11–20 of 192 posts
This guy clearly failed because he didn't actually do any compression, he just ab-used the filesystem to store parts of the data and then tried to argue that metadata was not data... But FYI someone else actually managed to compress that exact same data: https://jasp.net/tjnn/2018/1.xhtml
> It's not my fault that a file system uses up more space storing the same amount of data in two files rather than a single file. It's not interesting to see people play word games with each other in the HN comments, so why is it interesting to see this kind of disingenuous behavior? Trolls have always existed. I don't get what's interesting about it.
> It's not my fault that a file system uses up more space storing the same amount of data in two files rather than a single file. It's not interesting to see people play word games with each other in the HN comments, so why is it interesting to see this kind of disingenuous behavior? Trolls have always existed. I don't get what's interesting about it.
Putting up the initial challenge, especially with the accompanying commentary, is just as much trolling as that.
I wonder if it would have been possible to win the challenge legitimately? If a randomly-generated file happened to contain some redundancy through sheer chance, you could hand-craft a compressor to take advantage of it. This compressor would not work in general for random data, but it could work for this one particular case. It's a bet worth taking, because the payoff, 50:1 ($5,000 to $100), is pretty good. Play the…
A plausible "decompressor" is at least, say, 30 or 100 bytes, so the random file needs to have 30 bytes less entropy than you expected, which happens with probability X where X This argument could do with more rigor, but I think it's correct. Give me 100 million to 1 odds, though, and I'll take my chances trying to brute force a compressor.
This guy clearly failed because he didn't actually do any compression, he just ab-used the filesystem to store parts of the data and then tried to argue that metadata was not data... But FYI someone else actually managed to compress that exact same data: https://jasp.net/tjnn/2018/1.xhtml
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=patrickcraig.co.uk
For another compression challenge that is still ongoing, try "500000€ Prize for Compressing Human Knowledge" (also known as "Hutter Prize"):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37502329 - Hutter Prize for compressing human knowledge (2023-09-13, 215 comments)
I wonder if it would have been possible to win the challenge legitimately? If a randomly-generated file happened to contain some redundancy through sheer chance, you could hand-craft a compressor to take advantage of it. This compressor would not work in general for random data, but it could work for this one particular case. It's a bet worth taking, because the payoff, 50:1 ($5,000 to $100), is pretty good. Play the…