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Classifying all of the pdfs on the internet

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Re: Classifying all of the pdfs on the internet

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libgen size is ~33TB so, no, it's not "the largest corpus of PDFs online". (Although you could argue libgen is not really "public" in the legal sense of the word, lol). Disregarding that, the article is great! (edit: why would someone downvote this, HN is becoming quite hostile lately)

I haven't downvoted you but it is presumably because of your hasty typing or lack of proofreading/research. 33TB (first google result from 5 years ago) not 33GB. Larger figures from more recently.

>hasty typing or lack of proofreading/research

This is exactly what I meant with "HN is becoming quite hostile"

* I brought up something I looked up to support GP's argument.

* The argument is correct.

* I do it in good faith.

* G is literally next to T.

* I even praise the article, while at it.

"Oh, but you made a typo!".

Good luck, guys. I'm out.

PS. I will give my whole 7 figure net worth, no questions asked, transferred immediately to any account of their choice, to anyone here who has not ever made a typo in their life.

Re: Classifying all of the pdfs on the internet

#22
post #2

Interesting read, I did not know about Common Crawl. I feel like RTBF is kind of a lost battle these days with more and more crawlers for AI and whatnot. Once on the internet there is no way back, for better or for worse. This tangent aside, 8TB is really not a lot of data, it's just 8 consumer-grade 1TB hard drives. I find it hard to believe this is "the largest corpus of PDFs online", maybe the largest public one.…

Doesn't sound like a lot, but where I am now we routinely work on very large infrastructure projects and the plans, documents and stuff mostly come as PDF. We are talking of thousands of documents, often with thousands of pages, per project and even very big projects almost never break 20 GB. If you like, you could say, PDF are information dense, but data sparse. After all it is mostly white space ;)

I've been doing some work for an infrastructure company as well. They have a total of about 1 billion pages of PDF documents in their archives. If we assume even just 30 KB per page (which is quite low, all the PDFs I just randomly checked were higher, sometimes quite a bit so), that's already 30 TB of PDFs, just for that one company with 1B in annual sales.

Re: Classifying all of the pdfs on the internet

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wondering what do you collect? Is it mainly mirroring things like libgen? I have a decent collection of ebooks/pdfs/manga from reading. But I can’t imagine how large a 20TB library is.

No torrents at all in this data, all publicly available/open access. Mostly scientific pdfs, and a good portion of those are scans not just text. So the actual text amount is probably pretty low compared to the total. But still, a lot more than 8TB of raw data out there. I bet the total number of PDFs is close to a petabyte if not more.

> I bet the total number of PDFs is close to a petabyte if not more.

That's a safe bet. I'v seen PDF's in the GBs from users treating it like a container format (which it is).

Re: Classifying all of the pdfs on the internet

#24
post #2

Interesting read, I did not know about Common Crawl. I feel like RTBF is kind of a lost battle these days with more and more crawlers for AI and whatnot. Once on the internet there is no way back, for better or for worse. This tangent aside, 8TB is really not a lot of data, it's just 8 consumer-grade 1TB hard drives. I find it hard to believe this is "the largest corpus of PDFs online", maybe the largest public one.…

Libgen size is ~33TB so, no, it's not "the largest corpus of PDFs online". (Although you could argue libgen is not really "public" in the legal sense of the word, lol). Disregarding that, the article is great! (edit: why would someone downvote this, HN is becoming quite hostile lately)

I upvoted this comment because, though the number is wrong, it proves the point. The fact that the correct number proves the point even more, is a reason _not_ to downvote the comment.

Re: Classifying all of the pdfs on the internet

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't downvoted you but it is presumably because of your hasty typing or lack of proofreading/research. 33TB (first google result from 5 years ago) not 33GB. Larger figures from more recently.

>hasty typing or lack of proofreading/research This is exactly what I meant with "HN is becoming quite hostile" * I brought up something I looked up to support GP's argument. * The argument is correct. * I do it in good faith. * G is literally next to T. * I even praise the article, while at it. "Oh, but you made a typo!". Good luck, guys. I'm out. PS. I will give my whole 7 figure net worth, no questions asked, tran…

Don't take it too personally. Downvoting/flagging it makes it clear to people who come across it in the future that it's wrong.

Re: Classifying all of the pdfs on the internet

#26
post #15
post #2

Interesting read, I did not know about Common Crawl. I feel like RTBF is kind of a lost battle these days with more and more crawlers for AI and whatnot. Once on the internet there is no way back, for better or for worse. This tangent aside, 8TB is really not a lot of data, it's just 8 consumer-grade 1TB hard drives. I find it hard to believe this is "the largest corpus of PDFs online", maybe the largest public one.…

RTBF was a ludicrous concept before AI and these new crawlers. Only EU bureaucracts would have the hubris to believe you could actually, comprehensively remove information from the Internet. Once something is spread, it is there, forever.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always took RTBF to mean you have the right to be forgotten by any specific service provider: that you can request they delete the data they have that relates to you, and that they forward the request to any subprocessors. That's fairly reasonable and doable, it is enforced by GDPR and a number of other wide-reaching laws already, and it is a relatively common practice nowadays to allow users to make such requests with certain guarantees.

It never meant that you have the right to ask "the Internet" as a whole to scrub you from all possible records, that's indeed ludicrous. And if someone took it to mean that and they were pushing for it, they were just confused, no serious law ever proposed that.

Re: Classifying all of the pdfs on the internet

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't downvoted you but it is presumably because of your hasty typing or lack of proofreading/research. 33TB (first google result from 5 years ago) not 33GB. Larger figures from more recently.

>hasty typing or lack of proofreading/research This is exactly what I meant with "HN is becoming quite hostile" * I brought up something I looked up to support GP's argument. * The argument is correct. * I do it in good faith. * G is literally next to T. * I even praise the article, while at it. "Oh, but you made a typo!". Good luck, guys. I'm out. PS. I will give my whole 7 figure net worth, no questions asked, tran…

  > I will give all my 7 figure net worth, no questions asked, transferred immediately to any account of their choice, to anyone here who has not ever made a typo in their life.
My greatest typo was saying "I Do" when it should have been "I Go".

Re: Classifying all of the pdfs on the internet

#30
Ive been playing with https://www.aryn.ai/ for Partitioning. Curious if anyone has tried these tools for better data extraction from PDFs. Any other suggestions?

(I'm a bit disappointed that most of the discussion is about estimating the size of PDFs on the internet, I'd love to hear more about different approaches to extracting better data from the PDFs.)

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