7 ms·
How Scribd runs 150,000,000 polygon intersections a day
- petervandijck 16y agook that's crazy. Is scribd becoming the new pdf (I mean that in a good way)?
- baddox 16y agoProbably not until it doesn't look terrible (on Windows 7 with Chrome).
- ary 16y agoThe only thing I could applaud more would be a new (and simpler) cross platform document format (for asset encapsulation and offline viewing) that could be transformed to and from HTML on a whim. Scribd <-> My Screen <-> My Printer. To death with PDF. Come to think of it HTML5/CSS3 + an open archive/compression format would suit this purpose nicely.
- ed 16y agoYou've just described ePub.
- ary 16y agoI'm looking for visual and layout consistency across all mediums (screen, print, etc) and in my experience ePub isn't suited for that. My apology for the lack of clarity.
- tomjen3 16y agoWhat is your problem with PDF? Almost any browser other than lynx has a buitin pdf reader, and pdf can be created by just about anything. Finally pdf is a format that allow you to ensure that no matter where it is printed, it is exactly as you wanted it to be.
- gruseom 16y agoThe problem with pdf is that everything about it is clunky and slow. I didn't decide to groan whenever I see that something I want is trapped inside a pdf; years of annoyance just built that up as a reflex. Edit: actually, there is an exception, and you mentioned it: printing a pdf, once you have it open, is almost always a good experience. Too bad it's the thing I want to do least often.
- VMG 16y agoA web service replacing a document format?
- CamperBob 16y agoWell, that's about as many as a modern 3D game engine executes in one second, so, meh.
- matthiaskramm 16y agoAbsolutely. Modern graphics card hardware can easily process a few hundred million triangles per second. In all fairness, however, that has nothing to do with polygon intersection. Drawing a triangle on the screen with a z-buffer check is something quite different from actually computing an intersection polygon from two (multiply connected) input polygons.
- petercooper 16y agoCamperBob's flippant comment, however, got me thinking as to whether GPUs could be used to speed up this process, even if it were a bit.. "fuzzy." Anyone with GPU chops have any opinions on this?
- reitzensteinm 16y agoSome modern GPUs support double precision floats, so accuracy would not be an issue. GPUs are practically built for this kind of computation, however there are probably two things holding them back: 1) GPU development requires specific developer experience. Making performant GPU code is an even nastier and less intuitive problem than making performant CPU code. A naive implementation would be shockingly inefficient. 2) Leasing GPU hardware in a datacenter is very rare. You'd have to do it at the office, or build your own servers and install them yourself at a colo. Lots of time and effort. Even if the GPU solution was 10x faster (it could be much more, but it depends on how much the CPU, disk, network is a bottleneck), if you're talking about reducing $50k in computer time to $5k in computer time, it's almost certainly not worth it. If you're talking about $2m to $200k, that's a completely different matter.
- petercooper 16y agoThis is exactly why I like asking naive questions on Hacker News - thanks!
- mhd 16y agoJavaScript/HTML seems to have caught up to Display PostScript at last. Nice.
- euroclydon 16y agoI think a lot of people (me included) just though of Scribd as a YouTube of documents -- taking advantage of unlicensed material to juice up Pagerank, and then somehow converting that into a revenue stream. It also seemed kind of annoying to launch a Flash player just to view a PDF in a now, double-scrolling window, however I'm reminded, while reading this technical post, about the Ycombinator interviewer who said: "where's the rocket science?" Clearly, we're seeing some smart developers tackle a tough problem, and for a broad audience. I think they have a bright future!
- jmillikin 16y agoI'd like Scribd a lot more if they'd make downloading the document easy. My general process of opening a scribd link is: 1. Oh, an interesting looking article! Hopefully it will be in HTML or PDF so I can read it! 2. (browser tab freezes) Oh shit, it says "scribd.com" in the URL bar. 3. Interface finally loads; the fonts are broken, scrolling doesn't work, and it's only barely readable. 4. I begin the frantic search for the "download" button. On most sites this is easy to spot and use, but on scribd it seems to move around from day to day. Sometimes it's big and green, others it's small, white, and hidden somewhere on the page. 5. Scribd demands I log in to download; it doesn't support OpenID, and I can never remember which throwaway account/password I used, so I just register again. 6. Finally, it lets me download and read the document. ---- How about this instead? Scribd should offer a "direct link" to the PDF, and then it would be easy for users to submit these links to external websites (HN, Reddit, etc).