Top all-time · #1158
cbloom rants
Personal blog · cbloomrants.blogspot.comprogrammingsystemsgames
cbloom rants is a personal blog at cbloomrants.blogspot.com about programming, systems and games. Since 2009, 59 different Hacker News readers have linked it 96 times, most often “Library Writing Realizations (2015)”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Sometimes recommended · 14 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Charles Bloom's blog for its posts on data compression, Oodle, Huffman and ANS coding, image compression and high-performance programming, along with its engineering rants.
- Recommended for · 14 comments
- Called excellent and "the best ever"; the "Library Writing Realizations" post is singled out as worth a read.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2013-09-01
- Library Writing Realizations (2015)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-01-07
- The Lost Huffman Paper (2010)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-08-17
- Oodle Kraken and Oodle Texture Supercharge the IO System of the Sony PS53 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-10-08
- Introducing Oodle Mermaid and Selkie (data compressors)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-07-28
- The Mature Programmer3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-12-04
- Notes on float and multi-byte delta compression3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-07-03
- Software Patents Are Fucking Awesome3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-06-18
- Faster Inverse BWT (2021)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-03-12
- /2015/03/03-02-15-oodle-lz-pareto-frontier.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-09-22
What Hacker News says?
For "compress once, decompress many times" workloads like game assets, you might want to check out Oodle, a proprietary library that kills zstd in decompression speed while achieving better compression ratios. http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2016/07/introducing-oodle-me...
Comment linking /2016/07/introducing-oodle-mermaid-and-selkie.html
on “Smaller and faster data compression with Zstandard”Submitted Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web as a story · 402 points
HN discussionCharles Bloom’s Oodle new codecs handily beat them across the scale: http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com http://www.cbloom.com/oodle_arm_report/ http://www.cbloom.com/rants.html Caveat: proprietary commercial product.
Comment linking /
on “Smaller and faster data compression with Zstandard”Submitted The Mature Programmer as a story · 226 points
HN discussionEntertaining rants, compression (data & image) & general sweng. http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you read daily?”Submitted Faster Inverse BWT (2021) as a story · 65 points
HN discussionThere is an attempt to patent something ANS-related: http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2015/05/05-21-15-software-pa...
Comment linking /2015/05/05-21-15-software-patents-are-fucking.html
on “How are zlib, gzip and Zip related? (2013)”Submitted Library Writing Realizations (2015) as a story · 63 points
HN discussionThis looks promising! They ought to include time-to-decode in the performance numbers, though: a smaller compressed size doesn't matter if the process of loading and displaying the image takes more time overall. A graph like the ones on this page would be awesome: http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2015/03/03-02-15-oodle-lz-pa...
Comment linking /2015/03/03-02-15-oodle-lz-pareto-frontier.html
on “FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format”Submitted Tips for benchmarking a compressor as a story · 33 points
HN discussionThis is precisely the approach taken by the Hydra metacompressor in the (closed-source) Oodle compression library: http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2017/02/oodle-hydra.html
Comment linking /2017/02/oodle-hydra.html
on “Why are tar.xz files 15x smaller when using Python's tar compared to macOS tar?”Submitted The Lost Huffman Paper (2010) as a story · 22 points
HN discussionhttp://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2020/09/how-oodle-kraken-and...
Comment linking /2020/09/how-oodle-kraken-and-oodle-texture.html
on “PS5 Teardown [video]”Submitted Fucking Fuck the Fucking Web as a story · 12 points
HN discussionJPEG has shown amazingly good staying power. I would have assumed "JPEG is woefully old and easy to beat" but Charles Bloom did a good series of blog posts looking at it, and my (non-expert and probably hopelessly naive) takeaway is that JPEG still holds its own for a 20+ year old format. http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2012/04/04-09-12-old-image-c...
Comment linking /2012/04/04-09-12-old-image-comparison-post.html
on “Introducing the ‘mozjpeg’ Project”Submitted What happened to tech blogs as a story · 6 points
HN discussionOf course there is comparison with LZ4: http://www.radgametools.com/oodlemermaidselkie.htm LZ4HC is LZ4 compressed with the slow compressor to achieve better compression. It is decompressed using regular LZ4 decompressor. They also compare with zstd and lzma, which are the open source competition. I don't know what "specs" you think are missing. They do say which architectures are supported, what the memory use is,…
Comment linking /
on “NNCP: Lossless Data Compression with Neural Networks (2019)”Submitted Faster Inverse Burrows Wheeler Transform as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> best engineering blogs with real-world depth? The best ever is, IMO, Charles Bloom's blog, especially if you have any interest in data compression: https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/ But it is no longer regularly updated.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?”Submitted Faster Inverse BWT as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt's a terrible metric that fails basic dimensional analysis. Anytime you see a ratio of logs, you should already be suspicious. Say algorithm A is twice as fast as algorithm B. Then we'll have alpha r/R log(T)/log(t). The alpha r/R is constant, so the only interesting part is log(T)/log(t) = log(2t)/log(t) = log2/log(t) + 1. We can make this apparently unitless number take any value we want just by changing the uni…
Comment linking /2015/03/03-02-15-oodle-lz-pareto-frontier.html
on “Introducing Brotli: a new compression algorithm for the internet”Submitted Oodle LZNA: a high compression LZ with better decode speed as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI’d love to see Charles Bloom add LZFSE and ZSTD to his “pareto frontier” charts: http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com (read down a few posts)
Comment linking /
on “Apple Open-Sources its Compression Algorithm LZFSE”Submitted Games Without Strings as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFor those interested in the topic, I highly recommend the series of posts from Charles Bloom: http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2023/07/notes-on-float-and-m... > TLDR: > For S16 deltas, bias by 0x8080 , for S32 deltas, bias by 0x80808080. > De-interleaving multi-byte integers into homogenous streams can help, particularly with weaker back-end compressors. > TLDR: > For floats, just reinterpret F32 as U32. > If the flo…
Comment linking /2023/07/notes-on-float-and-multi-byte-delta.html
on “The simple beauty of XOR floating point compression”Submitted Function approximation by iteration: Reciprocal Square Root as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSee also Charles Bloom's rants [1] describing some of less known ideas from the paper. [1] https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2010/08/08-12-10-lost-huffm...
Comment linking /2010/08/08-12-10-lost-huffman-paper.html
on “What Is Huffman Coding?”Submitted Notes on float and multi-byte delta compression as a story · 2 points
HN discussionTake a look at Oodle Kraken, by Charles Bloom. http://www.cbloom.com/rants.html (this is his blog, you’ll have to skim back through the last year of posts). But e.g. check out this very recent one http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2016/05/ps4-battle-miniz-vs-... http://www.radgametools.com/oodle.htm http://www.radgametools.com/oodlewhatsnew.htm HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583898
Comment linking /2016/05/ps4-battle-miniz-vs-zlib-ng-vs-zstd-vs.html
on “Lossless compression with Brotli”Submitted Oodle Kraken and Oodle Texture Supercharge the IO System of the Sony PS5 as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
