Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

That's quite clever. Of course, only 2^800 hard drives can actually be represented in this way, but it would, by definition, be in principle capable of covering everything we would ever desire to place on a hard drive anywhere (during the relevant time period, in the relevant space, to the relevant resolution...).

One drawback (on top of astronomically slow extraction time...), is that this still requires us to go ahead and actually write the data in uncompressed form onto a hard drive somewhere. So storage space is still taken up at some point in the world, but at least we can erase and reuse that space as soon as we like, and transmit the data elsewhere with minuscule bandwidth.

Of course, all this really amounts to "Any data you are actually interested in presumably has a short description (e.g., something like 'A complete audio and video recording of every occurrence in Eurasia over the 10,000 years beginning with 6000 BC') and thus, in perfectly compressed form, you will never have any need for large numbers of bits". Or, put another way, "There can't be more than [some reasonably finite number] pieces of data you will ever actually be interested in in your very finite life, so as far as you're concerned, log_2([said number]) bits suffices for everything".




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: