There's no single best way to store information • Hacker News Board

Re: There's no single best way to store information

#51

Post by __MatrixMan__ » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 4:33 PM UTC

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #5

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #3

There are, however, several objectively bad ways. In "Service Model" (a novel that I recommend) a certain collection of fools decides to sort bits by whether it's a 1 or a 0, ending up with a long list of 0's followed by a long list of 1's.

That depends on the aim. The purpose of something determines how fitting the means are. Also, let us not confuse "relative" with "not objective". My father is objectively my father, but he is objectively not your father.

I'm frequently bothered by misuse of "objective" but I stand by it here. In the case of storage, one criterion supersedes all others: can you get the information back out? If you can then there are merits to discuss relative to use case. If you can't then your storage mechanism is broken.

Re: There's no single best way to store information

#52

Post by __MatrixMan__ » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 4:43 PM UTC

teraflop wrote: post #43

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #3

There are, however, several objectively bad ways. In "Service Model" (a novel that I recommend) a certain collection of fools decides to sort bits by whether it's a 1 or a 0, ending up with a long list of 0's followed by a long list of 1's.

There's a similar anecdote in Iain M. Banks' The Player of Games . https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/270578/negotiator-...

Thanks for pointing it out.

I'm putting together a database along the lines of https://www.whosampled.com/ except instead of samples in music it's fiction authors either:

- revisiting one another's ideas

- stumbling across the same idea independently of one other

Now I get to add an edge between Tchaikovsky and Banks. It's somewhat unsurprising. Tchaikovsky does this a lot.

Re: There's no single best way to store information

#53

Post by hcs » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #3

There are, however, several objectively bad ways. In "Service Model" (a novel that I recommend) a certain collection of fools decides to sort bits by whether it's a 1 or a 0, ending up with a long list of 0's followed by a long list of 1's.

Related seriously: You can make it more likely to have long runs of the same letters, reversibly, with the Burrows-Wheeler Transform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows%E2%80%93Wheeler_transf...

(No magic, though it still feels like it, BWT is most useful when there's repeated substrings.)