Hacker News Reader

By "torrent link" you mean the actual content of the magnet hash?

I have to admit I forgot they put they switched over to magnet entirely (I'm not actually that bigger torrent user).

But yeah same effect - although links may need to be shortened - it wouldn't be hard to knock up a quick redirect service to make nice friendly short urls.

They would then have extra space for number of seeders, leeches and any other descriptive info.

*edited title

But if you don't have access to the site, why would it even help to have a different link? If the pirate bay is blocked, you still can't download the file.

You don't have to download anything. A magnet link is not connected to a file on the server.

But yeah same effect - although links may need to be shortened - it wouldn't be hard to knock up a quick redirect service to make nice friendly short urls.

This is the part I don't understand. How does having a URL help?

hmm..maybe he thinks about a third party service to shorten the urls. I don't see an advantage in shorting urls, but IMHO the idea with magnet links inside google is great..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com