Hacker News Reader

Comment by wolfi1 | Hacker News Reader

winrar is profitable? sure? well, on the other hand, they sure don't make losses

They are a German GmbH and must publicly state their financials: https://www.northdata.de/win%C2%B7rar%20GmbH,%20Berlin/Amtsg...

Looks pretty profitable to me.

They're one of the few companies that actually manage to sell "boxed software" (i.e. has not changed much in years but new customers keep buying it)

That said, Windows users should use 7-Zip. Better compression format, unpacks more kinds of archives

> Windows users should use 7-Zip

Please no - no native zstd support. NanaZip is the better option (it's a different build of 7-zip) and it's available at windows store.

> Better compression format, unpacks more kinds of archives

winrar has supported zstd for 5 years[0]

In short - Everyone should be using zstd, and 7-zip does not support it.

[0]: https://www.win-rar.com/singlenewsview.html?&L=0&tx_ttnews%5...

> Everyone should be using zstd

Why?

It's just the best general purpose compression algorithm, in terms of compression ratio to CPU used, for the vast majority of use cases

I'm not that fussed about CPU use.

https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

By these charts, if I only need 5-10 megabytes per second of compression on a single core, LZMA2 wins significantly on ratio, and still decompresses at well over 100. If I'm doing a backup, or sending/receiving over my internet connection (which only has 2MB/s of upload), LZMA2 easily wins. If I need speed then zstd wins.

It's just this good.

On a more realistic note: few years back, I've added zstd compression to our log subsystem (hand written direct buffers, native code, in-process, java). For the same CPU utilization if provides twice dense compression compared to regular [-6] gzip (the topic in the title). Zstd is =much= faster on decompression as well, and it this case - unparalleledly better as it uses twice less disk.

zstd is 'silicon valley' (the tv show) - life imitates fiction, except entirely open source

Yeah, zstd is awesome. I built a webapp that uses it via wasm and the decompression speed is incredible, so much so that I store everything in zstd and decompress it on the app load. My wasm binary also does advanced search and tag insertion and stuff in addition to zstd but it's only 38kb. I wish zstd was supported natively by web browsers. The 8kb implementation of zstd is only half as slow as wasm, so even that is still viable.

Lzma. I did a simple test, same payload repeated with a gap. Lzma ruled it.

|gap |gzip |bz2 |lzma | |---------|----------|-----|--------| |0 |2.7% |18.9%|*0.9%*| |8 KB |2.4% |17.8%|0.9% | |*40 KB*|*94.4%* |17.7%|0.4% | |1 MB |*104.3%*|19.7%|*0.9%*|

HN doesn’t support Markdown tables. You can prepend two spaces to show it in monospace though.

I don’t see zstd in your comparison?

dont know the point of the table, but here it is:

  |gap      |gzip      |bz2  |lzma    | 
  |---------|----------|-----|--------|
  |0        |2.7%      |18.9%|  *0.9%*| 
  |8 KB     |2.4%      |17.8%|   0.9% |
  |*40 KB*  |*94.4%*   |17.7%|   0.4% |
  |1 MB     |*104.3%*  |19.7%|  *0.9%*|

seconding others' request to try with zstd! I'd be very curious what something like zstd -14 would give you

Good point. Looks like it’s related to window size (incl for lzma btw). Lzma stays 0.9 and goes to 88.5 post 8.8M gap. Zstd -14 is close to lzma up to 4.4M where it jumps to 91.5. 14L seems to be the best overall for this scenario staying at 1.9.

zstd is a good default for e.g. filesystem compression, but if you're making an archive file, presumably you're looking for higher compression and LZMA would be a better fit.

>> Windows users should use 7-Zip

7z is now built into W11 right click so that or zip is what will be used by default anyway.

Last I checked windows handles compressed files in 4 byte or 4kb or something chunks and is incredibly slow to compress or decompress a lot of files.

While I also like 7z a lot and use it all the time, it's really not a better format that RAR. Higher compression ratios? Sure, marginally. But for archival RAR is still the better choice as it supports recovery records, which 7z still does not. I also found it more difficult to restore data from a partial 7z file (i.e. trailer data is missing) compared to an incomplete RAR file.

but worse filebrowser

That’s surprising. Seems there is a niche for everything.

You need to visit Japan...

Huh. I guess the warez kids grew up and have money, now?

There is 2 softwares I will buy for myself if I still use Windows: WinRAR and Internet Download Manager. In fact, I will buy them in the future regardless the Windows usage.

TIL they're Turkish

The original author and also creator of the RAR format, Eugene Roshal, is Russian. I think he moved to the US way back in the day, but not sure about that. He has been very private with his life.

The company doing the software distribution, is located in Berlin. The Managing Directors for that company seem to have Turkish names, but I don't know if they're Turkish.

BTW, Looking for some info I just found a website [0], clearly AI generated (but not necessarily meaning the content is false) claiming Eugene Roshal had severe kidney failure this past month, and he's waiting for surgery. They're asking for donations. There are some names on who's theoretically behind it [1] but they don't link to any LinkedIn profile or personal site. I can't find any other references. The BTC wallet they're using for donations hasn't seen any traffic ever. BE WARY, SMELLS FISHY.

  0: https://eugeneroshal.org/
  1: https://eugeneroshal.org/about/

A donation site that takes only bitcoin as payment is very suspicious, surely there are alot of services like GoFundMe who would accept him if it was genuine. I think this is a fake scam

edit: can you write in brackets after the URL that it may be scam. I think alot of people may just go to the URL without reading your warning

WHOIS information for the domain shows it's registered in the Philippines. The name of the owner does not show up in any of the about section people. So I think those are fake.

In addition to what the other comments said ("WHOIS information for the domain shows it's registered in the Philippines"[0] etc), the "hospital bed" picture is blatantly AI-generated. If you zoom on his face, you can see that it looks extremely unnatural.

I suspect that someone's running a script that looks for public (-ish, Eugene has a Wikipedia page at least) figures without active social media presence and creates fake donation websites with AI-generated texts and pictures.

If my suspicion is correct, this is one of the most evil scams I can imagine.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49801838

I read GP more as "sure they're profitable, but they didn't exactly have many expense to cover so it's not a very useful comparison to make at this point" than doubt in the profitability itself.

E.g. when SpaceX started designing the Falcon 9 the losses were astronomical (pun intended) but a car dealership running more of a profit at the same time doesn't have much to say about which business is doing better.

they're is obviously joking

Culonavirus (GGP from the original? Dunno how to refer to that)? Yeah - you could make a good guess of that even just by looking at the username they chose :D. Doesn't mean wolfi1, shezi, or myself can't have a serious discussion stemming from it as well.

Who knows though - maybe I missed that German company financials are also funny :p. Wouldn't be the first time something flew well over my head.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com