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Comment by maaku | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but if you threw a torrent up with every published paper since Galileo, there'd be be plenty of people willing to seed.

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I believe some one already tried something similar, it unfortunately didn't end well[0]. If some one does throw up such a torrent though I'd be glad to help seed.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Had Aaron successfully seeded it a few times (if indeed that was even his intention in the first place), not really much would have changed for him. However I am certain that we would have the entirety of what he seeded.

> However I am certain that we would have the entirety of what he seeded.

You guys are all crazy.. torrents consisting of this type of content already exist, and they have only one seeder. For example, the excellent Library Genesis collection. Why should I believe you when you tell me countless people will come to the rescue this time? Your average seeder doesn't have piles of terabytes, and evidently doesn't care to seed one or two parts out of thousands.

People hoard all sorts of data, if they are made aware of it and want it. I for one certainly would have seeded the dump Aaron made, had he seeded it himself first. And who doesn't have piles of terabytes these days?

What is your objective, give it to people that don't want it, or make it available to people that do? The later is not rocket science, the former impossible and pointless. If you are telling me that nobody is interested in your content then I am not going to argue with you... If people are interested in having your content then the only thing standing in their way is your weird objection to attempting to distribute it.

If I am so wrong, so what? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

    > the only thing standing in their way is your weird objection
    > to attempting to distribute it.

My point was that people are already trying to host this sort of science content over torrents and it's not working. Nobody seeds it. I gave a very specific example to confirm this observation. I would love to hear about possible alternatives.

Well, Library Genesis doesn't interest me. A complete history of scientific papers would though.

libgen has many journals and compilations of papers, how is that not exactly what you're talking about?

Also, if the collection was only 95%, 98%, 99%, or 99.5% complete, would you mirror it? Keep in mind that you would also have to purchase/acquire about $500-$1500 of storage space.

Thank you, it helps me gauge WTF is going on.

that means someone has to download it, though.

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