Show HN: Every single torrent is on this website (opens in new tab)

I don't think they're equivalent. I think invention and creation aren't actually real. There is no "making" or "creating" when it comes to intellectual work.

All computer files are sequences of bits. All sequences of bits are integers. All integers already exist in the infinite set of natural numbers. I can even calculate how big those numbers are given their bit count.

  digits(bits)   = ceil(bits * log10(2))

  digits(32)     = 10
  digits(64)     = 20
  digits(128)    = 39
  digits(256)    = 78
  digits(512)    = 155
  digits(1024)   = 309

  digits(20 KiB) = 49,321
  digits(2 GiB)  = 5,171,655,946

We are merely discovering numbers through convoluted mental and technological processes. All our mental exertions result in the discovery of a number. This comment is a number.

I think Library of Babel by Borges is a static manifestation of Turing complete behaviour via the fact that some L-systems are Turing complete. or put another way. Where in the Library of Babel, does the real Hamlet reside? If we consider finding and replacing names with other names, is it still a Hamlet? And if we bring the full force of edit operations and do these in a reversible manner, then where does the actual Hamlet reside? An equivalence class of Hamlet?

I suppose this would work if the library was arranged such that comprehensible books were closer to the "origin". The workings of the "real" library of babel are supposed to be more inscrutable though.

But if I built one, it would totally work that way.

Kolmogorov’s library

Reproducing the text of a book in the library is a synonym for identifying the book. So this is really called "text compression", which is a well-studied field.

In a library of all possible strings, this is just text compression (as the other comment observes). But in a finite library it gets even simpler, in a cool way! We can treat each text as a unique symbol and use an entropy encoding (eg Huffman) to assign length-optimized key to each based on likelihood (eg from an LLM). Building the library is something like O(n log n), which isn't terrible. But adding new texts would change the IDs for existing texts (which is annoying). There might be a good way to reserve space for future entries probabilistically? Out of my depth at this point!

That's arguably just a regular library :)

The oracle doesn't have the books. The library does. And it has all of them. Directions to each book depend only on the layout and contents of the library.

At your service.

I have the same fascination. You might find https://github.com/dmotz/trystero quite interesting - it's fun to play around with, also can use torrent DHT for discovery.

iroh does too: https://www.iroh.computer/docs/concepts/discovery

https://github.com/pubky/pkarr is another one

You are only downloading metadata, and csam content is filtered. But yes, I would also rate it as a legally risky activity

Does running an indexer and crawler help make the content available to others, or why would this be legally risky? Why would anyone care about what kind of Docker container I run on my home server?

So they are basically detecting bots that indiscriminately try to download any detected infohash, right?

That's not detecting "announcers", but maybe more like detecting "indexers".

Or every bitcoin public and private address.

https://keys.lol

A few years ago, google stopped returning good links for strings that looked like bittorrent infohashes. Prior to that, it was actually a useful way to find information on and potentially trackers for an infohash you had

Yandex is the only search engine that's even marginal useful for that now.

I think Google is expected to abide DMCA takedowns in such cases, but IANAL. My understanding is that even an indirect reference (such as a link or infohash) is a DMCA violation.

That was The Pirate Bay's defense and... they're still around.

neither "hosts" the content. they both just point to the destination with the content.

> the infohash isn't copyrighted, so it's not illegal information in and of itself. serving the infohash isn't serving the torrent, and serving the torrent is also not serving copyrighted material

I'm of the impression that serving either the infohash or the torrent is considered to violate DMCA. DMCA does not just forbid sharing copyrighted material, but also sharing links to the copyrighted material or generally anything that can help people bypass copyright protections (including software that can decrypt even trivial DRM).