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amiga386last Friday at 7:18 PM5 repliesview on HN

It's very cool, but it's also a shame that measuring in characters leads to the metagame of using 97 multi-byte Unicode characters that decode to 194 ASCII characters when reinterpreted. Almost everything is in the format:

    eval(unescape(escape`<<97 wide characters>>`.replace(/u../g,'')))
Can't they just have the same agreement that Ford Prefect had with Mr Prosser? "So, assuming I'm going to use this lossless compression technique to fit 194 characters into a 140 character tweet... how about you just show the 194 characters and say that I fitted into 140 characters?"

I suppose you could make the same argument about size-based competitions at demo parties; the limit is strictly 4096 bytes but everyone + their dog is using Crinkler to compress a 12-20KB executable down to that size. In fact, part of the effort is in aligning data and tweaking constants with Crinkler's algorithm in mind, to make the raw data more amenable to compression! But at least then, it's not a constant compression (turning any 194 ASCII characters into 97 Unicode characters which with embedded decoder makes exactly 140 characters)


Replies

nightpoollast Friday at 7:33 PM

if you switch to the beta frontend it has a "compressed" toggle that will do exactly what you're looking for: https://beta.dwitter.net/top

show 3 replies
fainpullast Friday at 7:32 PM

Or simply set the limit in bytes (e.g. 140 bytes of UTF8 encoded text).

show 1 reply
musicandpisslast Friday at 10:57 PM

I have been using Hacker News for 20 years now and this comment is already topping the all time charts of replies.-)

lukebechtelyesterday at 2:23 AM

(sidebar) love to see a subtle, applicable HHG ref :)

layer8yesterday at 2:19 AM

To be fair, 140 bytes (1120 bits) corresponds to 160 ASCII characters, or even 170 characters if you exclude control characters.