Disagree COMPLETELY. I can waste time hunting down the file I need, or someone can build something fantastic to use.

Hell, when I was a youngin' I wrote FastFlick to make MY life easier. We as hackers are always striving to make things simpler for everyone, but most importantly for ourselves.

http://fastflick.blogspot.com/

Your use of capitalization is completely unnecessary. I think a better convention might be to use single stars like completely or double stars like completely but the moment I see letters in all caps I just automatically disregard whatever it is that person is saying.

Edit: HN doesn't seem to know what to do with double stars.

Thanks for LETTING me KNOW?

"Thanks for letting me know" just looks creepy.

This community is about making widely used product, and pushing boundaries; ease of use and torrenting are absolutely part of that. Say: it is acceptable that the software torrents out without the user’s knowledge? How are the files architectured to allow fast start? Is there a way to improve the experience by preloading some? How is this coming to affect how Netflix positions itself?

Can this mean that content can be disintermediated a little more, and could something, say a documentary that wouldn’t fit on YouTube (say, because it includes violence, or suspected espionnage) and wouldn’t be able to be produced by common producers would still be able to reach an audience and critical success? There has been many attempts at making torrents more user-friendly, and this is an interesting example.

I think the point is that what was formerly a file-oriented task now behaves much more like a service. Netflix would be nowhere near as popular if you had to download the movie file before watching.

Plus, no more external hard drives full of ~1GB movie files.

The subtitles feature is a huge win for me. My partner is Spanish speaking so every film we watch requires a hunt through various subtitles sites(not being able to use srt files with likes the of iTunes is also a major issue when paying for films). Of course I know how to do it but it's one of those things that has really made we wish there was a good quality commercial offering(I'd be very happy to pay something like $70/month for a spotify type service).

VLC player has a plugin that can do this for you. It's called Vlsub. It doesn't check for synchronization, but you can try out about 3-4 subtitles in less than a minute, so it works very well in practice.

Also, check out Filebot. It does sub hunting and has organization and renaming facilities too.

English speaker, but I have hearing issues.

That's going to be incredibly handy, thanks!

Once you involve the filesystem, you lose about 90% of users. Personally, I think hierarchical file systems a pain in the ass. I'm glad platforms are moving away from them.

If I understand you correctly that you don't care for the paradigm of organizing your data in a hierarchical database I would be curious to know what you would use preferably, say when you want to open a document? Tags? Full content search?

I disagree completely. It's not about solving a the problem of not being able to "download a torrent file", but adding a new functionality to an established protocol.

I find the idea very interesting, conceptually and technically.

Then just don't read/upvote/post in this thread, the community already has the necessary tools (upvote and downvote) to decide whether it is the place here for this type of threads or not.