you can absorb during many lifetimes. So we need to develop the crucial skill of discerning between the top stuff you really want and need - and everything else that should be discarded. Based on my limited personal experience, this is not always easy but improves with time.

[0] Marie Kondo would disagree

I don't get it, this is not a house with limited square footage. Discarding is of almost zero importance, in fact, you have it logically backwards because discarding incurs a cost of investing your precious time to make a decision. While retaining only requires you to have an amorphous blob somewhere, a non-event. This is especially true for things tens of megs to a few gigs. Of course not yet true for 4K videos, but we are approaching that point not year by year as cost per TB approaches 0.

By saving stuff, you future proof the high possiblity that it becomes completely unavailable anywhere online and you have the last copy. And you can easily find it by search, I have this happen all the time. In many cases the audio cassettes that accompany an old pedagogic text have been digitized by one person who shares a zip one time and then the link dies forever. Ten years later when I finally free up time to study the material, it will be too late.

The important skill: don't download or even browse crap you certainly won't use within your lifetime. It is a time sink. Develop a strong preference for only looking for things you'll immediately begin studying or have a concrete plan to study in the coming 6mos.

> With information, it's no longer the case.

It isn't always like that. If your data is on somebody else's platform (as for the author's data) your data is gone, possibly for good.

And by the way... onljne communities (and websites in general) come and go. The data you're relying upon today might not be there tomorrow (or it could get altered someway).

Information hording is not only concerned with information availability, also with information presentation, stability, liquidity (non mainstream information may be very hard to find later) etc.

> One of the crucial skills we have to learn in the digital age is to discard information.

For some things yes, for TV shows and movies eh. For roughly the price of a year of netflix you could get a 14TB hard drive, which would hold six continuous months of high quality 1080p video. It's also really easy to keep those things sorted with negligible clutter and wasted time.

> With information, it's no longer the case. You don't have scarcity like with physical goods: there is more available than you can absorb during many lifetimes.

As much as this is technically true, anything not currently on your hardware can, and probably will, get snatched away from you, usually without warning, regardless of it you paid for it.

I would spend more than the 2 hours a month all the streaming services cost me in salary pissing around, transcoding and finding the damn things.

> transcoding and finding the damn things

I'm sorry, this is bullshit.

I spend _less_ time if I torrent stuff.

Example: I want to watch the last season of Expanse. Ok, go to iTunes (Apple TV). Nope, not there (Australia). Hmmm, may be Netflix? Nope. I remember it was by Amazon or smth? Oh yeah, it's in Prime.

How much time did I just spend? And I also must pay for all of those?

Torrents:

- go to my favourite tracker

- search, find bunch of options from SD to HD with bunch of audio tracks and subtitles that not a single commercial pos offers

- copy magnet link

- paste in transmission UI

- done, took less than 3 minutes.

Whenever I feel like watching it, open Infuse on iPhone and watch it from my Emby.

Seriously it is some BS. I even spent like mabye an hour setting up the *arr tools and now anyone in my family can log into 1 site, find the tv/movies and hit download and it manages everything.

maybe you wouldn’t mind me asking: but how’s your setup work exactly?

also, for everyone: i have been looking for an easy way to allow my parents to browse torrents (via an app on their phones or tv or something), then select what they want to watch, and the movies/whatever are then downloaded on a remote pc that also hosts a plex server. they could watch whatever on plex in minutes, ideally. is there something that sreamlines this kind of thing?

Yep so I just run sonarr (for tv shows), radarr (for movies), jackett (a torrent search engine connector that the *arr apps use), deluge (for downloading things), and unpackrr (for extracting torrent rar sets) all on a single box

I have a little dashboard just providing quick links to sonarr/radarr that people can go to.

In radarr/sonarr they can search for movies and tv shows, add it to the application and it auto searches for the best download option through jackett and adds it to deluge

unpackrr will auto unpack it if it needs it

radarr/sonarr will automatically pick up the completed download and move it into the correct media directory

jellyfin/plex/whatever will pick it up and show it

everything is pretty easy to setup, i probably got it all running in 3 or 4 hours tops probably two years ago and honestly haven't touched it since.

When I want to stream something I go to justwatch.com, search, and then see which streaming services carry it either through subscription or for rent or purchase. Then I fire up that app or website on whatever device I like and watch.

Torrenting isn’t hard but these days neither is streaming.

Absolute hogwash. Torrenting is easy as pie if you know the right places and know the bare minimum basics of torrenting like pick a torrent with more seeds in the quality you want. It takes less time to torrent something than find out which of the gajillion streaming sites has the thing I want to watch.

Yeah 10 episodes down a hole of anime season and you find the last ones don’t have English dubs resulting in an impending shit show to deal with because no one bothered to release it or there are no seeds for single episodes. Then there’s the subs written by someone who doesn’t know any languages apparently. Then there’s the shitty transcodes originally. Then the logistics of managing which one of the 5 members of my family wanted it and getting it to the device of their choice.

Then you find something is only available in x265 so you have to transcode it yourself so it’ll play on the kids 5 year old Samsung TV. Oh and that only supports certain very fussy audio streams.

Just no. I’m on the mark. I’ve been doing this shit for a decade and I’m tired and fed up with it. I pay ~£35 a month for all my services and that’s a bargain. It’s literally fuck all money to make the problems go away.

420 punds a year!

You could just set up a NAS and a Plex server to do the transcoding for you. In all my years I have personally never had any issues. I have had to struggle with x265 once or twice, and even then I just found a different non x265 torrent and went with that. Not that hard, there are often 10 torrents for a single show, each of varying compressions and qualities.

And I bet that you can find anything you could ever want on nyaa. If an anime/manga exists, it almost certainly is on nyaa, unless it is highly obscure in which case it may not even be there on paid streams.

I am a Datahoarder with almost 50TiB. I almost never delete things. I kinda view it as a mixed media library, the value is in the content youay want to consume whenever. Plus one never knows if something will be available at a later date and hard or impossible to find.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com