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How do you join private trackers from scratch?

I used to do this kind of things decades ago, but there was also still a few things not ripped and uploaded you had _some_ chance of participating.

Nowadays I imagine ~everything under the sun is already ripped, so how can you contribute to seed ratio? (or is that not even a thing anymore?)


Generally a lot of them you can get an invite from someone on Reddit or discord. A lot also open up for a week or so allowing people to register every year or whenever a major tracker goes down so the refuges can join. you can check places like Reddit /r/opensignups.

A lot of mainstream stuff is ripped already, the “ratio” on some is more if you download a torrent, they want you to seed it for x amount of time or seed it back x amount to the community. I don’t know of any that expect you to be ripping and uploading that way, it’s recommended but a lot have groups for mainstream content.

There are a few “elitist” private trackers that require “interviews” and stuff, but don’t let that scare you off 99% of them are all just grab and invite or sign up and seed back to community for the week or so minimum (preferably longer) and your good to go!


>> How do you join private trackers from scratch?

https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers/wiki/how_to_get_started


I was looking for this european movie from 10 years ago only last month, could not find it anywhere on line, streaming or torrent. I'm pretty confident there is still a lot of stuff missing.

hey there's a project idea: a "todo list" for rippers that scrapes imdb and checks what's not in pirate bay (and then looks for dvd's on ebay / libraries)


Public trackers like the piratebay face a lot of issues with retention. If it’s not mainstream or recent people often don’t seed or maintain it. If you join a private tracker there’s ones dedicated to keeping older sources like that a live!

For really obscure content, internet archive, your library, usenet or even eBay are the go to!


SoulSeek was also pretty good for finding obscure music. I like collecting everything that was released (not live performances, though) and SoulSeek filled some, but not all gaps I had.

It's not E2EE IIRC, though, so use with caution.


How can anyone sit through a length of a film, especially a European one, and not have a cigarette?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VzSiilYSKs


What movie was it? There’s a good chance I can find it.

If you’re in Reddit, there’s also a subreddit dedicated specifically to this kind of thing (requests for stuff that is no longer available) called /r/DHExchange


How about a non-vhs rip of Einstein's brain?

I did some searching. I assume you mean “Relics: Einstein's Brain (1994)”? If so, it doesn’t look like it was ever released on anything but VHS, so I only found a TV recording and a VHS recording.

Out of curiosity, what movie?

> hey there's a project idea: a "todo list" for rippers that scrapes imdb and checks what's not in pirate ba

Private sites do things like this, archival efforts and have request systems.


Piracy is and always has been the only way for more obscure stuff.

Personally I do not feel guilty pirating a decades old TV show or movie. And I really doubt the industry cares much either.


Regarding seed ratio, generally by perma seeding. Many private sites either use seed time requirements instead of ratio or offer bonus points for seed time which can be exchanged for ratio. But also as new editions and formats are released, the library has a bit more turnaround than your music sites of yesteryear.

use their RSS feed + a seed box to automatically grab stuff as it’s posted some sites have ratio free for large files to get them seeded faster. at least that’s what I did a decade plus ago.

> ~everything under the sun is already ripped

But good luck to see a live seed. I have a torrent from ~2010 which is stuck at 2%, so some seed did come online some years ago I was able to leech those meager bits from them - but not ever since.

Same for my own torrent on TPB from 2008, i tried to dload it in 2015 and wasn't sucessful in it despite it was 1st one for some years for that particular title.


Don't give up hope, though. I've had torrents complete after a few years. I've long lost anything from 2010, though.

Try other protocols/services (listed in other comments in the thread) or maybe offer a bounty if it's something you can't buy.


I had one finish after 2 years recently. Someone in China came online and completed the last few MB.

I've got three open right now for ebooks which I don't think will ever finish. (one is 3.5TB)


I got:

"Hello, world! Welcome to the classic programming greeting. It is the traditional test message used to introduce beginners to computer science and verify that a language's syntax is properly understood"

Which clearly shows that there will be an avalanche of issues when non-technical people discover the joys of non-deterministic results.


How are they going to make trillions of dollars if not!?


Conversely, you have "full ownership" and have the ability to decide the direction, as long as it's the same direction as your higher-ups have decided.

All the responsibility is still yours though.


All the talk about higher-ups taking the big paychecks for "carrying so much responsibility" is in most cases just complete horseradish. When something goes wrong or doesn't run well, suddenly none of the higher-ups are taking the responsibility. Hmmmm it's strange, innit?


They carry the responsibility of collecting the paycheck. Stop complaining, there’s another night incident – no sleep for you today.


Yeah that's the rub. You have the responsibility for the thing you "own" but not true choice or control. Responsibility without authority. It sucks.


From past experiences (and I'm sure I'm not alone here), I can almost guarantee that the senior devs did communicate the problems, but they were ignored or brushed aside.

Very seldomly does middle/upper management truly listens to engineers, unless there's buy-in from the CTO/VP to champion the ideas and complaints.


Over time, as devs get more experience, they have seen countless fads come and go. Some worked, some screwed things up, etc. - NONE were the silver bullet / savior that they were touted to be by adherents. So they learn a default "no" or "slowly" response to "we need to do this <buzzword> ASAP" from management who only see $$$. I mean AI companies are telling management that devs will resist AI because "it's so good it will let you replace them", so management is getting their views reinforced by devs saying it's a bad idea.


Yeah, the developers who will argue and teeth-gnash about using an ORM for weeks on the hope it will save a few hours perceived as boring or obvious are, simultaneously, annoyed and upset at being told to save time with super tools that save time and effort…

Pay no attention to the software output or quality or competitive displacement of the people selling you tools. LLMs, like cheesy sales strategies, are something so lucrative the only thing you can really do is sell them first come first serve to other people. Makes so much sense. Why make infinite money when you can sell a course/tool to naive and less fortunate companies? So logical.


The CTO got fired last month, presumably for poor performance. And the director that has taken is place is now all in on AI because he's desperate to turn things around but has no idea how.


He doesn't care. When c suite gets fired they get like half a million in severance and go rinse and repeat somewhere else


And it was the AI's fault. So convenient.


Was the CTO advocating a more measured approached to ai adoption?


I have a feeling that I have witnessed it, although I was told the CTO decided to move on to other challenges.


If you haven't seen this one, I highly recommend it:

Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4&t=2070s

It's quite old but I think there is no modern version of it.

I've tried posting to HN a few times but it hasn't gained traction for some reason, but I find it absolutely mind blowing.


Videos in general don’t get much traction here. Most of the time I don’t want to watch them in this context either, when other sites I do.

Maybe it’s just I come here for the old web feel when video was costly, rare and short.


Which is a pity, because lots of videos really need to be seen to be fully appreciated. Especially the ones showing stuff being made. And the ones that tend to show up here are usually worth the time.

I'm totally with the text folks on the 5 hour Fossdem sessions, though. Give me an accurate transcript I can grep or don't even bother.


There's something to it. I personally am happy to have one of these few precious places left where I can find content to read rather than watch.


Yeah, I understand and partially agree.

However I've discovered wonderful gems like this RAM video.


Video links are naturally gonna get less clicks from people scrolling HN at work :)


The whole process was deep magic to me before I watched that video. It didn't seem less magical after I've watched it. More so, if anything.

Asianometry[0] has a number of videos on EUV lithography that cover some of the mind-blowing advances in the years since.

Veritasium[1] recently also made a video on the subject.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKtxx9TnH76RYHY7L1YzE...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0


I rewatch that every year as a reminder of what we're capable of. Great video.


Yep, me too. Still feels magical after all these years.


This was the one that did it for me: "38C3 - From Silicon to Sovereignty: How Advanced Chips Are Redefining Global Dominance" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdppYYfQJgg

Absolutely insane stuff.


This one I did not know! Thanks for sharing


When I discovered the pronunciation of Houston, TX and Houston, NY... my mind was blown


I've always thought I was the only one experiencing this and felt like I was crazy.

I guess it's "good" to know that I'm not alone.

The amount of times I've searched for a ticket that I know it's there (because I either have it opened in a different tab, or because I just created it), but can't find, it's just way to many.


The results usually seem completely random to me. It's like the feature never made it out of proof of concept territory. The only advantage of all the email noise Jira sends out is that I can usually search my email for what I'm looking for.


I've used JIRA back in 2009 and that is exactly what we did to work around shitty search function in JIRA.


I always got sad when I create a ticket and I see the "ticket created" toast, and then I'm like "oh shoot I forgot to add a screenshot" and go to click the toast to go to my ticket but the toast disappeared. Because then I know that I'm gonna waste the next five minutes of my life looking for it.

FWIW Github has similar shitty search interface. Not sure why.


What does AGI look like in your opinion?

Personally, I've used LLMs to debug hard-to-track code issues and AWS issues among other things.

Regardless of whether that was done via next-token prediction or not, it definitely looked like AGI, or at least very close to it.

Is it infallible? Not by a long shot. I always have to double-check everything, but at least it gave me solid starting points to figure out said issues.

It would've taken me probably weeks to find out without LLMd instead of the 1 or 2 hours it did.

In that context, I have a hard time thinking how would a "real" AGI system look like, that it's not the current one.

Not saying current LLMs are unequivocally AGI, but they are darn close for sure IMO.


> What does AGI look like in your opinion?

Being able to actually reason about things without exabytes of training data would be one thing. Hell, even with exabytes of training data, doing actual reasoning for novel things that aren't just regurgitating things from Github would be cool.

Being able to learn new things would be another. LLMs don't learn; they're a pretrained model (it's in the name of GPT), that send in inputs and get an output. RAGs are cool but they're not really "learning", they're just eating a bit more context in order to kind of give a facsimile of learning.

Going to the extreme of what you're saying, then `grep` would be "darn close to AGI". If I couldn't grep through logs, it might have taken me years to go through and find my errors or understand a problem.

I think that they're ultimately very neat, but ultimately pretty straightforward input-output functions.


Why should implementation matter at all? You should be able to classify a black box as AGI or not.

Well, I guess you lose artificial if there’s a human brain hidden in the box.


If we had AGI we wouldn't need to keep spending more and more money to train these models, they could just solve arbitrary problems through logic and deduction like any human. Instead, the only way to make them good at something is to encode millions of examples into text or find some other technique to tune them automatically (e.g. verifiable reward modeling of with computer systems).

Why is it that LLMs could ace nearly every written test known to man, but need specialized training in order to do things like reliably type commands into a terminal or competently navigate a computer? A truly intelligent system should be able to 0-shot those types of tasks, or in the absolute worst case 1-shot them.


To add to this, previously one could argue that LLMs were on par with somewhat less intelligent humans and it was (at least I found) difficult to dispute. But now the frontier models can custom tailor explanations of technical subjects in the advanced undergraduate to graduate range. Simultaneously, I regularly catch them making what for a human of that level would be considered very odd errors in reasoning. When questioned about these inconsistencies they either display a hopeless lack of awareness or appear to attempt to deflect. They're also entirely incapable of learning from such an interaction. It feels like interacting with an empty vessel that presents an illusion of intelligence and produces genuinely useful output yet there's nothing behind the curtain so to speak.


Would a proper SOC2 audit have prevented this?

I've been through SOC2 certifications in a few jobs and I'm not sure it makes you bullet proof, although maybe there's something I'm missing?


SOC2 is just "the process we say we have, is what we do in practice". The process can be almost anything. Some auditors will push on stuff as "required", but they're often wrong.

But all it means in the end is you can read up on how a company works and have some level of trust that they're not lying (too much).

It makes absolutely zero guarantees about security practices, unless the documented process make these guarantees.


Yeah, that was my understanding as well, so I fail to see how a proper SOC2 would have prevented this.

I mean ideally a proper SOC2 would mean there are processes in place to reduce the likelihood of this happening, and then also processes to recover from if it did ended up happening.

But the end result could've been essentially the same.


It wouldn't have. lol.


Just so long as it was a proper SOC2 audit, and not a copy-pasted job:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47481729


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