Hacker News Reader

Comment by sieabah | Hacker News Reader

I've used torrents to download software so that the provider didn't need to pay bandwidth to share their software.

There are completely legal and reasonable reasons torrenting exists. They're excellent at making huge downloads possible with the more efficient bandwidth. Instead of that, we have an ecosystem of "installers" that exist purely to download massive files to install.

View on HN

There are many things with technically legal purposes that people often choose not to associate with because they find the cons outweigh the pros. This is that.

I wish torrenting for general downloads was more popular. I had unstable internet that would make downloading anything over 100MB impossible.

Slap a torrent together of the same payload and it'd be guaranteed not to stall/error because of the network.

I agree, I wish they were more common, but you don't need torrents to solve any issues with resuming downloads. HTTP supports sufficient functionality to accomplish this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Range_requ...

    while; wget -c http://...; end

(From memory, may need tweaking.)

Cons of cryptocurrency outweigh the Pros. Yet these apps are on the app store.

Maybe so. Judgement is subjective.

And I'd be happy if they weren't, but people would be more upset over that than torrent clients.

How so?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com