71–80 of 184 posts
I bet switching to LZMA would have saved even more. LZMA beats Brotli nearly every time. zStandard would likely have worked better as well. Brotli is very slow to compress.
The amount of negativity in the comments section here is astounding. How could you not be excited and happy for this promising young woman's achievement? No, her work will not put her on the shortlist for a Turing Award. But it is something any engineer should be proud of, and has real impact for millions of users. You have a right to be unimpressed, but if you're taking the time to say "So what?" or "This is just a…
No, I doubt it would be. How many of the hundreds of little features in the google play store have been posted on HN with an article about the person who implemented them?
Also, I find it more than a little presumptuous of you to assume that any scoffing is due to sexism. I see the exact same cynicism and lack of awe in the posts below that I have come to expect from HN - regardless of gender or color of the person involved.
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.
That's why many 'hot' areas (like machine learning, for example) have a large gap between industry and academia. Researchers focus on "innovation" in terms of new approaches, aiming for marginally higher performance, and requiring increasingly complex models/infrastructure to unlock the remaining performance. On the other hand, combining an existing technology with industry knowledge of how to apply it can have a huge impact.
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's almost like Google might be recruiting.
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?
I think outside of this article, it's very different who gets recognition here.
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?
I bet switching to LZMA would have saved even more. LZMA beats Brotli nearly every time. zStandard would likely have worked better as well. Brotli is very slow to compress.
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/brotli/vignettes/bro...
I'm sure you can use those results to argue that LZMA is superior in some way (e.g. compression speed) but it definitely isn't clear cut superior in other important ways (compressed size and decompression speed are inferior).
I can see why, given those results, that they would use Brotli over LZMA.
Mathematicians are the true programmers. I wish I was one.
Even mathematicians rely on abstractions every day to do their jobs. Don't sell yourself short.
The amount of negativity in the comments section here is astounding. How could you not be excited and happy for this promising young woman's achievement? No, her work will not put her on the shortlist for a Turing Award. But it is something any engineer should be proud of, and has real impact for millions of users. You have a right to be unimpressed, but if you're taking the time to say "So what?" or "This is just a…
It's like when you go to a conference, and half of the talks are a promoted minority of some sort but they are not that good. You feel cheated.
The fact is there are women doing great work and talks. Make noise about them. Or you loose credibility.
The amount of negativity in the comments section here is astounding. How could you not be excited and happy for this promising young woman's achievement? No, her work will not put her on the shortlist for a Turing Award. But it is something any engineer should be proud of, and has real impact for millions of users. You have a right to be unimpressed, but if you're taking the time to say "So what?" or "This is just a…
> a senior engineer at Google could have implemented this compression and it would still be HN worthy, No, I doubt it would be. How many of the hundreds of little features in the google play store have been posted on HN with an article about the person who implemented them? Also, I find it more than a little presumptuous of you to assume that any scoffing is due to sexism. I see the exact same cynicism and lack of aw…