Taken literally, this comment feels like a joke -- which is probably why some HN people downvoted it.

However, think about the first part of this comment from an AI point of view. The program itself is the compression. An intelligent agent could discover this kind of program.

Notes: This isn't perfect, since it depends on having network access, reliability, and so on. However, maximally intelligent agents, in my view, know how to balance situational and environmental factors in order to solve a problem.

Maybe you should read the competition rules that explicitly specify what input is permitted.

Per HN guidelines [1], it would be better and nicer to say something like this: "the competition rules disallow input from other sources (files, network, dictionaries, etc.)" -- http://prize.hutter1.net/hrules.htm

[1] The HN guidelines write:

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm not telling the author to read the article, I'm telling them to read the actual rules which anticipated this trivial attempt to be clever. Per HN guidelines [1], it would have been better to do that than to post a shallow dismissal of the idea.

The article only contains a paraphrasing of the rules missing these essential details. Per HN guidelines [2], it would have been better to post the original link and avoid the confusion that you now also fell for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

[2] Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.

The HN rules aren't terrible, but with no-one actually following them nor having followed them for as long as this site exists I don't see the point in bandying them about to make pointless comments.