Piper Pied Imitates HBO’s Silicon Valley and Creates Lossless Image Compression | Hacker News Reader

Piper Pied Imitates HBO’s Silicon Valley and Creates Lossless Image Compression

techcrunch.com

18 pointsfrostmatthew11 comments

"The algorithm detects the face and then from there it can compress everything else but the face so that you keep the quality of the face while technically lowering the quality in a way that is not noticeable to the human eye."

That's the exact opposite of lossless compression. It is a creative way to implement lossy compression for a limited subset of images, though.

I was hoping it was just a bad title - but it doesn't appear to be as the founders use the word lossless themselves.

It's concerning because it either means they don't actually know what lossless compression is and believe they are doing it - or they are engaging in borderline fraudulent marketing.

Given they actually built an impressive product for subset of images it works with, I'm going to assume it isn't the former.

I can see their reasoning: "it doesn't appear to be any lower in quality because our brain focuses on the face to determine it, so you get the same effect as lossless compression ergo: lossless compression" - but that still feels rather slimy to me and is a great example of marketing trying to repurpose actual technical terms to fit their product.

> the founders use the word lossless themselves.

Where? (I probably just missed it but I don't see it.)

I'm tempted to assume that the lossless part is coming from the reporting side (probably influenced by the TV show too), rather than the project itself.

Have you tried it? It's not lossless, it's lossy https://www.dropbox.com/s/5c3g220rrzzsdov/%D0%A1%D0%BA%D1%80.... Seems like dummy reason for a post.

The post's title is taken from the article title (in keeping with HN guidelines).

The HN guidelines ask you to use the original title unless it is misleading or linkbait. For some reason people tend not to remember that latter bit, but it's just as important.

> For some reason people tend not to remember that latter bit

Indeed - but a reminder from dang should prevent that from happening again :-/

Ah yes, the TechCrunch hackathon, where they make a big deal out of ideas that have been done at pretty much every hackathon.

For instance some variation of Split is made at every hackathon I've been to, since Venmo or Dwolla is usually a sponsor: http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/03/split-lets-you-split-the-bi...

but if they didnt... they wouldnt have anything left to show.

http://209.208.79.122/uploads/ Full access to everything uploaded. These guys need to secure their shit.

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