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Jacob Ziv has died
- theandrewbailey 4y agoRIP. This is worthy of an HN black bar.
- mdaniel 4y agoI'd bet that an email to hn@ would fix it; I don't believe the black bar is programmatic and thus maybe dang hasn't seen this yet
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoSad news. Just recently Abraham Lempel [0] died, just days after I tasked my 16 yo daughter to implement an lzw compression as a part of her programming education. I chose this particular task for her because many years ago I have implemented an lzw compression myself, years ago, learning a lot about bits, masks and gifs in the process. R.I.P. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lempel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lempel
- qup 4y ago> I tasked my 16 yo daughter to implement an lzw compression as a part of her programming education Kudos, to the both of you. I'm sad we're starting to rapidly lose so many of our titans.
- londons_explore 4y agoIn other industries, the death of the inventor of a technology often marks the start of a further wave of innovation. For all kinds of reasons, the inventor (who is sometimes by now rich and/or powerful), may have a specific vision or path they want to proceed down. When they die, other people start investigating other paths, often with more success. I wonder if tech will see the same?
- colechristensen 4y agoNo. In tech when the creator quits or dies they’re replaced by MBAs that squeeze every penny out of the creation. (Like authors whose grandchildren direct the trusts which own the copyright a century after the work was written) New creations in tech have to wait for patents to expire and the incumbents to crumble to the point where they don’t have the cash to buy out the competition any more.
- qup 4y agoTo be fair, Ayn Rand said basically the same thing about industry long before tech bros existed.
- kortilla 4y agoA bit tone deaf considering the thread is about algorithms that are open.
- londons_explore 4y agoPlenty of things are totally open, yet innovation is still directed by the inventor.
- kortilla 4y agoStill not at all relevant to this case. Algorithms have no such gate keeping because there is no barrier to entry. Algo developers aren’t fighting for some tiny pot of NSF money allocated to particle physics to build a 100 million dollar algorithm detector.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agoThis is only partially true. A great example is Arithmetic coding in compression where research pretty much stalled for almost 40 years (from the mid 1970s until the 2010s) due to patent concerns.
- 4y ago
- MontyCarloHall 4y agoI hope that an LZW compressor was something she would have naturally wanted to hack on herself, rather than something she’s only coding because she was “tasked” to. The most surefire way to kill a young hacker’s spirit is to force them to hack on things they don’t care about. This goes with anything, not just computing. To whit, a childhood friend of mine was a gifted pianist who really loved jazz. His parents forced him to study with a classical teacher. Guess who doesn’t play piano anymore?
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoWell, she seems to be interested in programming and I don't force it on her. So far I think she does quite good. I have chosen lzw for her since my strategy is to give her quite a few diverse tasks to give her broad (albeit not very deep) understanding of general areas of development. I have covered this topic in more detail in a sibling comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35318995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35318995
- serf 4y agoanother anecdote to balance : as a kid who played chess, the kids who were 'forced' to play chess -- the ones who came from a long chess playing family and had different scenarios drilled into their head from the day they could talk -- were much more talented at chess than I. Their talent persuaded them to continue pursuing it far longer than I ever did, with many of them still involved. The most involvement I have now is a friendly lichess game every few months. It was their talent that allowed them to find more enjoyment within the pursuit than I ever did, and that talent was essentially forced by their immediate family. So, essentially, I am just saying that forced persuasion thing that parents' sometimes do is a double-edged sword; it can create animosity and bitter hatred but it can also create the drive and motivation for boundless talent and personal satisfaction.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y agoI’m pretty good at computers but had no real guidance. I now hire young people with a genuine interest, then gift them equipment and guidance that will last them their entire lifetime (Even if they get a career in something else). There’s such thing as pushing too hard, but nobody got buff without being pushed by those around them
- copymoro 4y ago[flagged]
- jjice 4y agoIf you're daughter can knock out lzw at 16, she's going to be an incredible programmer. How do you go about teaching your kids? I don't have kids yet, but if they do have in interest in programming, I'd love to give them a strong head start like you have.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoThanks, I think she has a potential to become a great developer, unless we all aren't replaced by that chatGPT thing everyone's talking about. Regarding teaching, I understood early that while I can program, I have very little understanding on how to teach it. So first, she underwent two Python courses (basic and advanced) on stepik.org [0], which had automated tests and have her an understanding of the language. Then, I planned to start throwing tasks of increasing complexity at her until she solves them, giving her a more or less complete coverage of all things programming. So far, she has written such things as - Tetris, in the console, with keyboard input - Snake game, with competing snakes which use wave algorithm to find path - LZW algorithm to learn bits and compression and other things Next my plan for her follows roughly this path: - some GUI programming, using GTK and Windows Forms. Calculator or maybe Checkers or something. - some web programming, backend and frontend. Most likely Django / jQuery - maybe some neural networks since are all so hot now - some hardcore assembler stuff, like maybe some simple game or visual demo - some mobile development, Android or iOS Once she'll be done with all that, I think she'll have quite a clear picture of most general areas of development and will be free to pursue the area she liked the most. [0]: https://stepik.org https://stepik.org
- userbinator 4y agosome hardcore assembler stuff, like maybe some simple or visual demo Demoscene/sizecoding might be interesting, especially if she also likes artistic stuff.
- eointierney 4y agoYou are awesome and your daughter is awesomer
- 4y ago
- userbinator 4y agoI noticed your username after reading your comment, and was not surprised. For some reason, it seems the former USSR is highly prominent in compression algorithms. RAR, PAQ, encode.su, etc. and of course Andrey Markov.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoIncidentally, the guy who wrote RAR (and an incredibly great file manager for Windows, FAR Manager), Eugene Roshal, has studied at the very same faculty/specialty as I did. However, he had graduated before I entered the university.
- xattt 4y ago> For some reason, it seems the former USSR is highly prominent in compression algorithms. I’d take a wild guess that it has to do with making more with having less, such as access to larger storage volumes or broadband. Specific to compression, when you’re “tech poor”, the time you spend waiting for data to get processed is essentially free.
- usr1106 4y agoAt the time those algorithms where developed even computers / networks in the West were painfully slow, compression always had its use. zstd is developed at Facebook, not known for a lack of computing resources.
- rbanffy 4y agoStill, even if you can reduce data footprint on Facebook by 1%, that's the GDP of a small planet right there.
- rbanffy 4y ago> the former USSR is highly prominent in compression algorithms And, which is quite odd, a lot of proprietary Windows software.
- tcmart14 4y ago
- tkhattra 4y agoLZ77 and LZ78 are ubiquitous, forming the basis of compression schemes used in ZIP, PNG, GIF, and Yann Collet's Zstandard. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ77_and_LZ78 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ77_and_LZ78
- Retr0id 4y agoHN served this webpage to me using `content-encoding: gzip`, which is using LZ77 (combined with huffman coding) if you look far enough under the hood.
- helpfulclippy 4y agoIt is fitting that such a large name is expressed in so few characters. RIP.
- fortran77 4y agoIt's even one fewer in his native Hebrew: "יעקב זיו"
- golemiprague 4y ago[dead]
- k_eshav 4y agoRest in peace! <3
- DeathArrow 4y agoRIP. I remember when I was a young guy learning programming, reading the source code of various DOS based LZ, LZH or LZW compression utilities and implementing myself a LZH algorithm thinking it will bring me great fame and fortune. Lempel, Ziv and Eugene Roshall were my heroes. At that time many young programmers regarded compression, compiler writing and anti-virus writing as very important. Now people just learn React. :)
- jacquesm 4y agoCompression and compiler writing are just as important today as they were back then. And the closer to the real end of cheap hardware improvements we get the more important they will be. They are where real progress lies, the rest was just a temporary freebie. Take cars: cars have a reasonable upper limit in physics so low that the difference between 'mild' (100 kph on the highway) and insane (300 kph+, no matter where) is a mere factor of three. And it took a good 100 years before that barrier was broken. It won't progress much beyond the standard of 100 or so kph under normal circumstances. There are just too many things that work against you when you go much faster than that including energy consumption, braking distance, the willingness of your vehicle to stay on the ground, attention requirements (ok, AI... someday...) and so on. So even if it is possible in exceptional cases it likely won't be the norm, even on closed over and evacuated freeways. Aircraft did a little better, but even there the supersonic passenger jet came and went. Though it may be back one day. In comparison computers have gotten many orders of magnitude faster in a much shorter time. But there is a physical limit, and we are very likely to run into that soon. And once that happens the only way to progress is to make more efficient use of the resources you've already got.
- DeathArrow 4y ago> In comparison computers have gotten many orders of magnitude faster in a much shorter time. But there is a physical limit, and we are very likely to run into that soon. And once that happens the only way to progress is to make more efficient use of the resources you've already got. Good points. And I will even argue that while we didn't hit a physical limit in hardware yet, it's still important to have a reasonable performance because not having performance means resources are wasted, money are wasted and it might lead to user frustration. But it seems to not be the majority's opinion or at least not most of the business owners opinion.
- CyberRabbi 4y agoOh no!
- dogma1138 4y agoI’m a bit surprised that neither Lempel nor Ziv were worthy of a black bar here.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gotoeleven 4y agoTo everyone who is wondering, there is a black bar its just one pixel.
- floodle 4y agoI love this :)
- AnnikaL 4y agoMay his memory be a blessing.
- superdisk 4y agoRIP. I just got done implementing a modified version of LZSS which is crucial to fitting all the music into a game I'm writing. Respect.
- einpoklum 4y agoTwo Professors Emeritus from my alam mater, the Technion - one from EE, the other from CS (Prof. Ziv). I distinctly remember noticing them in the old group photos of the first few graduating cohorts of the B.Sc. in CS. In Hebrew (or rather Aramaeic) we say: חבל על דאבדין ולא משתכחין A pity due to those who absent and not present.
- golemiprague 4y ago[dead]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pfoof 4y agoLempel, Moore, Ziv... This year is very unlucky
- phkahler 4y agoI remember my first LZW implementation. It was so amusing to me the the one case where something didn't exist in the dictionary yet, you knew what it was and could add it and keep going!
- beagle3 4y agoThe famous k<w>k<w>k case... indeed. I think, though, that most instruction texts do the reader a disservice by starting with LZW (and thus having to deal with the kwkwk case from the get go). They should start with LZ78, which is much more simple and elegant; then show how -- although unimportant asymptotically -- we can save some bits by using Welch's trick (W in LZW), and show how that gives rise to the special case which needs to be handled. Somewhat unexpectedly (for me anyway), if you write the decompressor as a memory stream decompressor rather than as a dictionary decompressor -- that is, instead of putting <w>,k pairs into your decoder dictionary while decoding, you note the output <offset> of where that <w> first appeared - there is no special case, and the implementation goes back to being LZ78 elegant and uniform.
- sn41 4y agoIn an interview, Jacob Ziv said that it was the uncomputability of Kolmogorov complexity that forced him to think about a different way to define the complexity of a single finite string : this is what led to Lempel-Ziv complexity in 1976, and its famous consequences, the LZ77 and the ZL78 compressors. https://web.archive.org/web/20181123231027/http://backup.itsoc.org/publications/nltr/96_dec/zivconv.html https://web.archive.org/web/20181123231027/http://backup.its...
- sakesun 4y agoRIP With better compression, heaven will soon have more space available.
- textread 4y agoFrom wikipedia: Jacob *Z*iv (Hebrew: 27 November 1931 – 25 March 2023) was an Israeli electrical engineer who, along with Abraham *L*empel, developed the *LZ* family of lossless data compression algorithms.
- bitofhope 4y agoPaying my respects to a pioneer. I started a project to implement a LZ77 decoder in Game Boy assembly to see if it could compress the sprites in Pokémon Red and Blue versions better than the algorithms actually used in the game. Results are inconclusive so far, but it's been an enlightening experience.