Yet another Hacker News

47 points bennett_dev 2 days ago 19 comments

Smalltalker-80 1 hour ago | parent

Nobody? Okay then: "Fun with flags!". There, I said it.

jtxt 1 hour ago | parent

Cool project and results! https://vantezzen.github.io/miniflags/

kjgkjhfkjf 1 hour ago | parent

In case anyone else was curious about using a lookup table: there are there are fewer than 256 recognized countries or territories [1], so 8 bits should be enough for a key.

This would be superior to the 11-bit encoding presented here because it handles complexities such as coats of arms. It would also handle bizarre situations such as two countries having almost identical flags [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territor...

[2] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/country-flags-that-resem...

opiotrek 1 hour ago | parent

but then you have to have the svg built into decoder. will they be smaller than 5KB?

also then it's no different from a svg sprite

porphyra 1 hour ago | parent

you could also exploit the fact that some flags may appear more frequently than others and use huffman encoding or something to encode the commonly used flags in a shorter sequence than rarely-mentioned countries, and save some bits on average

dhosek 57 minutes ago | parent

I’m surprised that the near-identical flags list omits Slovenia and Slovakia which both have white-blue-red horizontal stripes and a coat of arms (albeit with slightly different placement and different background colors on the coats of arms). A part of me feels like it’s part of a long-time joke the two countries are playing to confuse non-Slavs (the Slovenian word for their language is Slovenščina while the Slovak word for their language is Slovenčina and this is just the beginning of the confusion between the two countries/nationalities).

eventualcomp 43 minutes ago | parent

Maybe there's an allegory to the sciences. But I rather a model be suboptimal in encoding that can be used to generate hypothetical reasonable flags in its unpopulated states, than having an optimal encoding which doesn't answer questions or reveal possibilities in its unpopulated states. Like what does flag #0xFE look like in an 8-bit encoding? I really like the idea of driving compressed trees in reverse with random data to generate new fascinating (valid) sequences.

Also, for compressing into 8 bits - is this not like saying "I can compress all of Shakespeare's plays in 6 bits" because there are ~39 plays, but then the size of the "shakespearezip" is just the sum of the works?

ano-ther 1 hour ago | parent

Cool idea. Interesting that Indonesia, Poland and Monaco with very similar two-stripe designs have different compression rates (11, 14 and 17 respectively). Probably the aspect ratio that also gets encoded.

pimlottc 1 hour ago | parent

Surprised this didn’t mention heraldry, which has what’s basically a DSL for coats-of-arms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blazon

mabster 1 hour ago | parent

Loved the title. I was like "that's 10 bits too many for a flag!" Haha

xp84 32 minutes ago | parent

Slightly reminds me of how we used to use TINYINT in MySQL to store boolean flags (which can store a range from -128 to 127 or 0-255 if unsigned).

I'm the kind of nerd who secretly wished to store many such bools in one integer and use the bitwise operators to query them, but restrained myself from ever doing this, since if I managed to sneak that through code review, the number of curses of my name would no doubt become so large (and so loud) over time that it would affect my employability.

gerdesj 54 minutes ago | parent

A jack is a flag flown from a jackstaff, wot is found at the back of a ship or boat.

The UK flag is called the Union Flag (it's a flag and it is a union of various flags and possibly nations too!) but let's face it, given how many people think its called the Union Jack, it doesn't really matter.

If your flag pole at home is somewhat canted then I think you can call it a jackstaff, with a similar justification to the Royal Navy managing to designate their shore bases as ships. For example just up the road is HMS Heron (His Majesty's Ship: Heron).

The Union Flag/Jack is only the flag of the UK by convention and not law. It's a bit wooley, just like our Constitution but it still all works.

My point is that whilst I do enjoy this encoding scheme and it is jolly clever, reality is way more complicated. The UK's flag is pretty complicated but not alone. I'm pretty sure several flags have tassels, which I suppose strays into the coat of arms territory.

How hard do you want to squint!

xp84 36 minutes ago | parent

I enjoyed that the Union Flag just gets its own 'preset' - the fact that it's still presiding over a large handful of others makes it a very efficient decision compared to trying to tease out all the necessary shapes to reconstruct it.

I'll admit, I was hoping for some geometric approximations for countries like Brazil, though.

gerdesj 13 minutes ago | parent

This scheme is OK but not OK. You note the Brazil flag and that's a great example along with the likes of the UK and the US too.

The Brazilian flag is nominally "quite" simple: Green with a yellow/gold parallelogram/rhombus with a blue circle ... then there is the white band and stars. Absolute nightmare to classify.

I thought the UK flag was a bit of a challenge and I remember an art class 50 odd years ago, trying to paint the bloody thing. Little did I know at the time about how Aussies and Kiwi worriers and co would fare! Won't someone think of Hawaiians: their state flag is not something you depict for a quick laugh!

I suppose the US flag is arguably the hardest to depict: Those stars would take ages to draw/paint/dribble. I imagine kids get a box of stars to stick on their depictions in art classes in the US.

harpiaharpyja 53 minutes ago | parent

With all the attention on the link between compression and intelligence lately it is neat to have this example of how creating a encoding scheme naturally allows you to create new (likely) never before seen flags.

blacklion 51 minutes ago | parent

Fun fact: Constitution of Nepal has chapter about format of The Flag and it reads as geometry textbook problem (starred one, for advanced students).

AdieuToLogic 45 minutes ago | parent

This reminds me of the old joke[0]:

  There are 10 kinds of people in the world.
  Those who understand binary and those who don't.

0 - https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/10-kinds-of-people.html.en

emptybits 24 minutes ago | parent

Cool idea. The author's AI failed to encode flags for approximately 35% of the world's population. Approximately 3 billion people. At least that's why my AI tells me. India obviously contributes a lot to this. I'm probably salty because my own country's simple (?) flag is also in the "unencodable" group. Lol.

I applaud the author holding aspect ratio as a priority to encode. It's jarring to see an otherwise correct and familiar flag stretched into an incorrect shape when flown or shown.

ComputerGuru 7 minutes ago | parent

If you're on Windows (where Microsoft famously chose they would not get involved with flags and show country codes instead), execute this in dev tools or save it as a javascript bookmarklet to make the emoji flags show up:

    javascript:(function(){if(!document.getElementById('twemoji-styles')){const s=document.createElement('style');s.id='twemoji-styles';s.textContent='img.emoji{height:1em!important;width:1em!important;margin:0 .05em 0 .1em!important;vertical-align:-0.1em!important;display:inline!important;}';document.head.appendChild(s)}const r=()=>{const o={folder:'svg',ext:'.svg'};twemoji.parse(document.body,o);if(!window.__twemojiObserver){let t;const ob=new MutationObserver(()=>{clearTimeout(t);t=setTimeout(()=>{ob.disconnect();twemoji.parse(document.body,o);ob.observe(document.body,{childList:true,subtree:true});},300);});ob.observe(document.body,{childList:true,subtree:true});window.__twemojiObserver=ob;}};if(window.twemoji){r();}else{const sc=document.createElement('script');sc.src='https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@twemoji/api@latest/dist/twemoji.min.js';sc.crossOrigin='anonymous';sc.onload=r;document.head.appendChild(sc);}})();