The phrasing makes it clear that this is not intended to wow a tech audience. It's a Google ad to parents, or something.
Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
101–110 of 184 posts
Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is mostly young IT worker recruitment ad, and also a 'Women in technology' angle. I personally wouldn't be too happy if my modest contributions as novice described as 'massive improvement for millions of our users'.
You wouldn't be happy if somebody gave you a virtual high five for your work when you were early career?
I guess I remain critical of my efforts. For example, I would not call my sneaky effort to use old veggies and other food items in refrigerator as massive cooking innovation to keep the planet green.
Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
#103Can we get her to work for DropBox? Every time my iPad GoodReader syncs my 1,000+ papers, it has to check every file. It boggles the mind that they don't support some version of change records.
Maybe the solution should start with GoodReader? I don't have syncing issues with the core app.
Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
#104The 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…
This is surely a great resume item for her, it's a direct benefit to the place she interned, which is pretty awesome. But I think people are quite well attuned to Google's marketing/recruiting efforts these days, and how they compare to the average example. (It's like when such-and-such for profit school brags about how it's graduates work for companies A, B, and C, but more than likely, that's a very small percentage, and the results for the average graduate are lower.)
So yeah, it's awesome she did this, but most interns should not expect this out of their Google internship.
Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the reaction arose because of the person being put on the spotlight would not have been so if she have been a male. Meritocracy being part of the dev culture, promoting somebody achieving regular stuff because of the gender is ill-perceived. 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 wome…
> Meritocracy being part of the dev culture, That may be true on surface, and it's a good cliche, but ask any woman developer and you'll hear stories you'd never hear from males.
Honest question: is it because they don't happen, or they don't get told? What are some examples?
Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
#106The 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…
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Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
#107The 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…
I agree with you.
It is things like this one which makes a great engineer. Not only to spend decades coding an earth-shattering algorithm that will take the industry by storm, but also knowing how to save 1.5PB per day with a rather simple (I guess it's not as simple) decision.
HN is supposedly full of business-minded technologists. How are we missing the great impact this had on the business is mind-boggling.
I can't find an explanation for this reaction either.
Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
#108I 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.
LZMA is much slower at decompress compared to Brotli. https://www.opencpu.org/posts/brotli-benchmarks/
Apps are usually in the order of 40-50 MB. From a back of the hand calculation, the a 50 MB file when compressed with Brotli is 14.5 MB and LZMA is 17.5 MB. The difference of 3 MB translates to an additional 8 seconds of data transfer in a 3.1 Mbps 3G connection (an average one).
This [1] states that a LZMA has a decompression speed of 70 MB/s, which is about 0.7 seconds. The 334 MB/s speed of Brotli does the same in about 0.15 seconds. So the additional overhead of LZMA (compared to Brotli) in decompression is just 0.65 seconds.
Given these orders of magnitudes, I think optimizing for compression ratio is a much better option than decompression speed.
[1] https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/brotli/vignettes/bro...
Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
#109I bet your hacker excellent skills cannot save 1.5 PB traffic per day.
Your own shitty[0] remark highlights why your post doesn't have much of a point. The reason the impact of this change is worth mentioning at all is because google already wields the centralized control needed to effect change to such a massive volume of internet traffic on it's whims.
Edit: [0] "shitty" is not a quality rating, but my assessment of the attitude embodied in your comment. Not specifically the bit I quoted, but how it fits into your assessment of contribution. You're acting "shitty" by implying the fact "everyone" can't do it is a matter of skill, while knowing full well that access is the more important factor here.
Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads
#110The 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…
URMs?
Underrepresented minorities