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Kevin Albertson
Personal blog · blog.kevinalbs.comprogramming
Kevin Albertson's personal blog at blog.kevinalbs.com covers programming. Since 2016, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times, most often “Base-122 – A space efficient alternative to base-64”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Kevin Albertson's posts on binary-to-text encodings, including Base-122 and Base58. Commenters cite them for encoding efficiency and as references for encoding standards.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Articles by Kevin Albertson
Most-linked posts?
- Base-122 – A space efficient alternative to base-644 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-11-27
- Stupid Smart Pointers in C2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-18
- Base-122 Encoding – A space efficient alternative to base-642 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-03-14
What Hacker News says?
See also: https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/the-1st-international-longe... Twitter characters can actually store up to nearly 31 bits each, if you’re using the JSON API. (Or at least, this was true in 2010. I don’t know whether this is still true.) http://blog.kevinalbs.com/base122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13049329 Base-122 encoding is 87.5% efficient in UTF-8, better than anything listed in the base65536…
Comment linking /base122
on “Base65536 encoding”Submitted Base-122 – A space efficient alternative to base-64 as a story · 191 points
HN discussionThe possible number of x-byte-long valid UTF-8 strings is defined with the following recurrence relation: f(-x) = 0 f(0) = 1 f(x) = 0x80 * f(x-1) + 0x780 * f(x-2) + 0xf400 * f(x-3) + 0x100000 * f(x-4) (Replace 0x80 with 0x7c to account for ES6 template literals.) The characteristic polynomial for this recurrence has a positive root of 144.61 (or 141.12 for literals). This means that you can actually put quite more t…
Comment linking /base122
on “Game Boy Wordle clone: How to compress 12972 five-letter words to 17871 bytes”Submitted Stupid Smart Pointers in C as a story · 146 points
HN discussionhttp://blog.kevinalbs.com/base122#a_minor_note_on_the_last_c... Almost a perfect standard, but the prepended one byte header is a mistake IMHO. It makes it impossible to encode when the input size is unknown. Better to encode whether the last chunk is one byte or two at the end of the stream. Please whoever is involved with this, revise the standard to not have a header and call this existing spec a beta. Otherwise,…
Comment linking /base122
on “Base-122 – A space efficient alternative to base-64”Submitted Stupid Smart Pointers in C as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI think the article is good as is, because base58 is actually pretty dissimilar to most binary-to-text encodings. Surprisingly many encodings are just base 2^k (16, 32, 64 and 128 [1]), some have converged to base 85 (because 85^5 / 2^32 ~= 1.03, i.e. just enough to represent 4 octets in 5 units). This is because binary-to-text encodings are not expected to use costly bigint operations for an arbitrary-length payloa…
Comment linking /base122
on “Base58”Submitted Base-122 Encoding – A space efficient alternative to base-64 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionDo you need the whole solution or just a way to validate answers against them? The first n characters of a hash would work for the latter. For the former I'd encode it into something like base-122[0] or something else equally esoteric. [0] http://blog.kevinalbs.com/base122
Comment linking /base122
on “Ask HN: Best way to encode Wordle words? rot13 is too revealing”Submitted Base-122 Encoding as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
