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Comment by tharkun__ | Hacker News Reader

Is it? In the first paragraph the author clearly shows his ignorance of base64. When told that it "looks like base64 encoded JSON" he

    was incredulous but gave it a go, and it worked!!

Even if you don't notice the ey specifically the string itself just screams base64 encoding, regardless of what's actually inside.

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TBC I was addressing the parents suggestion that the writer was incurious.

One blog post is hardly enough to just someone as ignorant but after quick look at the author's writing/coding/job history, I doubt he is that either.

I think it's fantastic that you can look at a string and feel it's base64 essence come through without a decoder. Thinking about it for a minute, I suspect I could train myself to do the same. If someone who already knew how to do it well wrote a how-to, I bet it would hit the front page and inspire many people, just like this article did.

I just don't get the urge to dump on the original author for sharing a new-to-him insight.

They were probably expecting base64 encoded binary data. Base64-encoded-binary-inside-Base64-encoded-JSON-inside-JSON is a really strange construction if you haven't encountered it before, because of how much space it's wasting playing a game of Russian nesting dolls.

Just add a layer of compression periodically to reclaim the wasted space and it will all work out.

If you have a compression that works on encrypted data, you can avoid wasting your time on the "encryption".

Base64 isn't encryption. The overhead added follows an extremely predictable pattern. That said I've no idea what the performance of common compression algorithms might be in such a use case. The comment was entirely tongue in cheek.

I apologise for my mistake. Either the comment got edited or I misread encryption somewhere in there.

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