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Comment by denvaar | Hacker News Reader

> The first step involves yet another clever strategy for identifying repetition and thereby compressing message size, but the second step is to take the resulting compressed message and run it through the Huffman process.

I wonder if this "first step" is Burrows-Wheeler Transform?

Side note: In Silicon Valley (the show), I'm pretty sure that Richard has a picture of David Huffman by his bedside.

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No, BWT is largely unused in modern compression codecs.

Lempel-Ziv is the basis for almost all modern general purpose compression, and works more like having a hash table mapping 3 or 4 byte fragments to their positions, and walking through the input byte by byte checking the hash table for matches and inserting the latest fragments&positions into the hash table.

BWT has nearly identical speed compressing and decompressing, but searching for matches to compress is much slower than simply copying data according to instructions to decompress.

I came here to find Silicon Valley references and wasn't disappointed.

I don't like that show because whenever I watch it I start imagining a world with inside-out compression and I get sad we'll never have it.

What is inside-out compression?

I believe the parent meant "middle out". (Very NSFW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex1JuIN0eaA)

I mean, sure it’s NSFW, but just take a look at that Weissman Score!!

How did I make that mistake, I'm so ashamed.

> Very NSFW

I didn't believe you until about a minute in. LOL

Both of us have been satisfied

at the same time?

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