# NNCP

15 Hacker News commenters recommended NNCP and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Neural-net compressor by Fabrice Bellard that tops the Large Text Compression Benchmark and works well for offline, store-and-forward transfer. Caveat: compression is extremely slow.

## Why people recommend it

- Top compression ratios on benchmarks (5 comments): "I saw bellard neural net compression benchmarks. If you have time and performant system, based on the semantic of the data to compress, neural net seems tough to beat." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49608641)) "his Transformer-based `nncp` is indeed #1 on the "Large Text Compression Benchmark"" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46065597)) "neural net compressor by Bellard that beats gzip on compression benchmarks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50313603))
- Suited to sneakernet and offline transfer (3 comments): "It fully supports sneakernet/floppynet distribution but also has an online mode" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610007)) "Based on what I've read I think NNCP would be better for sneakernet" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48273974)) "in case sneakernet solutions are ever needed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48819386))
- Works over mail and tunnels (3 comments): "Mail over NNCP works well as you mentioned because mail is already asynchronous." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46765447)) "I run Yggdrasil on that, and NNCP too among other tools." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46517001)) "Learn about NNCP in order to tunnel messages over it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47804522))

## What people warn about

- Very slow compression speed (2 comments): "nncp compress really well they are extremely slow" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46852856)) "is 24 times slower than xz" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47394085))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Zstandard (zstd)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zstd.md): 111 recommend
- [Brotli](https://hackerapproved.com/p/brotli.md): 24 recommend
- [gzip](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gzip.md): 23 recommend
- [tar](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tar.md): 19 recommend
- [xz](https://hackerapproved.com/p/xz.md): 14 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "NNCP", https://hackerapproved.com/p/nncp/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).