How are zlib, gzip and zip related? • Hacker News Board

Re: How are zlib, gzip and zip related?

#31

Post by dTal » Mon, Nov 27, 2023, 5:29 PM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #23

bombela wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned this when I tried correcting the wikipedia page on Docker. I literally wrote the first prototype. But this wasn't enough source for wikipedia. And to this day the English page is still not truthfull (interestingly enough, the french version is closer to the truth).

You could publish a little webpage called "An historical note about the Docker prototype" under your own name, which you could then cite on Wikipedia. I think it makes perfect sense as a general and strict policy for an encyclopedia. It would simply be too hard to audit every case to check if it's someone like you, or a crank.

I don't see how requiring someone to set up a little webpage filters out cranks. If anything I might expect it to favor them.

Re: How are zlib, gzip and zip related?

#32

Post by norenh » Mon, Nov 27, 2023, 5:35 PM UTC

dcow wrote: post #16

zxt_tzx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relatedly, I have seen the graph showing the dip in SO traffic by ~30% if I'm not wrong (and the corresponding hot takes that attribute that to the rise of LLMs). I know most people are pessimistic that LLMs will lead to SO and the web in general to be overrun by hallucinated content and AI-training-on-AI-ouroboros, but I wonder if it might instead allow for curious people to query an endlessly patient AI assistant a…

GPT info tools will fully replace SO in most dev workflows if it hasn’t already.

And what will GPT info tools learn from, once the public curated sources are gone?

Re: How are zlib, gzip and zip related?

#33

Post by BeetleB » Mon, Nov 27, 2023, 5:36 PM UTC

dcow wrote: post #4

melagonster wrote: post #2

For people who first read this: the sweet part is in the comments :)

What’s even more sad is that the SO community has since consequently destroyed SO as the home for this type of info. This post would now be considered off topic as it’s “not a good format for a Q&A site”. You’d never see it happen today. Truly sad.

This is somewhat revisionist. They would mark stuff like this as off topic even in the early days.

Re: How are zlib, gzip and zip related?

#34

Post by msla » Mon, Nov 27, 2023, 5:39 PM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #20

gmgmgmgmgm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's disallowed on Wikipedia. There, you must reference some "source". That "source" doesn't need to be reliable or correct, it just needs to be some random website that's not the actual person. First sources are disallowed.

And that's for good reason. Encyclopedias are supposed to be tertiary sources, not primary sources. Having an explicit cited reference makes it easier to judge the veracity of a statement compared to digging through the page history to figure out if a line was added by a person who happens to be an expert.

And then there's impostors, which people who denigrate sourcing rules never seem to even think of.

Re: How are zlib, gzip and zip related?

#35

Post by JadeNB » Mon, Nov 27, 2023, 5:42 PM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #20

gmgmgmgmgm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's disallowed on Wikipedia. There, you must reference some "source". That "source" doesn't need to be reliable or correct, it just needs to be some random website that's not the actual person. First sources are disallowed.

And that's for good reason. Encyclopedias are supposed to be tertiary sources, not primary sources. Having an explicit cited reference makes it easier to judge the veracity of a statement compared to digging through the page history to figure out if a line was added by a person who happens to be an expert.

> And that's for good reason. Encyclopedias are supposed to be tertiary sources, not primary sources. Having an explicit cited reference makes it easier to judge the veracity of a statement compared to digging through the page history to figure out if a line was added by a person who happens to be an expert.

But why is a reference to "[1] Blog post by XXX" (or, even worse, "[1] Blog post by YYY based on their tentative understanding of XXX") a more authoritative source than "[1] Added to Wikipedia personally by XXX"? Of course, Wikipedia potentially has no proof that the editor was actually XXX in the latter case; but they have even less proof that a blog post purporting to be by XXX actually is.

Re: How are zlib, gzip and zip related?

#36

Post by pixl97 » Mon, Nov 27, 2023, 5:47 PM UTC

cout wrote: post #25

Interesting -- I did not realize that the zip format supports lzma, bzip2, and zstd. What software supports those compression methods? Can Windows Explorer read zip files produced with those compression methods? (I have been using 7zip for about 15 years to produce archive files that have an index and can quickly extract a single file and can use multiple cores for compression, but I would love to have an alternative…

Until windows 11, no, windows zip only seems to deal with COMPRESS/DEFLATE zip files.

Re: How are zlib, gzip and zip related?

#37

Post by dylan604 » Mon, Nov 27, 2023, 5:55 PM UTC

norenh wrote: post #32

dcow wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT info tools will fully replace SO in most dev workflows if it hasn’t already.

And what will GPT info tools learn from, once the public curated sources are gone?

By then, AGI will be ready, right?

Re: How are zlib, gzip and zip related?

#38

Post by kibwen » Mon, Nov 27, 2023, 6:25 PM UTC

JadeNB wrote: post #35

kibwen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's for good reason. Encyclopedias are supposed to be tertiary sources, not primary sources. Having an explicit cited reference makes it easier to judge the veracity of a statement compared to digging through the page history to figure out if a line was added by a person who happens to be an expert.

> And that's for good reason. Encyclopedias are supposed to be tertiary sources, not primary sources. Having an explicit cited reference makes it easier to judge the veracity of a statement compared to digging through the page history to figure out if a line was added by a person who happens to be an expert. But why is a reference to "[1] Blog post by XXX" (or, even worse, "[1] Blog post by YYY based on their tentati…

> Wikipedia potentially has no proof that the editor was actually XXX in the latter case; but they have even less proof that a blog post purporting to be by XXX actually is.

Wikipedia is not an authoritative identity layer, it provides no proof of identity and is thus strictly weaker than any other proof you can come up with. If you don't trust any arbitrary website that Wikipedia cites, then you have no more reason to trust any arbitrary Wikipedia editor.

As for what tertiary sources are and why they prefer not to cite primary sources in the first place, Wikipedia goes over this in their own guidelines: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_resear...

Re: How are zlib, gzip and zip related?

#39

Post by emmelaich » Mon, Nov 27, 2023, 6:55 PM UTC

Fun fact: in a sense. gzip can have multiple files, but not in a specially useful way ...

    $ echo meow >cat                                                            
    $ echo woof > dog                                                           
    $ gzip cat                                                                  
    $ gzip dog                                                                  
    $ cat cat.gz dog.gz >animals.gz                                             
    $ gunzip animals.gz                                                         
    $ cat animals                                                               
    meow                                                                        
    woof

Re: How are zlib, gzip and zip related?

#40

Post by HexDecOctBin » Mon, Nov 27, 2023, 6:56 PM UTC

Is there an archive format that supports appending diff's of an existing file, so that multiple versions of the same file are stored? PKZIP has a proprietary extension (supposedly), but I couldn't find any open version of that.

(I was thinking of a creating a version control system whose .git directory equivalent is basically an archive file that can easily be emailed, etc.)