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jamwise | parent | next
Reminds me of when I tried to use the library of babel as a data compression tool. It led me down a fun rabbit hole and was my first introduction to information theory.

The conclusion being that you basically need the same amount of data to represent the address of your data as the data itself, so it's not really effective at compression, just a fun thought experiment.

The cool part of this in modern times is that LLMs are basically a form of lossy compression that actually achieves the gist of what these tools fail at. Although it is lossy, and requires a massive substrate. This is related to the idea of AI/LLMs being a form of language compression.

ithkuil | parent | next
You'll find this an interesting watch:

Reinventing Entropy Compression is Intelligence Part 1

3blue1brown https://youtu.be/l6DKRf-fAAM?is=ne73FCJ7ErXhzZ-v

sam_lowry_ | root | parent
Also this article by Ted Chiang as a literary explanation of the connection between intelligence and compression: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-...
ainch | parent | next
In some sense, science is the most extreme form of compression - Newtonian mechanics explains an incredible number of phenomena in a few lines of text.
mdp2021 | root | parent
Yes. But /lossful/ compression: (scientific, philosophical etc.) laws compress an abstract narration of events into that tiny, hard, fundamental, predictive detail.

(Then it depends on your concern: "Aagh, the aunt fell!" // "Oh yes, that'd be Newton")

esquivalience | root | parent
> "Aagh, the aunt fell!" // "Oh yes, that'd be Newton"

This is totally lost on me.

mdp2021 | root | parent | next
Compression minimizes the representation of information.

Laws (scientific, philosophical etc.) as compression represent the common side of classes of events - an abstraction of said events, stripping the irrelevant - irrelevant to some perspective, or irrelevant in a potential Procuste's bed. So, laws are compression, but a so extremely lossful compression that the loss can be relevant.

Brutally, "there may be more to the story of the fall of an elderly than just gravitation" - also in the sense that there are details behind the event.

Laws are compression - yes, with caveats.

On a more scientific, epistemological side: Einstein extended Newton covering more exceptions (reducing the abstraction - reducing the loss).

user_7832 | root | parent
> This is totally lost on me.

Appears to be lossy then ;)

(Sorry, you have to admit that was too easy to not say)

quirino | parent | next
3Blue1Brown just released a viduo about this Intelligence-Compression connection.

https://youtu.be/l6DKRf-fAAM

jamwise | root | parent
The idea was fresh in my mind because I watched this yesterday. Great video, the illustrations and intuition-building of the compressability of information was so good! I'm so grateful for 3Blue1Brown.
janalsncm | parent | next
The level of compression is pretty impressive when you think about it. I wrote a comment a while back which is still true (although bytes should be bits, so in that sense it’s still wrong): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39559969

Back of the envelope calculation for storing valid 4-grams (sequences of four words) is around 10 billion x 14 bits per word = 17 gb for all 10 billion. There are LLMs 100x smaller which can write coherent prose.

frotaur | root | parent
If you combine the LLM probability distribution with arithmetic coding you can actually use them to compress text losslessly. When people reports 'bits per byte', it is actually the compression rate for text.

GPT-2 for instance achieves roughly 1 bit per byte, so it can be used to compress (english) text 8-fold. Modern models are likely much better.

divbzero | parent | next
> you basically need the same amount of data to represent the address of your data as the data itself

Almost like the other Borges work where “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire”.

| parent
{"deleted":true,"id":48483471,"parent":48482379,"time":1781129685,"type":"comment"}
dang | parent | next
Related. Others?

πfs – A data-free filesystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36357466 - June 2023 (107 comments)

πfs – A data-free filesystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699499 - Sept 2021 (30 comments)

PiFS – The Data-Free Filesystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26208704 - Feb 2021 (1 comment)

Πfs: Never worry about data again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21359338 - Oct 2019 (1 comment)

The π Filesystem for FUSE: Store Your Data in π - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19223032 - Feb 2019 (1 comment)

pifs - Avoid disk space usage by saving your files in the digits of Pi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18687275 - Dec 2018 (1 comment)

πfs – A data-free filesystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13869691 - March 2017 (105 comments)

Πfs: Stores your data in π - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10856108 - Jan 2016 (1 comment)

Πfs: Never worry about data again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10847693 - Jan 2016 (1 comment)

File system that stores location of file in Pi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8018818 - July 2014 (98 comments)

100% Compression Using Pi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6698852 - Nov 2013 (32 comments)

(Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)

Levitating | parent
How are you generating these lists
programjames | root | parent | next
If you click the website's name to the right of the title, it pulls up all the submissions from the same site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/philipl

Levitating | root | parent
Even then I don't see a direct way to extract a list like this.
ChrisMarshallNY | root | parent
I think it's safe to assume that dang has access to tools that we mortals are unable to comprehend, without being driven to madness.
lukan | root | parent | next
For this use case, of finding related threads, I thought he wrote not special tools, but rather uses just

https://hn.algolia.com/

Levitating | root | parent
Even using algolia, I don't see a way to generate a list in this exact format.

I think ChrisMarshallNY is right, dang has access to eldritch powers.

khimaros | root | parent
the Glider HN app for Android shows related posts with high overlap to dang's list, so it must be possible for mere mortals after all.
ChrisMarshallNY | root | parent
It was really just a rhetorical joke, but I wrote an app that is a system, based on a custom backend and native frontend.

I wrote a special native management app, and often use that, to implement dashboard functionality, like the kind of thing that the HN mods do.

Yeah, I could, for example, feed the logs into an LLM, and get fancy reports, but it’s a lot easier to simply hit the charts button in the navbar, and view interactive graphs, customized exactly for my workflow.

whynotmaybe | root | parent
I can only imagine opening dbeaver and running "select * from hn.posts where site like '%github.com/philipl`"
emptyroads | parent | next
Reminds me of nsafs, the National Security Agency Filesystem ("free" because the government pays for it) - https://github.com/freedomtools/nsafs
dekhn | parent | next
I once interviewed for a company and the interviewer was telling me how he (a vc) funded a project to generate large streams of random numbers; you would select an index at random, share that private key with somebody, and then the subsequent text could be used as a one-time-pad. NSA would be forced to buffer/save the entire stream, which could be generated at GB/sec, if they wanted to decrypt.

It didn't seem very practical.

helterskelter | root | parent | next
I wonder if we could mess with NSA-style surveillance by having a good chunk of the population streaming lots of random data over the internet. Essentially, Alice piping her /dev/random to Bob's /dev/null over netcat or something. Make a slick looking app that does it 24/7 in the background using excess bandwidth and tell people it sticks it to the NSA.

Spy agencies would not only have to store it all in case it was something valuable, but at some point they may try to crack it because it's indistinguishable from encrypted data and waste resources on it. If enough people did it, total web surveillance could become impractical.

fc417fc802 | root | parent | next
That's known as cover traffic and is a tactic employed by many of the anonymity oriented overlay networks.

I'll note that any observer already has this problem to the extent that video streams are also encrypted. However most observers presumably recognize the endpoints as well as being able to classify the traffic by means of statistical analysis.

What might be useful would be a tool to generate arbitrary user data of various forms, including HMTL, video, audio, and various message formats. Then it could assemble a convincing traffic stream full of gibberish to exchange with peers at random. You wouldn't even necessarily need all that much of it to overwhelm any would be observers when considered relative to the volume of streaming service traffic that already exists.

nairboon | root | parent
Local llms and diffusion models can help you with that.
danielmeskin | root | parent | next
I suspect this would have an effect similar to early internet worms that caused significant strain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_(computer_virus)

dekhn | root | parent | next
This violates law #27, "do not unnecessarily increase the entropy of the universe"
iwontberude | root | parent
It’s not unnecessary. If anything it seems necessary.
| root | parent
{"deleted":true,"id":48484558,"parent":48484092,"time":1781136399,"type":"comment"}
agnishom | root | parent
> generate large streams of random numbers; you would select an index at random, share that private key with somebody, and then the subsequent text could be used as a one-time-pad.

This is what stream ciphers are

adzm | parent | next
It is worth noting that as the length of data increases it becomes extremely unlikely that the index and length of the sequence within pi would actually be smaller than the data.
Aloisius | parent | next
That seems easy enough to solve. Simply record the index and length in pi of the index and length in pi.
awesome_dude | root | parent
See also: Recursion
dietr1ch | root | parent
See also: Recursion
philihp | root | parent
See also: Recursion
amelius | root | parent | next
You can stop the recursion when you've found an index that is smaller than what you wanted to store.
mondrian | parent | next
The index of your 20 line file is <20TB number>
russfink | root | parent
Unless, in turn, you locate the index itself in pi at a much smaller index. And so on...

Find k candidate indices for your data, then locate each of them. If the smallest one is a significantly smaller index space, repeat.

Galanwe | root | parent | next
It's recursive as well, you now need to store how many levels of indirection of indices you had to resolve, which will in turn take 20TB to store, unless you store that in pi as well, which in turn...
akoboldfrying | root | parent
Can't tell if you're in on the joke or not, but for anyone who is genuinely wondering whether this might work: Consider that there are at most 256 different indexes that could be represented by a 1-byte index value, but if you're trying to store 9 bits of data, there are already 512 different possible things it could be that each need to be represented by a different index value, otherwise you won't be able to tell them apart. Those pigeons aren't gonna fit.
jonhohle | root | parent
That’s what variable length encoding is for!
jastr | parent | next
Back in college, I thought I could compress my phone number by telling people its index in pi, but my 7 digit phone number is at an 8 digit index.

I didn’t have the compute to find my 10 digit number with the area code.

xavortm | root | parent
HEX should've solved for char length?
account42 | parent | next
That just means you'll be creating even more valuable metadata to store your files. Win-win.
12_throw_away | parent | next
yes I believe that's the joke
jwpapi | root | parent
He’s aware, he just added some curious information.
bandrami | parent | next
At least as of 15 years ago when I was in grad school that remained an open conjecture.
hatthew | parent | next
TFA addresses this

> Now, we all know that it can take a while to find a long sequence of digits in π, so for practical reasons, we should break the files up into smaller chunks that can be more readily found.

> In this implementation, to maximise performance, we consider each individual byte of the file separately, and look it up in π.

ithkuil | root | parent
Why stop at bytes? Let's split it in individual bits and then look up the bits in pi!

But Pi's binary expansion is not very practical for this purpose, since it's 11.0010...

OTOH. e is 10.1011...

Let's stick to fractional digits (the ones right of the binary point) at index 0 we have 1 and at index 1 we have 0.

So, to encode a stream of bytes so that each bit is encoded as the index of that bit in the e, all you need to do is to xor it with 0xFF

nvader | root | parent | next
Hang on hang on let me write a CUDA kernel for this. This is going to be really huge.
liamYC | parent
Point taken about the index potentially being really long. Why would the length be longer than the data? Don’t you need to find the right sequence?
gowld | root | parent
For a given length of data, considering all possible data of that length, it's impossible for the median length to be shorter than the data length. There aren't enough strings of that length that early in the data.
MisterTea | parent | next
Reminds me of: https://www.spronck.net/sloot.html

Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System

ndiddy | parent | next
I looked into this a bit a while ago, what Sloot did was at least a little novel. Basically the way his encoding scheme actually worked was that it would store each line of video into a database, encode each video frame as a series of line lookups, and then store that encoded frame into another database. Then each video is a series of frame lookups. When you hear accounts of him being able to demo smooth playback of 16 videos at once on late 90s hardware, this is how he did it. Because each frame is a series of line lookups, splitting the screen horizontally 16 times and playing 16 videos at once is not any more taxing than playing a single video fullscreen. Similarly, he was able to fast-forward and rewind smoothly because each frame is individually decoded, it's not like traditional video compression where you have to calculate differences from each keyframe. Playing at 2x speed was not any more taxing than 1x speed. Of course he never would have been able to store a video file in 8KB or whatever, but this meant that (for example) if you had a whole season of a TV show in your database, the opening and ending credits would only be stored once.
MisterTea | root | parent | next
Interesting. Do you have any resources you can share?
ndiddy | root | parent
There's a good podcast about the whole saga here (with a transcript): https://corecursive.com/sloot-digital-coding-system/ and Sloot's patent is here: https://patents.google.com/patent/NL1009908C2/en .

One thing to note is that Sloot consistently refers to his scheme as "encryption" rather than "compression". His encoding scheme originated as a method to encrypt TV repair manuals for his previous project, RepaBase. The idea was that they'd send out a compressed and encrypted database of repair manuals for free, then whenever a technician needed one he would call up RepaBase and pay for the key for that manual. That way, a tech would only need to pay for the manuals he needed instead of for the whole database. The video encoding scheme was basically the same idea except the key was stored on a smart card. Of course the scammy part was misleading investors into believing that all the video data was somehow stored in that decryption key.

gowld | root | parent
Block deduplication. This is how Enterprise storage arrays (such as NetApp Deduplication) and local file systems (like ZFS and Microsoft ReFS via Windows Server Data Deduplication) (and normalized databased in general) work.
Levitating | parent | next
> The SDCS is only possible if keys are allowed to become infinite, or the data store is allowed to become infinite (...) This would, of course, make the idea useless.

But Pi is infinite. And thus this genius contraption will work as long as we have Moore's law on our side :)

giancarlostoro | parent | next
Never heard of that one, that's amazing! Love it.
beng-nl | parent
I have very fond memories of reading that book.
mkesper | parent | next
Outdated! Should have linked directly to https://github.com/philipl/inferencefs/ obviously.
utopiah | parent | next
"This file doesn't look like what I remember.

Are you sure? It's been a while since you last opened it. Memory is funny like that. The file is fine — maybe take another look with fresh eyes."

from https://github.com/philipl/inferencefs/

Maybe I do not indeed remember properly. Anyway, back to watching "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" for the first time, I think.

windward | parent | next
>One of the properties that π is conjectured to have is that it is normal

conjectured

Glad to see one of my pet points of pedantry come up. No non-constructed irrational number has never been proven to be normal or disjunctive.

vbarrielle | parent | next
Chaitin's constant does not count? Depends on your definition of constructed, but contrary to "easy" normal numbers such as Champernowne's constant, it's not defined by its sequence of digits.
oofbey | parent | next
That’s a lot of negatives!
mikestew | root | parent
One of which probably needs to go away.
umanwizard | parent | next
What do you mean by "non-constructed" here?
loading story #48484778
niggischiggi | parent
You must be fun in RL.
bobim | parent | next
This is disturbing to realize that pi then contains all the past and future knowledge, including when I'll pass away.
mike_hock | parent | next
So does every other random infinite sequence of bits. The unintuitive part comes from infinity, not pi.

It also doesn't contain all past and future knowledge because it also contains all possible falsehoods about the past and future in a way that's indiscernible from the truth.

Encoding information as an offset into a pseudorandom sequence is no more storage efficient than storing the information directly.

smaudet | root | parent | next
Keyword is conjectured.

Infinities of random sequences exist that can be shown not to contain all data, 0-8 (base 10) is one such random sequence that is trivially proven to never contain 9...

There are no known patterns to pi, but, (I am legitimately curious about this), are there any known sequences e.g. of 1 million 0s and a single other digit within the decimal sequence of pi?

Given how it (pi) looks, I'm of the strong suspicion is that the answer is "no". But of course, proving that requires that some property of the randomness is provable. Which it does feel as if, given there are different infinities, there are also different randomnesses, hence the conjecture is ill-formed and probably incorrect...

gowld | root | parent
The longest consecutive sequence of decimals digits found in pi is a sequence of 13 8s. All other digits have a sequence of length 12.

https://bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/pidigits.html

sph | root | parent
Are you aware this is meant as a joke, right?
LoganDark | root | parent
Jokes can be educational too.
nosioptar | parent | next
The worst part is that it contains Star Wars 4-6 from an alternate timeline where Disney did a reboot casting Chris Pratt as Han Solo.

(Fun fact: "Chrispratt" is an ancient Californian word that means "Joel McHale didn't want the role.")

Yokohiii | root | parent | next
Around here it just means chrisp ratt.
1attice | root | parent
Thank you for this Prattfall
arialdomartini | parent | next
You will love reading Jorge Borges The Library of Babel.

https://dn760100.eu.archive.org/0/items/TheLibraryOfBabel/ba...

teapourer | root | parent
I thought of this as soon as I saw the repo as well.
matheusmoreira | parent | next
All knowledge already exists. Humans are merely discovering it.

All knowledge is information. All information is sequences of bits. All sequences of bits are numbers. All numbers already exist.

All files in a computer are sequences of bits. Intellectual work creates files. Intellectual work is number discovery.

Humans are interesting number generators. Humans are anti-random number generators.

xp84 | parent | next
If it makes you feel better, consider that it also contains all plausible and implausible falsehoods about your demise as well.
Yokohiii | parent | next
The person who starts reading ahead into pi will always gets the freshest numbers.

Perfect crypto!

OkayPhysicist | parent | next
So does a calendar, if you you buy them enough years in advance.
thih9 | parent | next
It also contains all possible falsehoods and comes with no way to distinguish what's true from what isn't.
vadansky | root | parent
But enough about LLMs
skulk | parent | next
this statement is equivalent to "pi is a normal number." While most real numbers are normal and pi is suspected to be so, it isn't known.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number

cadamsdotcom | parent | next
Fear not! It’s probably so deep in pi that you’d pass away listening to someone tell you where!
nighthawk454 | parent | next
And also all the days you don’t, so, by itself not very meaningful. Especially since you can’t tell which one is right in advance. In some sense, so does a calendar
layer8 | parent | next
It also contains all past and future fake news, and you don’t know which is which.
koolala | parent | next
It isn't actually proven true.
deadbabe | parent | next
A not so distant calendar also has the day you will pass away.
anthonj | parent
So does a random number generator
gowld | root | parent
You need to be more specific in order to make that statement falsifiable.
aidenn0 | parent | next
I vaguely remember an entry to a compression-benchmark that gamed the benchmark by treating the filename as part of the input to the decompression-algorithm, thus beating the metric that only measured the size of the file.
layer8 | parent | next
> In this implementation, to maximise performance, we consider each individual byte of the file separately, and look it up in π.

Considering each individual bit separately would be even more performant: you only need the indexes 2 and 33, and there is an efficient mapping of those to the bits in storage.

nyc_pizzadev | parent | next
Just a heads up, this is writing 16 bits for every 8 bits of input:

https://github.com/philipl/pifs/blob/fded8bf7b8f4fc64233e37b...

vbarrielle | parent | next
This would be easier using the Champernowne constant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champernowne_constant) which is guaranteed to be normal, not just conjectured.
partsch | parent | next
Finally, someone is doing something about the rising prices of storage!
hnlmorg | parent | next
This is probably a dumb question, but do we actually know that pi has an infinite number of decimal digits or are we assuming that it does because we haven’t developed a sufficiently powerful computer to calculate the last digit of pi?

I’m guessing this is something that could be formally proven?

hasteg | parent | next
Here is a one page proof that pi is irrational - https://heuklyd.github.io/papers/pdf/Niven-1947.pdf
partsch | root | parent | next
Thanks for the PDF. I feel like I understand even less now than I did before.
simonreiff | root | parent | next
For a superb explanation of Niven's proof (which leaves more questions than answers when you first read it), I like Michael Penn's video: https://youtu.be/dFKbVTHK4tU?is=d2DbV5HDP0IpP9tA ....notwithstanding the length of the proof, this is quite a hard problem.
hnlmorg | root | parent | next
Thanks for sharing. That’s a nice read. I’m glad I asked :)
stackghost | root | parent
It's amazing how inscrutable calculus can be when you return to reading it after not doing so for a period of time, much like lisp or forth. I don't think I've actually done an integral or taken a derivative in years. I can see the elegance of that proof but I'll be damned if I can actually follow the mathematics from one step to the next.
mike_hock | parent | next
We definitely know that Pi is irrational, we just don't know if it's normal (i.e. if the PiFS joke even works).
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{"deleted":true,"id":48482371,"parent":48482216,"time":1781123979,"type":"comment"}
pixel_popping | parent
Well, that should get GPT-5.5 extended thinking going for a few weeks.
loading story #48491607
baalimago | parent | next
This got me thinking about the "simulation theory":

If our universe is simulated, it must be possible to snapshot the entire state for one iteration (however time now is quantized, open question). "... From here, it is a small leap to see that if π contains all possible files, why are we wasting exabytes of space storing those files, when we could just look them up in π!" (from pifs, above)

This means that not only does a singular snapshot of our universe exists in pi, but every single one does

The information for our entire universe's simulation is stored in pi (and every other number like it)

loading story #48487263
loading story #48487171
loading story #48487340
Lalabadie | parent | next
Love it! This feels very much in the spirit of Tom7's Harder Drive [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio

thangalin | parent | next
https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/53737/1704

> Matches that occur early enough in π to attain significant compression will not be varied. That is, it isn't possible to use π to compress interesting, real-world data because real-word strings are unlikely to arise early.

Levitating | parent
> Since the file is 128 bits long, one would expect this place to be around the 2*128th bit.

> Calculate the number of bits to encode that value using log2(938933556), which is ~29.8

Can someone explain these two statements to me?

csunoser | root | parent | next
for > Calculate the number of bits to encode that value using log2(938933556), which is ~29.8

This is roughly same as saying: "If you rewrite 938933556 as a binary number / usize, it will need 30 bits".

Sanity check: 1101111111|0110111111|0100110100 (| delimits every 10 bigits).

> Since the file is 128 bits long, one would expect this place to be around the 2*128th bit.

This statement is a bit more subtle. As a first ord approximation, we can see pi sort of as a RNG.

If we write pi (ignore the decimal point), as a binary number, we get: 11011001111111011110010101011110001010101111101101110001001100001...

You can... kind of squint and pretend this is a random sequence of 1s and 0s.

Now, if you had a file that is 128 bits (so lots of intermingling 0s and 1s), and each next digit of pi is effectively a coin flip. Pretend 1s are heads, and 0s are tails. You basically have to get the exact 128 consecutive coin flips of the same result as your file to get your file back.

Imagine now, PI not as a number, but a sequence of experiments of flipping the coin 128 times.

  - (11011..01000)(10000...00100)....
  - ^attempt 1     ^attempt 2
You have to try, on expectation, quite a few times to win this game! Now, you could easily get lucky for sure. But on average, your chance of winning per attempt is roughly 0.5^128! So, how many times do you have to try to win this game? Something like 2^128 times - and you have to consider that each attempt uses 128 bits as well. So more like 2^135. But you don't have to start fresh in each attempt, you can see it as like this:

  - 11011................00100...
  - (       128 flips     )
  -  (  another 128        )
  -   (                     )
  -     ... so on and so on
That's where the 2^128 number came from.
giancarlostoro | parent | next
I... I can't tell if this is an elaborate troll or pure genius. I love it.
koolala | parent | next
Short Storage Number - SSN

0x123456789ABCDEF0

use this number as a shorter nibble storage alternative...

notatyrannosaur | parent | next
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Fnd_in_a_Lbry

Meta: every single comment seems to start with some variation of "Reminds me of". Had to get mine in.

golem14 | parent | next
This isn't really going far enough; the readme says - keep the metadata on a piece of paper or whatever. But: The metadata is data too, you can find it ALSO within \pi. So it's \pi all the way down.

Not even sure if there an interesting Collatz-like conjecture here.

torh | parent | next
No thanks, I have all the files I need right here in /dev/urandom.
adzm | parent | next
I'm intrigued that π was capitalized to Π presumably automatically in the HN headline.
cbm-vic-20 | parent

    jshell> "πfs".toUpperCase()
    $1 ==> "ΠFS"

    Welcome to Node.js v26.3.0.
    Type ".help" for more information.
    > "πfs".toUpperCase()
    'ΠFS'

    Python 3.14.5 (main, May 10 2026, 10:21:34) [Clang 21.0.0 (clang-2100.0.123.102)] on darwin
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> "πfs".upper()
    'ΠFS'

    echo 'πfs' | awk '{print toupper($0)}'
    ΠFS
noman-land | root | parent
Why does your Python terminal report May 10th? Today is June 10th.
atvrager | root | parent | next
It's the build date of their Python binary
Yokohiii | root | parent | next
He prepared the comment a month ago.
elcritch | root | parent
Well it was already ready in pi.
danlitt | root | parent
Probably daylight savings
z3t4 | parent | next
Someone should make a service "where in the pi am I" then you could use it as a short link. Then there will be hardware accelerated pi chips. All computers will come with pi preinstalled.
keithnz | parent | next
isn't this relying on properties that aren't proven about pi? it needs to be disjunctive or normal, and neither of those are proven
yason | parent | next
Where do you store the indices? Blockchain!
amelius | parent | next
I am curious what this means for copyright. I.e. if all music/songs were already encoded in Pi even before the universe started existing.
chris_sn | parent | next
Funnily enough I’m reading Service Model and just got to the bit in the Library Archive, which has a very similar vibe to this project. Love it
amelius | parent | next
Instead of using Pi wouldn't it be better to choose a number for which the conjecture is true?

And for which the index is easy to compute?

woah | parent | next
I've simplified it and made it more flexible

3._1_415926535897932384626433832795_0_288419716939

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mohsen1 | parent | next
If you think about it, a piano has all the possible songs in it too!
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actusual | parent | next
This is why I got pi tattooed. It's a tattoo of all tattoos.
dekhn | parent
yes, but can you get a tattoo of all tattoos that do not contain themself?
psadri | parent | next
This is part of the plot in Murakamui's Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.
markcollins05 | parent | next
Technically π being normal is still unproven. So if the conjecture is false this whole thing falls apart. But that's what makes it a perfect nerd joke.
yassi_dev | parent | next
I built something with a similar spirit for Pi day: https://pi.yassi.dev/
glitchc | parent | next
At what point is the metadata larger than the actual file?
wavemode | parent | next
Part of the joke is that, in this implementation, the metadata is guaranteed to be larger than the file:

> Now, we all know that it can take a while to find a long sequence of digits in π, so for practical reasons, we should break the files up into smaller chunks that can be more readily found.

> In this implementation, to maximise performance, we consider each individual byte of the file separately, and look it up in π.

mike_hock | parent
Half the time it should be larger, right?
bilsbie | parent | next
I’d guess even the index in pi for my phone number would be more digits than the phone number.

So not really a compression scheme.

amluto | parent | next
> Why is this thing so slow? It took me five minutes to store a 400 line text file!

> Well, this is just an initial prototype, and don't worry, there's always Moore's law!

Seriously? They're only storing individual bytes in pi:

> In this implementation, to maximise performance, we consider each individual byte of the file separately, and look it up in π.

So the whole transformation should be trivially reducible to a 256-element lookup table from source byte to location in pi and a similar table used to convert back the other way. Maybe a fancy formula could be used for the (never actually encountered) case in which a byte is encoded by one of the infinite available noncanonical encodings.

liamYC | parent | next
Developed a UI with Claude here:

https://ljsimpkin.github.io/pi-compress

It really shows how inefficient such a compression would be. Haha nice idea

ctan4 | parent | next
μῆνιν ἄειδε:

Sing, the wrath. Rendering in LaTeX.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48010729

0x1ceb00da | parent | next
The design is very human
keyle | parent | next
Note, this (2012)
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adamwright326 | parent | next
The metadata storage problem is the real punchline here. You end up needing more space for the metadata than the original data, so it's a zero-sum joke.
dofcof | parent | next
This is a classic
anon291 | parent | next
It is actually not proven that the decimal expansion (or any rational base expansion) of pi contains all possible sequences of numbers. It sounds like it intuitively would be since the expansion is infinite, but it is not necessarily true. For example, the number 0.101001... (i.e., decimal formed by concatenating N zeros and then 1 for all N 0 to infinity) is infinite, never-ending, and irrational but does not contain every sequence of numbers.
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stogot | parent | next
Has there been attempts to prove the conjecture?
j3th9n | parent | next
Why would anyone need πfs, since you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially on Linux.
leephillips | parent | next
What a brilliant idea! Of course, of course, it’s not in the repository so I can’t apt-get install it. Debian...always so far behind.
dwheeler | parent | next
Horrible. Brilliant. Love it.
mzelling | parent | next
Looked at the repo but it says NOTHING about what value this project offers.

I mean, I get that it's "fun" to store information within the digits of pi. But is this just amusement, or is there a value prop for production use here?

(Speaking as a math major, by the way. I'm sympathetic to the cause.)

windward | parent | next
It's a(n IMO weak) argument raised when discussing illegal files/numbers.

This project makes clear the counter-argument: the input that gets you the file out of π is a badly compressed version of the file.

tcoff91 | parent | next
I think it's pretty clearly for amusement. And it would kind of spoil the amusement if it were to explicitly mention that it's a joke...
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spchampion2 | parent | next
This is interesting, but I feel like my use cases would better align with a different irrational number. Could I get an option to do this with e instead? /s