NNCP
Hacker ApprovedRanked 5 of 14 compression tools by recommenders
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.
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.
15 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 15
- criticize it
- 0
- approval share
- 100%
Recommended in 11 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 15 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- Nobody criticizes itNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Top compression ratios on benchmarks
“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.”
Comment from 8 Sep 2026 in “bzip3” “his Transformer-based `nncp` is indeed #1 on the "Large Text Compression Benchmark"”
Comment from 27 Nov 2025 in “Compressed filesystems à la language models” “neural net compressor by Bellard that beats gzip on compression benchmarks”
Comment from 31 Oct 2026 in “Anthropic may not secure investment-grade rating after IPO, Blackstone says” - Comment from 12 Jan 2026 in “Fabrice Bellard's TS Zip”
- Comment from 15 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip”
Suited to sneakernet and offline transfer
“It fully supports sneakernet/floppynet distribution but also has an online mode”
Comment from 13 Jan 2026 in “Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown,Phones back. How to stay resilient?” “Based on what I've read I think NNCP would be better for sneakernet”
Comment from 26 May 2026 in “Syncing from the Void: Implementing Delay-Tolerant Burst Tunnels” “in case sneakernet solutions are ever needed”
Comment from 7 Jul 2026 in “Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament” Works over mail and tunnels
“Mail over NNCP works well as you mentioned because mail is already asynchronous.”
Comment from 26 Jan 2026 in “Iran's internet blackout may become permanent, with access for elites only” “I run Yggdrasil on that, and NNCP too among other tools.”
Comment from 6 Jan 2026 in “Raspberry Pi and mini PC home lab prices hit parity as DRAM costs skyrocket” “Learn about NNCP in order to tunnel messages over it”
Comment from 17 Apr 2026 in “US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Very slow compression speed
“nncp compress really well they are extremely slow”
Comment from 2 Feb 2026 in “Efficient String Compression for Modern Database Systems” “is 24 times slower than xz”
Comment from 16 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip”
Other compression tools people recommend
The four most recommended other compression tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zstandard (zstd) | 111 | 14 | 89% | 12 | — | Approved |
| Brotli | 24 | 18 | 57% | 7 | — | — |
| gzip | 23 | 13 | 64% | 8 | — | — |
| tar | 19 | 13 | 59% | 11 | — | — |
| NNCPThis page | 15 | 0 | 100% | 11 | — | Approved |
What people said
20 of the 23 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“neural net compressor by Bellard that beats gzip on compression benchmarks”
“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.”
“it wins on data sets gigabytes in size due to it's ability to create the training data on the fly”
“in case sneakernet solutions are ever needed”
“did something with neural nets and a transformer model that was very successful”
“Based on what I've read I think NNCP would be better for sneakernet”
“Learn about NNCP in order to tunnel messages over it”
“my Atom n270 junk can run NNCP and it's written in damn Golang”
“NNCP would have more sense there.”
“You need to look into NNCP (nncpgo.org, clone the source ASAP)”
“is 24 times slower than xz”
“This misses the very best compressors by Fabrice Bellard.”
“nncp compress really well they are extremely slow”
“Mail over NNCP works well as you mentioned because mail is already asynchronous.”
“NNCP, Yggdrasil... every portable project uses sane choices.”
“It fully supports sneakernet/floppynet distribution but also has an online mode”
“Current leader of the Large Text Compression Benchmark is NNCP”
“I run Yggdrasil on that, and NNCP too among other tools.”
“his Transformer-based `nncp` is indeed #1 on the "Large Text Compression Benchmark"”
“Goerzen from https://complete.org creating NNCP and a bunch of nice tools”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.