Forgret

I'm looking for interesting computer science articles that aren't in Show HN and Ask HN

Base64 is great and widely used. I just wanted to experiment with a numeric-only representation. NUMBASE encodes everything into a single large number, which can make certain compression schemes like Huffman more efficient and opens up new ways to store or transmit data.

It depends on the data. Base64 adds ~33% overhead, while NUMBASE can be encoded into one large number at once and compressed with Huffman or other algorithms. For some data types this results in fewer extra characters.

Thanks for the inspiration! I realize it’s probably crazy to think my algorithm could ever become universally needed, but I’m not giving up. Even if it doesn’t turn into something as large-scale as I once dreamed, I believe it can still lead to something useful — and the journey itself is worth it.