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Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

students.googleblog.com

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

#31

Post by jdcarter »

> 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 seen some great advances in compression lately. I've been using Facebook's zStandard [1] for compression in a product I'm currently working on, and I've been extremely pleased with both its speed and compression ratio. The days of "just use zLib" are coming to a close.

[1]: https://github.com/facebook/zstd

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

#33

Post by anon987 »

okreallywtf wrote: post #13

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?

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

#34

Post by okreallywtf »

aylmao wrote: post #28
okreallywtf wrote: post #13

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.

At the scale at which Google operates even small optimizations can save tons of data. Not saying this was a small contribution, but I agree, mostly internship advertising. A lot of my friends who have interned at Google felt insignificant, Google needs this counter-marketing.

I think that is how so many school projects and internships end up. You just feel like fuel for some grant machine, your contributions are overblown and you might not have been able to contribute as much as you wanted or maybe you didn't get nearly as much mentorship as you were promised and expecting, but everyone plays along and so it continues. I would like to think that if you go high enough eventually you end up in places where the experience matches the expectation better but maybe not.

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

#35

Post by falloutx »

Syzygies wrote: post #15

Can 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.

I don't whats the config of your computer, but Dropbox works like a charm for me. I have more than 600 gigs of data synced btwn Dropbox and my computer and it works pretty nicely. I never had to manually check whether a file has been transferred or not.

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

#36

Post by sp332 »

painted wrote: 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.

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

#37

Post by power78 »

okreallywtf wrote: post #13

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?

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

#38

Post by gambiting »

ThePawnBreak wrote: post #21
akhilcacharya wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.... I hope the rock you live under is heated, they're paid $6.6K a month + 9K-12K housing in the US.

2700 GBP a month, plus 1000 GBP housing (for a summer). Because Europe.

She started in Krakow, Poland. 2700 GBP/month is what the prime minister of Poland makes, it's an absurdly high salary for the local market there. I've friends who work as professional C++ programmers there and they make about 1000-1500 GBP/month working for huge corporations.

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

#40

Post by tempymctempface »

fs111 wrote: post #26
sp332 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unpaid internships are illegal, if the intern is doing real work for the company. https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm

Newsflash: There are more countries than the US of A and your laws do not apply here.

U mad bro?
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