Why Lowercase Letters Save Data
tl;dr: “I took the front page of Hacker News and rewrote the title of each article in sentence case instead of title case. Each html file had the exact same number of characters — but when compressed into zip files the title case file was 5,992 bytes and the sentence case file was 5,961 bytes. Saving 31 bytes!” For each site visit to Hacker News would save 0.00001059642g of carbon if written in sentence case. Assuming it gets about 10 million visits a day changing to sentence case would result in the prevention of 105g of carbon daily.”featured in #481
The Tar Archive Format, Its Extensions, And Why GNU Tar Extracts In Quadratic Time
tl;dr: "The time estimate went from a bit over an hour, to multiple hours, to over a day, to almost a week. After giving it some time, and after failing to find anything helpful through Google, I decided that learning the tar file format and making my own tar extractor would probably be faster than waiting for tar. And I was right; before the day was over, I had a working tar extractor, and I had successfully extracted my 1.1TiB tarball."featured in #337