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Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

students.googleblog.com

41–50 of 184 posts

Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#43
post #37

There isn't much information but this reads more like an advertisement for google internships than anything else. Not to denigrate her work, she could very well be brilliant and have gone above and beyond, but from how it reads they could be blowing it up to make it seem like every intern has a huge impact and you could too! Either way good for her, but not sure why this is so high up on HN.

It is strange. They were trying to decrease update sizes by using File-by-File patching, for example, but never decided to use the best applicable compression library until an intern came along?

According to the article Brotli compression was only launched in 2015 and she did the integration work in the summer of 2016. Bearing in mind we don't know how much of an improvement to Brotli was made during the intervening period and what the evaluation and adoption criteria were that actually seems pretty prompt.

Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#48

> her work resulted in saving users an expected 1.5 petabytes (that's 1.5 million gigabytes) of data each day. I'm guessing this is not a measure of data at rest, but data transferred over the network. The couple samples listed on the page ranged from 2.5% improvement to 20.3% (vs. zLib) so I guess they're extrapolating that out to all app downloads and updates across the world. Nicely done. More generally, we've see…

Are you worried at all about their patents stance. I currently I think it says if you litigate with Facebook you lose the license. Otherwise I agree zstd is looking like a very nice improvement in an area where most people think nothing happens. I especially dictionary compression bit.

Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#49
post #36
post #19

So she used a compression algorithm developed by other googlers? So what? Don't get me wrong, I'm sure she did a lot of work for it, but looks like a lot of people would have been able to do that, there is nothing innovative in what she did, right?

It's not innovative, and yet it had a large impact on Google and their customers. Innovation isn't everything.

sometimes just applying the same thing in a different place can make a huge difference

Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#50
post #33

There isn't much information but this reads more like an advertisement for google internships than anything else. Not to denigrate her work, she could very well be brilliant and have gone above and beyond, but from how it reads they could be blowing it up to make it seem like every intern has a huge impact and you could too! Either way good for her, but not sure why this is so high up on HN.

It probably is - much like their Pokemon Go + Google Cloud article. When will HN readers that they are furthering corporate agendas when they upvote fluff like this?

If it's an interesting article with relevant content (I'd not heard of Brotli compression before), so what? Unless you're advocating active hostility to companies like Googe, to particularly discourage relevant content with such connections. In which case would you like to justify that?
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