Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

No, because lossy compression has the goal of preserving elements for replay. At the extreme you could turn a movie into subtitles, but not a costume from the movie alone. The costume might contain more information from the movie, but you can meaningfully recreate the movie from a single costume.


If I derive Kepler's laws from positions of planets, I have preserved elements of their motion for replay as well.


The laws alone don’t have enough information to replay their motion without each planets location, a foci, the orbital period, and an associated timestamp or equivalent information.

So, include that data and it’s lossy compression, exclude it and it’s not.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: