5 ms·
Can someone explain to me why this Wikipedia article is at the top of the front page?
by spicyj 16y ago
Can someone explain to me why this Wikipedia article is at the top of the front page?
- lanstein 16y agoI'm guessing because people voted it up. Additionally, it's not a peak time right now.
- mechanician 16y agoWhen is peak time?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- wmf 16y agoMost hackers don't know about XZ yet, but they should. I still prefer not to see Wikipedia articles on HN since they lack context. A "7 reasons you should ditch bzip2 and use XZ" blog post would probably be better.
- someone_here 16y agoOh god please not more "X reasons for Y"
- WilliamLP 16y agoGive me Z reasons why you don't like "X reasons for Y" posts.
- SkyMarshal 16y ago9 Reasons Why You Should Hate "X Reasons for Y" posts: 1. They're overdone 2. They're uncreative 3. They're unoriginal 4. They're a crutch 5. They're assembly-line writing 6. They're used by tabloids to appeal to supermarket zombies 7. They've helped turn respectable mags into tabloids (or are a symptom of it, not sure which came first) 8. They're psychologically manipulative (I don't know how, I just know it) 9. They work :)
- joshfinnie 16y agoYou forgot to put these across 11 individual comments so your 8pts would have been multiplied to 88! I do not mind lists, but I cannot stand lists that are seperated to pages for inflated page counts!
- koeselitz 16y agoHe was going to put it across 11 comments, but as the Wikipedia article clearly points out, xz compression conventionally bundles a single file.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Perceval 16y agoThe HN Guidelines explicitly frown upon "X reasons..." titles because they're almost always linkbait. If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids." http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- snippyhollow 16y ago"X reasons for Z": there, I fixed it for you.
- tvon 16y agoI'd prefer it to a two paragraph Wikipedia article.
- ramchip 16y agoHow about a "Y is the new X" or "X is dead, long live Y"?
- ElliotH 16y agoAgree on the wikipedia articles with no context point. Especially since the article in question is short with not very much real information on why it matters.
- matthavener 16y agoLZMA2 has a better compression ratio than bzip2, according to this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Markov_chain_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Mark... . Seems like it would be a good idea to switch away from bzip2/gzip to zx
- wheels 16y agoThe main reason to continue to use gzip is speed: it's an order of magnitude faster than bzip2 for compression / decompression, for a relatively small compression ratio hit. It's fast enough to us inline in web servers, SSH sessions, etc, and if you're just moving data around a single time, often the amount of time for compress / transfer / decompress is much faster than with bzip2.
- alecco 16y agoYes, the new compression algorithms (BWT and LZ77-based) are slower and require a lot more memory than DEFLATE (*zip) in most cases. This guy did a not so rigorous analysis but it is mostly OK: http://changelog.complete.org/archives/931-how-to-think-about-compression-part-2 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/931-how-to-think-abou... A little bird told me there's a better algorithm in speed/compression rate coming soon ;)
- gxti 16y agoI've found that on many types of data, xz -2 is twice as fast and compresses better than gzip -9. Of course gzip -1 kicks the pants off xz but there's absolutely no reason to use gzip at its higher levels, nor to use bzip2 at all. And if you want fast, LZO does it better -- the lzop tool provides a typical unix compress interface. Using 50MiB from a tarball I had lying around, best of 3: prog time(s) size(%) gzip -1 1.703 38.7 gzip -9 14.670 35.1 (worse than xz -1) bzip2 -1 7.714 34.0 bzip2 -9 8.035 31.4 (worse than xz -1) xz -1 6.278 31.3 xz -9 42.445 22.7 (best compression) lzop -1 0.670 46.1 (fastest) lzop -9 18.144 38.0
- 16y ago
- kiba 16y agoIt's apparently something new that has been floating around. Some hackers are probably curious about the "new thing" that popped up lately.
- scdlbx 16y agoSoftware that was released 9 months ago isn't particularly new.
- joshfinnie 16y agoFirst, I think that is why it's in quotes. Second, I am reading Of Mice or Men for the first time this summer. It is new to me!
- golwengaud 16y agoIn retrospect, I probably should have submitted the XZ Utils project page: http://tukaani.org/xz/ http://tukaani.org/xz/ . However, that page does not give the same picture of widespread adoption that the Wikipedia article does. That use was what interested me: I'm surprised that it only came to my attention when I was trying to recall the name of the 7z command line utility p7zip.
- goodside 16y agoI upvoted it because, on top of being interesting, it fights the passively accepted wisdom that "newsworthy" is synonymous with "worthy".