Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Library Genesis Desktop app, now with IPFS support

wiki.mhut.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 75 posts

Re: Library Genesis Desktop app, now with IPFS support

#61

Post by arthurcolle »

Samin100 wrote: post #49
amiantos wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my test searches I did "Donnie Darko" and clicked on the first result, and then "Diana Spencer" and tried a few results. Doesn't seem like sources ever load for me. I have a much better experience just going to whatever libgen URL Safari auto-completes for me.

Ah, I figured out what went wrong. Libgen has two different databases, a fiction and non-fiction one, and right now Alexandria only queries Libgen's non-fiction DB. I'll update it to search both databases later this week. Thanks for bringing this to my attention!

It is a really nice app! I have been meaning to get into Mac OS native app development but haven't had the time. Did you implement it in Objective C or Swift?

Re: Library Genesis Desktop app, now with IPFS support

#62

Post by nyolfen »

hagbard_c wrote: post #5

The ´Books' tool [1] has been doing the same for a long time as well, can be used anywhere where Bash runs and - given its shell-based nature - is eminently hackable. It comes with a CLI (named 'books'), TUI ('nbook' and 'nfiction') and GUI ('xbook' and 'xfiction') and supports both IPFS, Bittorrent as well as direct download. It can search on all fields. Source: I wrote this about 6 years ago and maintain it every n…

how big is the local db?

Re: Library Genesis Desktop app, now with IPFS support

#63

Post by test245 »

sva_ wrote: post #34

Does somebody know of a plugin for Zotero to automatically fetch a file from LibGen? I tried writing one but it seems like libgen does something weird to not show the download link... s.t. I gave up.

Perhaps modifying https://github.com/ethanwillis/zotero-scihub would be a nice starting/continuation point. Also, if you can write the stuff around fetching an ISBN from Zotero, and getting the right LibGen entry, perhaps someone else can fix the issue of converting the right LibGen entry into the actual link.

Re: Library Genesis Desktop app, now with IPFS support

#64

Post by Animats »

dannyobrien wrote: post #57
Animats wrote: post #54

Does IPFS really work? As I understand it, it's sort of like a pay version of BitTorrent. In theory, you're supposedly renting space on hard disks of random users. In practice, you're probably renting space from AWS at a markup. I was interested in IPFS as a possible asset storage system for assets for virtual worlds. Not for piracy, but as a way to sell virtual world assets with no ongoing obligation to host the con…

I think it's worth separating what IPFS provides from what Filecoin offers (note that I work at the Filecoin Foundation/Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, but I'm hopefully being sufficiently technical here that the description is as objective as I can be.) IFPS is a model for providing a content-addressable storage system -- so if you have a particular hash (the CID) of a piece of content, you can obtain…

Storage providers on the Filecoin network negotiate directly with customers to store files.

So why bother with all the crypto stuff?

Re: Library Genesis Desktop app, now with IPFS support

#65

Post by fao_ »

jancsika wrote: post #60
fao_ wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux support should be extremely simple to test and deploy. It'd be like an hour's task to write up a github action for it so you don't even need to have a local linux deploy or whatever. I was going to do it myself but the build scripts you made are incompatible with node 17.x.x (it requires exporting `NODE_OPTIONS=--openssl-legacy-provider`), and they also seem to assume that `react-scripts`, etc. are in the local…

"This fence is so long and sprawling that even thinking about painting it negatively affects my health. But I bet you could knock it out in under an hour," Tom said to the other children. Later that afternoon, Aunt Polly arrived home to an unpainted fence.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that the primary maintainer, the person who wrote the (extremely slapdash) build scripts and knows exactly why it's copying folders during the build process, is going to get the changes done faster than someone who is not knowledgeable with the tools and codebase? Writing code isn't painting fences, it's like asking me to replace a set of levers on an industrial piping system, except at least then the specifications of the prior levers would be available and there would be documentation for the whole thing.

Re: Library Genesis Desktop app, now with IPFS support

#66

Post by Scaevolus »

hagbard_c wrote: post #5

The ´Books' tool [1] has been doing the same for a long time as well, can be used anywhere where Bash runs and - given its shell-based nature - is eminently hackable. It comes with a CLI (named 'books'), TUI ('nbook' and 'nfiction') and GUI ('xbook' and 'xfiction') and supports both IPFS, Bittorrent as well as direct download. It can search on all fields. Source: I wrote this about 6 years ago and maintain it every n…

This looks nearly perfect apart from the mysql dependency. Sqlite should be more than enough for this use case.

Re: Library Genesis Desktop app, now with IPFS support

#68

Post by mdprock »

tribler wrote: post #33
lyndons wrote: post #23

Can we create decentralized library (catalog) protocol , so it can't be taken down? I'm thinking about libgen/sci-hub/whatcd(RIP), but entirely decentralized, protocol-based. We already have basically all necessary tools: BitTorrent/IPFS to distribute files, magnet links to link them, DHT to discover peers. We just need to combine them together in a smart way and maybe add some bits of missing functionality, like: -…

Yes, this is exactly what we are working on for 16 years now. Longest running torrent, trust and Tor-fork project: https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki Its as hard as making a decentralised Google and decentralised YouTube at the same time. Over 75 master students and PhDs put their coding efforts in it at Delft University.

Looks great, congrats! sci-hub and libgen can be found on tribler?

Re: Library Genesis Desktop app, now with IPFS support

#69

Post by lifeformed »

lyndons wrote: post #23

Can we create decentralized library (catalog) protocol , so it can't be taken down? I'm thinking about libgen/sci-hub/whatcd(RIP), but entirely decentralized, protocol-based. We already have basically all necessary tools: BitTorrent/IPFS to distribute files, magnet links to link them, DHT to discover peers. We just need to combine them together in a smart way and maybe add some bits of missing functionality, like: -…

I am just a layman with all this, but could this be an actually useful application of blockchain? Create a DAO where reputation is earned through votes, and tokens are distributed to people who upload new good content that people want (a bounty system??), and you can spend them on downloads. I have no idea how any of this works so maybe it's a terrible idea.

Re: Library Genesis Desktop app, now with IPFS support

#70

Post by tribler »

mdprock wrote: post #68
tribler wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is exactly what we are working on for 16 years now. Longest running torrent, trust and Tor-fork project: https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki Its as hard as making a decentralised Google and decentralised YouTube at the same time. Over 75 master students and PhDs put their coding efforts in it at Delft University.

Looks great, congrats! sci-hub and libgen can be found on tribler?

Thnx! Sadly it's not that simple.

What IPFS, Dat protocol, Tribler, and all others are missing is "adverserial decentralised information retrieval".

For any keyword you type in, the match you want should show first. Trolling, Kremlin bots and copyright police forces should not be able to bring it down. Unsolved problem. How to create a privacy respecting relevance ranking or distributed clicklog.

Post reply on HN