Top all-time · #1040
code.flickr.com
Company blog · code.flickr.netprogrammingsystemsweb
code.flickr.com is the company blog at code.flickr.net, writing about programming, systems and web. Since 2012, 63 different Hacker News readers have linked it 77 times, most often “Flickr PARK or BIRD – Solving XKCD 1425”. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (29) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Flickr's engineering blog for its 2014 bird-detection project answering xkcd 1425, its ticket-server ID generation, feature flags, and image resizing and compression work.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 29 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Flickr PARK or BIRD – Solving XKCD 14257 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2014-10-21
- Real-Time Resizing of Flickr Images Using GPUs5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2015-06-25
- Ticket Servers: Distributed Unique Primary Keys on the Cheap5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2013-10-28
- Show HN: Using computer vision to detect birds in parks4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-10-20
- Flickr – A Year Without a Byte3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-01-12
- Flickr Highly Available Real Time Push Notifications3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-12-12
- Flipping Out [2009]3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-01-30
- Computer vision at scale with Hadoop and Storm3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-05-20
- The Ins and Outs of the Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100M Dataset2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-10-15
- Introducing Similarity Search at Flickr2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-03-07
What Hacker News says?
Flickr did it in 2014, same year as the comic. Unfortunately the service is down and they didn't include a screenshot of it working. https://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-o...
Comment linking /2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-or-bird/
on “The MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge”Submitted Flickr – A Year Without a Byte as a story · 527 points
HN discussionedit: found the flickr link - https://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-o...
Comment linking /2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-or-bird/
on “Xkcd 1425 (Tasks) turns ten years old today”Submitted Show HN: Using computer vision to detect birds in parks as a story · 195 points
HN discussionIirc, Flickr had implement bird detection within a few months of this xkcd coming out? EDIT : A month, https://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-o... It's so weird them explaining 'Deep Networks'. Language on AI has definitely changed in the past ten years. Also, hilariously, the page they created to demonstrate this ( http://parkorbird.flickr.com/ ) no longer works. Oh, how time flies. explain XKCD…
Comment linking /2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-or-bird/
on “Xkcd 1425 (Tasks) turns ten years old today”Submitted Perceptual Image Compression at Flickr as a story · 115 points
HN discussionEssentially, I was going down this route if anyone's curious.... http://code.flickr.net/2012/12/12/highly-available-real-time...
Comment linking /2012/12/12/highly-available-real-time-notifications/
on “Streams: a new general purpose data structure in Redis”Submitted Introducing yakbak: Record and playback HTTP interactions in Node.js as a story · 60 points
HN discussionRandall Monroe himself didn't know how hard (easy) the task was. The Flickr team released a month after the comic this (sadly offline now): https://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-o... Today a hobby programmer could do it by themself.
Comment linking /2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-or-bird/
on “DALL·E 2 prompt book [pdf]”Submitted The Ins and Outs of the Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100M Dataset as a story · 52 points
HN discussionHello, Sentinel 2 is doing quite a good work for many users, here is for example Flickr report: http://code.flickr.net/2014/07/31/redis-sentinel-at-flickr/ Of course Sentinel does not make Redis conceptually different from what it is from the point of view of consistency guarantees during failures. It performs best-effort attempt to select the best slave to retain writes, but under certain failure modes its possible…
Comment linking /2014/07/31/redis-sentinel-at-flickr/
on “January 28th Incident Report”Submitted Perceptual Image Compression at Flickr as a story · 7 points
HN discussion> significant overhead cost for anyone who needs to handle images from unconstrained sources Flickr is doing just that, and they’ve been using GPUs for more than 2 years already: http://code.flickr.net/2015/06/25/real-time-resizing-of-flic... > It'll happen but this kind of thing always takes longer than it seems like it should. I think the main reason for that is lazy software developers reluctant to learn new stuf…
Comment linking /2015/06/25/real-time-resizing-of-flickr-images-using-gpus/
on “How Discord Resizes 150M Images Every Day with Go and C++”Submitted How Flickr used cookies to load images 7 times faster. as a story · 7 points
HN discussion> If we had had to write our own image resizing kernel, this would have taken much longer I don’t disagree but this is very subjective. You don’t need to invent anything, you only need to carefully implement a well known approach, e.g. this one: https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/GPUGems/gpugems_ch24.ht... Also there’re third party libraries for that, e.g. here’s one from the same company who do JPEG codec: http:/…
Comment linking /2015/06/25/real-time-resizing-of-flickr-images-using-gpus/
on “How Discord Resizes 150M Images Every Day with Go and C++”Submitted Ticket Servers: Distributed Unique Primary Keys on the Cheap as a story · 6 points
HN discussion- nl · 2022-10-25
Small correction - it wasn't until 2014 that it was widely available in libraries. AlexNet was September 2012. FlickR did their XKCD1425 bird detector in Oct 2014: https://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-o...
Comment linking /2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-or-bird/
on “Bumble releases open-source A.I. feature to help combat unsolicited nudes” Submitted Introducing Similarity Search at Flickr as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThis is the best way, and actually the only sensible way to approach the problem. I first read about it here https://code.flickr.net/2010/02/08/ticket-servers-distribute...
Comment linking /2010/02/08/ticket-servers-distributed-unique-primary-keys-on-the-cheap/
on “How to do distributed locking (2016)”Submitted Building Flickr’s new Hybrid Signed-Out Homepage as a story · 6 points
HN discussionFlickr's response to the xkcd: https://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-o...
Comment linking /2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-or-bird/
on “Researchers Announce Advance in Image-Recognition Software”Submitted Flickr Highly Available Real Time Push Notifications as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI have been using Flickr to archive my photos since 2013 when they announced a 1TB limit for free users, and have been paying them $50/year since 2016 when they limited availability to Pro users for their first-party auto-upload tool ( http://flickr.com/uploadr ). It did seem like the 1TB limit was too good to last when it was announced 5 years ago. Still, it's a relatively inexpensive extra archive for my photos (4…
Comment linking /2009/03/03/panda-tuesday-the-history-of-the-panda-new-apis-explore-and-you/
on “Why we’re changing Flickr free accounts”Submitted Flickr: Our Justified Layout Goes Open Source as a story · 5 points
HN discussionObligatory follow-up link to that xkcd: http://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-or...
Comment linking /2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-or-bird/
on “How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer”Submitted Real-Time Resizing of Flickr Images Using GPUs as a story · 5 points
HN discussionYeah, Randy was a bit miscalculating the estimate there. Within a month of that comic, flickr made http://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-or...
Comment linking /2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-or-bird/
on “A Simple AI Capable of Basic Reading Comprehension”Submitted How Flickr optimized for the new Yahoo homepage as a story · 5 points
HN discussionNo, no, no, no, no! This is a terrible idea, and will end up causing you a massive headache in the long-run. If I see commented-out code like this, I will delete it because that's what version control is for . If you really need to turn code on/off in different environments, you should be using feature flags: http://code.flickr.net/2009/12/02/flipping-out/ and at the very least you should be detecting the environmen…
Comment linking /2009/12/02/flipping-out/
on “The //* /*/ //*/ comment toggle trick”Submitted A Year Without a Byte as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
