

Let's build a JPEG decoder: Huffman tables - jamesmiller5
http://imrannazar.com/Let%27s-Build-a-JPEG-Decoder%3A-Huffman-Tables

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jmspring
Slightly off topic, but heck.

I was lucky enough to have David Huffman as an instructor at UC Santa Cruz.
Very engaging and smart guy. He got a little tired about being asked about
"Huffman Coding" all the time, given it was so long in the past and he had
done a number of other things.

One of the things he enjoyed talking about during office hours (if help wasn't
needed) was his paper folding:

<http://www.graficaobscura.com/huffman/>

Gives a good example.

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gte910h
Huffman encoding should be a mandatory topic you can explain before you are
allowed to write a web api.

I hate when people output json that's not self documenting enough because they
don't understand that aReallyNiceLongNameThatDescribesTheAttribute and nam1
compress to functionally the same size once you turn on compression.

One API recently I saw had a few single letter names. I could still figure it
out, but it was figuring it out instead of just reading the name.

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alexjeffrey
technically your example is incorrect unless the same attribute name is used
quite a few times. Regardless, premature optimisation is the root of all evil,
especially in places that are highly unlikely to be a bottleneck and even more
so when it's used to remove valuable documentation.

~~~
gte910h
The particular example I'm referring to, it is used over 100 times.

