Ancient Web: Matt Mahoney Kept Ultramarathons and Compression Code on One Homepage

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Matt Mahoney is an unlikely person to need two separate personal sites: one for data compression, the other for the punishment of running up mountains. So he just kept both subjects at the same address.

Visit Matt Mahoney's homepage.

Mahoney describes earning a computer-science doctorate from Florida Tech in 2003, researching data compression, and later working at Ocarina Networks, which Dell acquired in 2010. The homepage's other half is a chronological collection of long-distance race diaries, beginning with his 1998 Western States 100 and Hardrock 100 adventures.

Readers find links to many more races, hikes, and vacation accounts, often with first-person recollections rather than official sports statistics.

Algorithms and endurance both leave logs

The data compression section contains technical papers, source code, benchmarks, and explanations of lossless compression. Its research-paper list includes a 2000 work about fast text compression with neural networks and a 2002 paper on the PAQ1 compression program. Later material describes ZPAQ, a journaling archiver and compression format.

The pages offer researchers more than downloadable software. Benchmark corpora, challenge results, papers, and a complete online book about compression are arranged so interested programmers can reproduce or study the ideas. It is the kind of public workshop that made personal technical sites useful before code hosting became a default destination.

Meanwhile, the race index records both successes and failures. Mahoney lists multiple Hardrock attempts, noting in one entry that he missed a 48-hour cutoff by six minutes. Another link is labeled Barkley, with a self-reported record of fifteen starts and zero finishes. The homepage documents his late wife's perimeter-cycling accomplishments too.

At the bottom, Mahoney recommends viewing the site with Mosaic 1.0 on a machine with floppy drives and dial-up. He explicitly praises its lack of cookies, tracking, notification requests, pop-up videos, and paywalls.

That joke is also a publishing philosophy. Long technical explanations and eccentric personal adventures can coexist without being fed into different recommendation engines.

A personal webpage remains a powerful thing when its owner keeps the files readable.

Browse the compression research and the race journals.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.