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Comment by sgt | Hacker News Reader

Even better when you switch on the --lossy option in gzip.

You may be interested in Lossy Zip [1]. It's coming up on 22 years old, as of April 1st.

Admittedly, it's somewhat unclear why the format didn't take off. At its core, it uses the Lessis-Moore algorithm to perform a global bit-wise sort of its inputs, then performs a run-length encoding (plus some other magic) on the results to achieve up to 100% compression.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20050402203136/http://lzip.source...

So it only has a 0% quality setting?

I'm not convinced that actually qualifies as "lossy".

That's hilarious. Thank you.

At that point you might as well store your files in /dev/null

Does /dev/null support sharding?

Maybe try mangodb https://github.com/dcramer/mangodb

if /dev/null is fast and web scale I will use it. ( https://devnull-as-a-service.com/ )

It's time to mention the name of the NABOB archiver, it seems. (-:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26460317

That's where the zoster virus hides out

Although you are joking, gifsicle does have a "--lossy" switch which allows changes to a gif file in order to make the LZW compression more efficient.

An other example is pngquant, which performs "lossy" compression of PNGs (by quantizing them).

pngquant reduces the size by removing information from the image before compression.

gifsicle --lossy actually allows slightly lossy LZW dictionary matches to improve the compression itself.

I assume you're joking... I've never heard of lossy compression in this kinds of formats, as there's no general way to determine what can be discarded without affecting the utility of the data. There's no such option in any implementation of gzip I've found...

I use gzip --lossy if I forget to submit a rough draft for school papers. It comes out decent quality, but slightly worse.

Was hoping for an Easter egg, but it just says unrecognized option? At least on my phone it does, iirc that's a Debian Buster install that I haven't updated in three years.

I might be overexplaining but it's a joke because lossy compression of a gzip would end up with you losing data that could render the entire file unreadable.

Yeah, that much was clear, just thought it might refer to a hidden option that triggers a funny message, but it didn't for me so perhaps it was a macOS' gzip thing or an ancient/recent gzip version thing.

What version of gzip has a lossy option?

It's a joke. Lossy compression can only work with specific formats where information loss is acceptable, theoretically anything but in practice usually audio and video.

If gzip tried to do lossy compression, not knowing what the data is, it would have to randomly corrupt data.

There are plent of example texts where letters are deliberately left out to show how the brain fills in the missing data without losing meaning. Seems like this --lossy option might not be so bad after all. Might only work well for those that speak the language natively.

http://www.brendangregg.com/specials.html#ltzip

It was the best and worst of times.

It was the best and best of times.

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