I feel like if Bittorrent shipped in the browser, either embedded or as an extension and just ran on it's own accord, managing the download and throttling upload & download speed based on my current usage and needs without a lot of tweaking and configuration setup, that would be fine. I know most browsers tried this and gave up on it years ago. But, I'd rather not manage a separate program, having to fiddle with settings and open ports and have it always running in the background using a lot of ram/cpu, it's just a hassle.
But, are big CDNs really struggling to manage people downloading 500+gb models? Is AWS/Cloudflare/Akamai/etc begging for p2p hosting again?
Building BitTorrent into the browser is a bad design. I tried and measured it. It makes the browser even more bloated and busy and less responsive and vulnerable to crashing than it currently is, which is a leap in the wrong direction.
It's much better to run a BitTorrent client as a separate process, a shared system service, that all other programs can share, and talk to it via local http (through a data channel configured by url parameters, and optionally a control channel for monitoring and on-the-fly configutayion), not built in and tied to one particular app like the web browser.
That's how Red Swoosh and Bittorrent DNA worked: It acted like a local web server, and any web client could simply open a url and start downloading the file, which would be delivered as it was received. BitTorrent DNA had an option of trying to download the chunks in order as much as possible, so it was better for watching streaming video.
The point is that every app knows how to fetch files via http, and doesn't need to know a thing about BitTorrent. So the Red Swoosh or BitTorrent DNA service makes BitTorrent look like http, and you don't have to modify the web browser or link in any native libraries.
DonHopkins on April 16, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: Spotify Starts Shutting Down Its Massive P2P Netwo...
When I worked for TomTom, I developed and tested a system for distributing maps via BitTorrent.
I first looked at Red Swoosh and its Firefox extension, FoxTorrent. It would have been ideal, since we using the xulrunner platform for TomTom Home, but Akamai acquired Red Swoosh, and it vanished without a trace. [1] [2] [3] [4]
TomTom's Maps are perfect for BitTorrent distribution, because they're large (1 Gig and growing) and lots of people in the same region need to download the same map at the same time. And it would have been a wonderful legal and practical example of a legitimate use of BitTorrent to point to when companies like Comcast try tricks like blocking BitTorrent traffic.
I visited BitTorrent in San Francisco, and discussed it with Bram Cohen. Their technology seemed ideal for our purposes (it worked a bit like Red Swoosh / FoxTorrent), and they quoted me a price per gigabyte to distribute content over their BitTorrent DNA network, which was a hell of a lot cheaper than we were paying to Akamai (this was before the made BitTorrent DNA distribution free).
A couple days after that meeting, I stopped by the Akamai booth at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, and asked them what their prices were for using the Red Swoosh technology they'd recently acquired. Travis Kalanick, the founder of Red Swoosh, gladly told me about his technology and answered my technical questions. (I had previously been looking at Red Swoosh and FoxTorrent, before it was acquired by Akamai, and it would have been easy to integrate with our xulrunner based product, TomTom Home).
Akamai's sales people refused to quote me a price, despite repeated requests, so I told them the price BitTorrent quoted me, and told them we were ready to start testing as soon as possible, and asked again if they could at least give me a ballpark estimate of how much they would charge for distributing content via Red Swoosh, and when we could start testing. They muttered something about not having come up with a pricing model yet, but that I could get into their beta program, whenever that started, which they also would not state.
I was somewhat skeptical about Akamai's support for Red Swoosh, dedication to P2P technologies, and motivations for acquiring Red Swoosh, since P2P technologies are such a huge threat to their business model. It was getting a lot of attention before they acquired it. I was afraid that they might have just acqui-hired Red Swoosh simply to sweep it under the rug so they didn't have to compete with it. And I was afraid th...
Torrent always made more sense for distributing large static files like models especially ones where specific ones suddenly become popular and need scaling. Huggingface is incentivised to not do that though to keep control.
The main currency the platform has with investors and model creators is download stats. If they hand seeding over to DHT that basically means giving up transparent analytics on purpose and they don't need that.
DHT/torrents and AI have been on a collision course for the last 20 years. Sometimes the correct answer is the simplest one. Except the stakes are much higher now with the power struggle over frontier models.
> Movies are different. Search for a movie on a torrent site and you'll see 4K remux, 1080p, 720p [...]. But no one downloads models like this: anyone who wants DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 wants the same 48 shards.
But this is exactly the situation for AI models as well. If you look for
DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 or Qwen3.8-27B on HuggingFace, you'll see many different releases by various people with different quantizations like FP8, Q4_K_M, INT4, abliterated/uncensored models and various versions that are fined tuned or modded in whichever different way. It feels to me exactly like the various different video encodings.
Yes, there is usually a single, official release from the lab that produced the model (or sometimes a handful of different variants), but very frequently this isn't something you can even run on consumer hardware.
Very few users will end up downloading the base model straight from the lab, chief reason being they can't actually use it for inference on consumer hardware. We will end of with the same scenario described for films where lots of competing providers for different quantisations and fine-tunes will dilute the swarm. I can only assume this was written from the perspective of a developer/researcher?
(It's fine, of course, to use AI tools—we use them heavily ourselves. Just please don't use them to generate or edit text to be read by fellow humans on Hacker News.)
It's impossible to know for sure what was LLM generated or edited, but we have to rely on imperfect classifiers or else the site would be completely flooded by genai text, which is not what the community here wants to read, nor in the intended spirit of HN.
18 comments
[ 0.37 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadBut, are big CDNs really struggling to manage people downloading 500+gb models? Is AWS/Cloudflare/Akamai/etc begging for p2p hosting again?
It's much better to run a BitTorrent client as a separate process, a shared system service, that all other programs can share, and talk to it via local http (through a data channel configured by url parameters, and optionally a control channel for monitoring and on-the-fly configutayion), not built in and tied to one particular app like the web browser.
That's how Red Swoosh and Bittorrent DNA worked: It acted like a local web server, and any web client could simply open a url and start downloading the file, which would be delivered as it was received. BitTorrent DNA had an option of trying to download the chunks in order as much as possible, so it was better for watching streaming video.
The point is that every app knows how to fetch files via http, and doesn't need to know a thing about BitTorrent. So the Red Swoosh or BitTorrent DNA service makes BitTorrent look like http, and you don't have to modify the web browser or link in any native libraries.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7601083
DonHopkins on April 16, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: Spotify Starts Shutting Down Its Massive P2P Netwo...
When I worked for TomTom, I developed and tested a system for distributing maps via BitTorrent.
I first looked at Red Swoosh and its Firefox extension, FoxTorrent. It would have been ideal, since we using the xulrunner platform for TomTom Home, but Akamai acquired Red Swoosh, and it vanished without a trace. [1] [2] [3] [4]
TomTom's Maps are perfect for BitTorrent distribution, because they're large (1 Gig and growing) and lots of people in the same region need to download the same map at the same time. And it would have been a wonderful legal and practical example of a legitimate use of BitTorrent to point to when companies like Comcast try tricks like blocking BitTorrent traffic.
I visited BitTorrent in San Francisco, and discussed it with Bram Cohen. Their technology seemed ideal for our purposes (it worked a bit like Red Swoosh / FoxTorrent), and they quoted me a price per gigabyte to distribute content over their BitTorrent DNA network, which was a hell of a lot cheaper than we were paying to Akamai (this was before the made BitTorrent DNA distribution free).
A couple days after that meeting, I stopped by the Akamai booth at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, and asked them what their prices were for using the Red Swoosh technology they'd recently acquired. Travis Kalanick, the founder of Red Swoosh, gladly told me about his technology and answered my technical questions. (I had previously been looking at Red Swoosh and FoxTorrent, before it was acquired by Akamai, and it would have been easy to integrate with our xulrunner based product, TomTom Home).
Akamai's sales people refused to quote me a price, despite repeated requests, so I told them the price BitTorrent quoted me, and told them we were ready to start testing as soon as possible, and asked again if they could at least give me a ballpark estimate of how much they would charge for distributing content via Red Swoosh, and when we could start testing. They muttered something about not having come up with a pricing model yet, but that I could get into their beta program, whenever that started, which they also would not state.
I was somewhat skeptical about Akamai's support for Red Swoosh, dedication to P2P technologies, and motivations for acquiring Red Swoosh, since P2P technologies are such a huge threat to their business model. It was getting a lot of attention before they acquired it. I was afraid that they might have just acqui-hired Red Swoosh simply to sweep it under the rug so they didn't have to compete with it. And I was afraid th...
Wish they'd at least gone for a hybrid approach
But this is exactly the situation for AI models as well. If you look for DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 or Qwen3.8-27B on HuggingFace, you'll see many different releases by various people with different quantizations like FP8, Q4_K_M, INT4, abliterated/uncensored models and various versions that are fined tuned or modded in whichever different way. It feels to me exactly like the various different video encodings.
Yes, there is usually a single, official release from the lab that produced the model (or sometimes a handful of different variants), but very frequently this isn't something you can even run on consumer hardware.
End user will never need pirateface.
many end users would suffer if a low parameter count Qwen got taken down from huggingface because of government regulation
(It's fine, of course, to use AI tools—we use them heavily ourselves. Just please don't use them to generate or edit text to be read by fellow humans on Hacker News.)
It's impossible to know for sure what was LLM generated or edited, but we have to rely on imperfect classifiers or else the site would be completely flooded by genai text, which is not what the community here wants to read, nor in the intended spirit of HN.