Related:

Data Compression Explained (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40631931 - June 2024 (1 comment)

Data Compression Explained - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5931493 - June 2013 (14 comments)

Data Compression Explained by Matt Mahoney - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1179242 - March 2010 (1 comment)

The leader boards are from the pre Fabrice Bellard days, btw. Neural network modeling helped finding better patterns in text.

Also, you could say the same for the related data search problem. How to prepare data, so that it can most efficiently searched. Smallest encoding vs fastest search. Databases are mostly very, very stupid compared to more data-specific tuned algorithms. Like factor 1000 slower and bigger.

Matt is a great guy to explain this kind of stuff. He's very helpful.