{"slug": "nncp", "name": "NNCP", "category": "files", "category_name": "Files, sync and backup", "description": "", "recommenders": 7, "commenters": 14, "warners": 1, "score": 6.704, "rising": -0.96, "first": "2025-11-05", "latest": "2026-10-31", "why": "Learn about NNCP in order to tunnel messages over it, really useful for asynchronous connections", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 9, "neutral": 3, "compare": 3, "warn": 1}, "spark": [2, 0, 2, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "Learn about NNCP in order to tunnel messages over it, really useful for asynchronous connections", "kind": "", "icon": false, "domain": "bellard.org", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "http://www.nncpgo.org/", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["NNCP", "nncp"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 805017648, "item_id": 50313603, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50313603", "by": "matltc", "date": "2026-10-31", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I stumbled upon this neural net compressor by Bellard that beats gzip on compression benchmarks", "excerpt": "I stumbled upon this neural net compressor by Bellard that beats gzip on compression benchmarks https://bellard.org/nncp/", "context": "", "use_case": "neural network compression", "switched_from": "", "story": "Anthropic may not secure investment-grade rating after IPO, Blackstone says"}, {"id": 781110179, "item_id": 48819386, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48819386", "by": "iamnothere", "date": "2026-07-07", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "in case sneakernet solutions are ever needed", "excerpt": "It\u2019s a good time to download the source code for software that allows locally encrypted messaging, particularly without central infrastructure. Delta Chat works with any email server and has a rich feature set, Bitchat is also good to have on hand. And of course the old standby GPG, flawed as it may be. Also NNCP (https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/) in case sneakernet solutions are ever needed.", "context": "", "use_case": "Store-and-forward file transfer", "switched_from": "", "story": "Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament"}, {"id": 776850881, "item_id": 48553180, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48553180", "by": "hashar", "date": "2026-06-16", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "NNCP, a Neural Networks driven lossless data compression system", "excerpt": "Maybe but I think you are underestimating the achievements Fabrice has accomplished. Among others: - Improved an algorithm to compute Pi, ran it on a *personal laptop* and broke the world record. That achievement is not even listed on his personal homepage, and it a single line of facts with Zero bragging involved https://www.bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/ - a PC emulator in vanilla javascript, boot the Linux Kernel in a b", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "John Carmack on Fabrice Bellard"}, {"id": 764872353, "item_id": 47804522, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47804522", "by": "anthk", "date": "2026-04-17", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Learn about NNCP in order to tunnel messages over it, really useful for asynchronous connections", "excerpt": "Salvage old free as in freedom distros. Learn about i2pd and tunneling Usenet/IRC and Email (even cool online Nethack/Wesnoth/FreeCiv gameplays over it, any turn based libre game will work). There are some Usenet servers (text content only, no binaries, all illegal crap it's cut down by design) listening under I2P servers. By design enforcing any cross-pond law it's impossible. Learn about NNCP in order to tunnel mes", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification"}, {"id": 758210736, "item_id": 47388171, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47388171", "by": "rurban", "date": "2026-03-15", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "This misses the very best compressors by Fabrice Bellard.", "excerpt": "This misses the very best compressors by Fabrice Bellard. https://bellard.org/nncp/ and for text tm_zip", "context": "", "use_case": "Neural network compression", "switched_from": "", "story": "An Ode to Bzip"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 758305361, "item_id": 47394085, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47394085", "by": "lucb1e", "date": "2026-03-15", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "xz decompresses twelve thousand times faster (50MB/s vs. 4kB/s) when nncp has an Nvidia RTX 3090", "excerpt": "Interesting approach. The fastest of the 4 presented compressors (\"LSTM (small)\") is 24 times slower than xz, and their best compressor (\"LSTM (large1)\") is 429 times slower than xz. Let alone gzip or, presumably, zstandard (not shown in paper). They also ran the models on different CPUs (a Core i5 and a Xeon E5) so the results are not even comparable within the same paper. Another site list's the author's decompress", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "An Ode to Bzip"}]}], "who": [], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["neural network compression", "neural text compression", "store-and-forward file transfer", "encrypted store-and-forward transfer", "store-and-forward transfer", "store-and-forward networking"], "compared": [{"slug": "gzip", "name": "gzip", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "gnupg", "name": "GnuPG", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "zstandard", "name": "Zstandard", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "ts-zip", "name": "ts_zip", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "yggdrasil", "name": "Yggdrasil", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47377998", "title": "An Ode to Bzip", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50307219", "title": "Anthropic may not secure investment-grade rating after IPO, Blackstone says", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50122878", "title": "You could have invented transformers from memory", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48819008", "title": "Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48799781", "title": "The Sneakerweb", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48562662", "title": "Data Compression Explained", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 2, "neutral": 1}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"recommend": 2, "compare": 1}, "2026-02": {"compare": 1}, "2026-03": {"recommend": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-04": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-07": {"compare": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}}, "versions": [], "version_unnamed": 0, "quotes": [{"id": 805017648, "item_id": 50313603, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50313603", "by": "matltc", "date": "2026-10-31", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I stumbled upon this neural net compressor by Bellard that beats gzip on compression benchmarks", "excerpt": "I stumbled upon this neural net compressor by Bellard that beats gzip on compression benchmarks https://bellard.org/nncp/", "context": "", "use_case": "neural network compression", "switched_from": "", "story": "Anthropic may not secure investment-grade rating after IPO, Blackstone says"}, {"id": 802011568, "item_id": 50125723, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50125723", "by": "andai", "date": "2026-10-16", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "NNCP: Lossless Data Compression with Neural Networks (2019)", "excerpt": "See also: NNCP: Lossless Data Compression with Neural Networks (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27244004 https://bellard.org/nncp/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "You could have invented transformers from memory"}, {"id": 781110179, "item_id": 48819386, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48819386", "by": "iamnothere", "date": "2026-07-07", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "in case sneakernet solutions are ever needed", "excerpt": "It\u2019s a good time to download the source code for software that allows locally encrypted messaging, particularly without central infrastructure. Delta Chat works with any email server and has a rich feature set, Bitchat is also good to have on hand. And of course the old standby GPG, flawed as it may be. Also NNCP (https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/) in case sneakernet solutions are ever needed.", "context": "", "use_case": "Store-and-forward file transfer", "switched_from": "", "story": "Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament"}, {"id": 780854432, "item_id": 48803402, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48803402", "by": "myself248", "date": "2026-07-06", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "This looks like a partial reinvention of NNCP's sneakernet transport", "excerpt": "This looks like a partial reinvention of NNCP's sneakernet transport, but for a much more limited use-case: http://www.nncpgo.org/index.html You can also run NNCP over networks if you want to.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Sneakerweb"}, {"id": 777792048, "item_id": 48612003, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48612003", "by": "mtdewcmu", "date": "2026-06-20", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Fabrice Bellard did something with neural nets and a transformer model [1] that was very successful.", "excerpt": "Fabrice Bellard did something with neural nets and a transformer model [1] that was very successful. I suspect that LLMs wouldn't be ideal to use as compressors, because they are large, consume a lot of resources, and are constantly changing. You need the model to produce exactly the same output at encoding and decoding time, or else you get gibberish. [1] https://bellard.org/nncp/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Data Compression Explained"}, {"id": 776850881, "item_id": 48553180, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48553180", "by": "hashar", "date": "2026-06-16", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "NNCP, a Neural Networks driven lossless data compression system", "excerpt": "Maybe but I think you are underestimating the achievements Fabrice has accomplished. Among others: - Improved an algorithm to compute Pi, ran it on a *personal laptop* and broke the world record. That achievement is not even listed on his personal homepage, and it a single line of facts with Zero bragging involved https://www.bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/ - a PC emulator in vanilla javascript, boot the Linux Kernel in a b", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "John Carmack on Fabrice Bellard"}, {"id": 764872353, "item_id": 47804522, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47804522", "by": "anthk", "date": "2026-04-17", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Learn about NNCP in order to tunnel messages over it, really useful for asynchronous connections", "excerpt": "Salvage old free as in freedom distros. Learn about i2pd and tunneling Usenet/IRC and Email (even cool online Nethack/Wesnoth/FreeCiv gameplays over it, any turn based libre game will work). There are some Usenet servers (text content only, no binaries, all illegal crap it's cut down by design) listening under I2P servers. By design enforcing any cross-pond law it's impossible. Learn about NNCP in order to tunnel mes", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification"}, {"id": 758305361, "item_id": 47394085, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47394085", "by": "lucb1e", "date": "2026-03-15", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "xz decompresses twelve thousand times faster (50MB/s vs. 4kB/s) when nncp has an Nvidia RTX 3090", "excerpt": "Interesting approach. The fastest of the 4 presented compressors (\"LSTM (small)\") is 24 times slower than xz, and their best compressor (\"LSTM (large1)\") is 429 times slower than xz. Let alone gzip or, presumably, zstandard (not shown in paper). They also ran the models on different CPUs (a Core i5 and a Xeon E5) so the results are not even comparable within the same paper. Another site list's the author's decompress", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "An Ode to Bzip"}, {"id": 758210736, "item_id": 47388171, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47388171", "by": "rurban", "date": "2026-03-15", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "This misses the very best compressors by Fabrice Bellard.", "excerpt": "This misses the very best compressors by Fabrice Bellard. https://bellard.org/nncp/ and for text tm_zip", "context": "", "use_case": "Neural network compression", "switched_from": "", "story": "An Ode to Bzip"}, {"id": 749645697, "item_id": 46852856, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46852856", "by": "boulos", "date": "2026-02-01", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "or nncp compress really well they are extremely slow", "excerpt": "This isn't strictly correct: you probably mean wrt compressed size. Compression is a tradeoff between size reduction and compression and decompression speed. So while things like Bellard's tz_zip (https://bellard.org/ts_zip/) or nncp compress really well they are extremely slow compared to say zstd or the much faster compression scheme in the article. It's a totally different class of codec.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Efficient String Compression for Modern Database Systems"}, {"id": 745760112, "item_id": 46610007, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610007", "by": "giantrobot", "date": "2026-01-13", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "NNCP (Note-to-Node Copy)[0] would be useful", "excerpt": "In this case NNCP (Note-to-Node Copy)[0] would be useful. It fully supports sneakernet/floppynet distribution but also has an online mode that could be used by nodes with active Internet connections. [0] http://www.nncpgo.org/index.html", "context": "", "use_case": "Encrypted store-and-forward transfer", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown,Phones back. How to stay resilient?"}, {"id": 745523344, "item_id": 46595209, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46595209", "by": "omoikane", "date": "2026-01-12", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "nncp-2024-06-05.tar.gz is just 1180969 bytes, unlike ts_zip-2024-03-02.tar.gz", "excerpt": "Current leader of the Large Text Compression Benchmark is NNCP (compression using neural networks), also by Fabrice Bellard: https://bellard.org/nncp/ Also, nncp-2024-06-05.tar.gz is just 1180969 bytes, unlike ts_zip-2024-03-02.tar.gz (159228453 bytes, which is bigger than uncompressed enwiki8).", "context": "", "use_case": "neural text compression", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fabrice Bellard's TS Zip"}, {"id": 744272021, "item_id": 46517001, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46517001", "by": "anthk", "date": "2026-01-06", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I run Yggdrasil on that, and NNCP too among other tools.", "excerpt": "Learn to live with 1GB of RAM. Either CLI/TUI tools, or software like Dillo or Sxiv. Mainline dillo from their Git and not the outdated one from the repos. The new \"dilloc\" it's amazing, you need Dillo compiled with socket control support. Then you will be able to use dilloc as a client to spawn commands con scripts. For instance, to rewrite URL's from a list. Hint: the ones from https://farside.link . Youtube to Inv", "context": "", "use_case": "Store-and-forward transfer", "switched_from": "", "story": "Raspberry Pi and mini PC home lab prices hit parity as DRAM costs skyrocket"}, {"id": 737256647, "item_id": 46078540, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46078540", "by": "sunshine-o", "date": "2025-11-28", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Get into a protocol like NNCP https://www.complete.org/nncp/", "excerpt": "Yes I believe one way to see what is happening is in fact our own mistake. We thought we could prevent those law of being signed but it was very naive. The only way you fight this is by moving forward and faster than them. Because their eternal weakness is that they are slow and somehow stupid. But tech oriented people got pretty lazy in the last 2 decades: - We let ISPs be the only gatekeeper of the Internet - We le", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "EU Council Approves New \"Chat Control\" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance"}, {"id": 737049552, "item_id": 46065597, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46065597", "by": "grohan", "date": "2025-11-26", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "his Transformer-based `nncp` is indeed #1", "excerpt": "Bellard has trained various models, so it may not be the specific 169M parameter LLM, but his Transformer-based `nncp` is indeed #1 on the \"Large Text Compression Benchmark\" [1], which correctly accounts for both the total size of compressed enwik9 + decompresser size (zipped). There is no unfair advantage here. This was also achieved in the 2019-2021 period; it feels safe to say that Bellard could have likely pushed", "context": "", "use_case": "Neural text compression", "switched_from": "", "story": "Compressed filesystems \u00e0 la language models"}, {"id": 733145025, "item_id": 45821564, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45821564", "by": "anthk", "date": "2025-11-05", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Goerzen from https://complete.org creating NNCP and a bunch of nice tools", "excerpt": "The original hackers are the ones from the Lisp Machines and ITS/WAIS under the PDP10. The rest of these are just PC wannabes. Actual hacker knownledge: http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/hakmem.html Under PC's, today, great hackers should be the guy behing https://t3x.org, the one behind EForth running under Subleq, reverse engineers, people reusing DNS' connections for tunnels such as the folks from Iodine, p", "context": "", "use_case": "Store-and-forward networking", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Hacker\u2019s Manifesto (1986)"}]}