Yeah, succinct data structures aren't something taught in most intro to data structures courses, and the concept may even be unfamiliar to oldhats since SDSs are relatively new on the scene -- the public datasphere only started becoming conscious of the idea in 1988 when Guy Jacobson introduced them in his CMU thesis. And I have yet to find a digital copy of it online so for those who want to read the original thesis, you may have to order a paper copy of one or go to the CMU library to read it.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=guy+jacobson

But, there's been a lot of development on succinct data structures since, and this post on the fast select algorithm was in-part a continuation of a conversation from a post yesterday on succinct data structures in general and the open-source lib SDSL 2.0. So if anyone wants to learn more about SDSs in general, there's a bunch of links to videos and reference material in the comments of yesterday's thread...

SDSL – Succinct Data Structure Library 2.0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18204432