These Engineers Just Built Their Own “Pied Piper” Compression Algorithm A team of engineers at Dropbox’s Hack Week re-created the fictional compression schema from HBO’s Silicon Valley.

Other uses for the algorithm could be for super simple video compression, for applications where resource is tight and some low-effort bandwidth reduction would be beneficial.

For example, I can make a 256 kB text file, containing over 260,000 identical characters, and use a file compression tool and the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm (LMZA) to squash it down to ...

Everyone has unzipped files via an algorithm called Deflate that has been used for data compression for 20 years. Now Facebook says it has something better called Zstandard.