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Comment by krick | Hacker News Reader

Uh, cool, I guess? I want to applaud that, but, first off, unless you are OpenAI or Facebook, it is not exactly plausibly easy to participate in the festivities. Even if I had spare 300 TB laying around, how the fuck do I download that?

But, more importantly, I cannot even say "good for you", because I don't actually think it is good for Anna's Archive. I wouldn't touch that thing, if I was them. Do we even have any solid alternatives for books, if Anna's Archive gets shot down, by the way? Don't recommend Amazon, please.

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BitTorrent protocol doesn’t force you to download all of the files of a torrent :)

Now imagine a dedicated music client that will download and stream (and share, because we are polite) only the needed files :)

I am in no way saying that this is cheap but 300 TB will set you back a little less than $6k with tax. Very attainable for people other than OpenAI and Facebook. And it's not crazy at all to snag a server with enough bays to house all those.

I have a Supermicro 24 bay 2U in my house with an array around half that size in it. It’s not prohibitive.

For reference, considering you can purchase a 12-month Spotify Premium subscription via a $99 gift card at the moment, that same $6k could be used for 60 years of Spotify Premium.

For reference, cosidering the backup has 86 million music files, at an average of 3 minutes per file it would take you around 490 years to listen to all the tracks.

The cost of rest of the hardware, running it constantly, and 'admin' overheads aren't to be scoffed at to be fair.

think popcorn time for mp3s/flac instead of mp4.

a client can selectively list and then stream individual files from a huge torrent. if you've ever watched illegal movies/shows on those random domain websites, you're likely streaming it from a torrent on the backend somewhere.

it wouldn't surprise me if we start to see some docker images pop up in a few days to do exactly this as a sort of "quasi-self-hosted jellyfin". Where a person host a thin client on a machine that then fetches the data from the torrent, then allows the user to "select" their library. A user can just select "Top hits from the 80s" and it'll grab those files from the torrent, then stream or back them up.

I don't really see why it wouldn't, from an end user perspective, be any different than a self hosted jellyfin or plexamp.

You can download torrents selectively. I think if they adopted that cautious attitude they wouldn't exist in the first place

Anna's archive mirrors z-lib and libgen, so those are the main alternatives. But it's unlikely anna's archive would go down so easily, they take a lot of precautions.

Oh, I was somehow under impression that libgen is no more. Glad to see it's not. I guess it was just a different domain.

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