Build your own BitTorrent • Hacker News Board

Re: Build your own BitTorrent

#31

Post by bayesianbot » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 1:01 PM UTC

ducktective wrote: post #24

Does anyone know why BitTorrent-based Linux package managers has not become a thing?

I wonder if you could insert your own downloader to pacman / whatever without touching the source.. I might try to do this at some point if I have time. I often get over 100MBps from torrents but only like 5MBps from package repositories (though on good days that might be up to 40MBps)

Re: Build your own BitTorrent

#32

Post by tetsuhamu » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 1:02 PM UTC

It seems to be failing to create a repository right now

Re: Build your own BitTorrent

#33

Post by strangesmells02 » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 1:05 PM UTC

thinkingkong wrote: post #26

ducktective wrote: post #24

Does anyone know why BitTorrent-based Linux package managers has not become a thing?

Most linux distributions have a rather robust mirroring operation. This is much faster than bittorrent. Lots of cloud vendors provide a mirror endpoint for traffic within their network, and ISPs typically also have them. The network is fast enough for lots of small files to not really justify it.

I think that hundreds of thousands of peer machines would be way faster than a few centralized repositories... right?

It seems you would have essentially unlimited bandwidth.

Re: Build your own BitTorrent

#34

Post by the8472 » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 1:06 PM UTC

ducktective wrote: post #24

Does anyone know why BitTorrent-based Linux package managers has not become a thing?

Bittorrent is most useful as a long-running application or background service to make data available. To get any use out of it in short-running contexts (e.g. updaters) you need lots of machines jumping on the content simultanously.

Re: Build your own BitTorrent

#35

Post by orng » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 1:10 PM UTC

shp0ngle wrote: post #20

eimrine wrote: post #15

Is this BitTorrent course free (as beer)? I can see a neighbour course about HTTP server "free during beta".

They have some free tier and paid tier and I am not sure what is in what. https://codecrafters.io/pricing

Like GP I was also confused and tried looking for a pricing page but failed. Seems like there isn't a link to it from https://app.codecrafters.io/catalog which is the site you go to if you click the big CodeCrafters logo in the top left of the page.

There is a "Subscribe" button which takes you to https://app.codecrafters.io/pay but I wasn't savvy enough to notice it or realize what it was.

Only after starting a course did I begin to suspect that I needed to subscribe since there were a bunch of locks all over. However, it was not clear that the locks actually did anything since I could still click on those links. I guess I would have found out after completing the first step and not being able to progress. This appears to be by design, which strikes me as slightly dishonest.

Re: Build your own BitTorrent

#36

Post by HeckFeck » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 1:17 PM UTC

_steady wrote: post #3

sunbum wrote: post #2

Why in the world does this want access to my github account, with 0 explanation as to why.

It does say it only asks for your email (read) privileges tbf, but yeah I didn't bother either after that step.

I don't see why they can't present it as a simple list of blog articles with a link to the repository.

It achieves the same thing without anyone knowing who I am.

Re: Build your own BitTorrent

#37

Post by teddyh » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 1:30 PM UTC

ducktective wrote: post #24

Does anyone know why BitTorrent-based Linux package managers has not become a thing?

https://wiki.debian.org/DebTorrent>

Re: Build your own BitTorrent

#38

Post by codetrotter » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 1:35 PM UTC

Dragging-Syrup wrote: post #12

mr-karan wrote: post #8

Jon Gjengset[1] is currently doing a livestream on the same challenge in Rust, on his YT channel[2]. [1]: https://thesquareplanet.com/ [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSTkEPPiULs

Thank you for pointing this out. I only got to catch the tail end, but it was really cool to watch.

You can re-watch it using the same URL if you want to see it from the beginning.

Re: Build your own BitTorrent

#39

Post by tomcam » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 1:36 PM UTC

techn00 wrote: post #10

Reminds me of building a bittorrent client in go: https://blog.jse.li/posts/torrent/

Thanks! That looks like a treasure and I can’t wait to do my own implementation.

Re: Build your own BitTorrent

#40

Post by linhns » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 1:41 PM UTC

opheliate wrote: post #25

eimrine wrote: post #15

Is this BitTorrent course free (as beer)? I can see a neighbour course about HTTP server "free during beta".

Having done a couple of their courses without paying: You are expected to complete the project in steps they define (so for their Redis project, step 1 is to bind to a port, step 2 is to respond to a PING command, etc). If you choose not to pay, you can only complete one step per day, even if you submit code which would pass future steps. This can be quite frustrating, since each step is often very simple, and IMO di…

It's better for me this way, having things broken down to piecemeal level like this allow me to avoid overthinking and know when to just produce a solution and accept it.