6 ms·

Impressive results for RAD's suite of lossless compression products, which is apparently called "Oodle"[0] and was on HN a few months ago[1]. I can't put my fi

by aorth 10y ago

Impressive results for RAD's suite of lossless compression products, which is apparently called "Oodle"[0] and was on HN a few months ago[1]. I can't put my finger on it, but something about the blog post bothers me. The "groundbreaking" compression suite is closed source and commercial, and even the data set used for testing in the post isn't public. Con Kolivas (ck), the author of lrzip, commented and inquired about the corpus but the blog post author says he "can't release it". I dunno, it just seems like a weird exchange to me. [0] http://www.radgametools.com/oodlewhatsnew.htm http://www.radgametools.com/oodlewhatsnew.htm [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583898

huhtenberg 10y ago
> something about the blog post bothers me Yep, same here. Way too much excitement for something that shows no "groundbreaking" advantage over other codecs based on his own benchmark results.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  Right. There's a niche where it excels, giving you lz4 decompression speed combined with zlib-esque ratios, but it accomplishes that by having significantly slower compression than either of them. It's not really breaking away from the pack in any way that I can see.
  - jeffreyrogers 10y ago
    I think it's targeted at the game industry, so the slow compression doesn't matter. It just needs to decompress quickly for the user.
- angersock 10y ago
  Go read Cbloom blog for much better information, and some implementation deets.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
Arnt 10y ago
The author is a game person and primarily interested in game compression (compression at compiletime, decompression at runtime), so if he's lazy and smart, then his corpus consists of assets from the games he's worked on. That would be both conveniently available and realistic. Of course he can't say in public that he's kept copies of any of those assets. They belong to his previous employers.
TylerE 10y ago
Isn't there an argument to be made for keeping the corpus private? Namely to prevent the unscrupulous from 'cheating to the test' - as games companies have a long, long history of doing.
ksk 10y ago
You don't explain what exactly is wrong with it being commercial and closed-source. That is the default way businesses make money.
- sp332 10y ago
  It means the claims are unverifiable. The test set especially should be available.
  - ksk 10y ago
    >It means the claims are unverifiable. The test set especially should be available. Eh..Why should anyone in the world care that a compressor can compress test data well? Except vaguely, it might serve as a motivator to investigate the use of said compressor for their own purpose. But then again, this is simply marketing, for developers. To me, its like saying "the new compiler version is faster" on this collection of source files. Personally, I couldn't care less what the test set is, if the compiler is not faster for my own use case. So yeah, if anyone is interested, they could probably get an evaluation copy, try it out on their own data and decide for themselves.
    - sp332 10y ago
      Of course it would be better, but I thought it was implausible that the code would be public given that the corpus is private. I guess it's possible though.
    - michaelmrose 10y ago
      Then the blog post is a waste of everyone's time and ought to be deleted from hacker news. Either it provides enough information to replicate the benchmarks or its spam. If it provided more freely available information other parties could test immediately and post and this would provide additional feedback to help parties decide if it is actually worthwhile.
      - ksk 10y ago
jeremiep 10y ago
My litmus test is checking how many "titles" authors list on their pages. The more titles the less likely I am to take their word seriously. Pretty crude heuristic, but seems to work with very few false positives!
- late2part 10y ago
  I feel your heuristic is simple and brilliant.

by aorth 10y ago

huhtenberg 10y ago

> something about the blog post bothers me Yep, same here. Way too much excitement for something that shows no "groundbreaking" advantage over other codecs based on his own benchmark results.

Dylan16807 10y ago
Right. There's a niche where it excels, giving you lz4 decompression speed combined with zlib-esque ratios, but it accomplishes that by having significantly slower compression than either of them. It's not really breaking away from the pack in any way that I can see.
- jeffreyrogers 10y ago
  I think it's targeted at the game industry, so the slow compression doesn't matter. It just needs to decompress quickly for the user.
angersock 10y ago
Go read Cbloom blog for much better information, and some implementation deets.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

Arnt 10y ago

The author is a game person and primarily interested in game compression (compression at compiletime, decompression at runtime), so if he's lazy and smart, then his corpus consists of assets from the games he's worked on. That would be both conveniently available and realistic. Of course he can't say in public that he's kept copies of any of those assets. They belong to his previous employers.

TylerE 10y ago

Isn't there an argument to be made for keeping the corpus private? Namely to prevent the unscrupulous from 'cheating to the test' - as games companies have a long, long history of doing.

ksk 10y ago

You don't explain what exactly is wrong with it being commercial and closed-source. That is the default way businesses make money.

sp332 10y ago
It means the claims are unverifiable. The test set especially should be available.
- ksk 10y ago
  >It means the claims are unverifiable. The test set especially should be available. Eh..Why should anyone in the world care that a compressor can compress test data well? Except vaguely, it might serve as a motivator to investigate the use of said compressor for their own purpose. But then again, this is simply marketing, for developers. To me, its like saying "the new compiler version is faster" on this collection of source files. Personally, I couldn't care less what the test set is, if the compiler is not faster for my own use case. So yeah, if anyone is interested, they could probably get an evaluation copy, try it out on their own data and decide for themselves.
  - sp332 10y ago
    Of course it would be better, but I thought it was implausible that the code would be public given that the corpus is private. I guess it's possible though.
  - michaelmrose 10y ago
    Then the blog post is a waste of everyone's time and ought to be deleted from hacker news. Either it provides enough information to replicate the benchmarks or its spam. If it provided more freely available information other parties could test immediately and post and this would provide additional feedback to help parties decide if it is actually worthwhile.
    - ksk 10y ago

jeremiep 10y ago

My litmus test is checking how many "titles" authors list on their pages. The more titles the less likely I am to take their word seriously. Pretty crude heuristic, but seems to work with very few false positives!

late2part 10y ago
I feel your heuristic is simple and brilliant.