Hi, there! I'm one of the project managers at CountThings, I'll try to respond to comments here but I guess you can AMA.
Do you need help with Salesforce integration?
Don't we all?
A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
131–140 of 236 posts
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#132Okay, I'm not sure why people use software to do the work that hardware has solved decades ago. Like, I know that pearls come in various shapes, sizes, and weights but they're discrete objects. I would have assumed a simple machine similar to an egg counter would've already been on patent for such uses just for pearls. I mean the ML use case is still neat but I always feel that people always grab computers for the wr…
Wouldn't an egg counter be much more expensive? To say nothing of customizing it for pearls.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish I could get a bead on how useful ML is. Hackernews makes me think it’s all hype.
I don't know about others, but because a lot of IT news comes to me from American medias, I _always_ consider it hype. The reason is cultural: american can't seem to do without superlatives. They didn't eat good carrots yesterday, there were AMAZING carrots. They don't introduce me to their friends, but to their VERY BEST friends. They are always EXCITED to do X and SO something about Y. The result is that none of th…
I live in Southeast Asia and am in a Facebook group where foreigners often post asking for recommendations.
Americans always phrase their questions as, "What's the BEST pizza?" or "What's the BEST sushi?"
As if they would die (or could even tell the difference) if they had the fourth or tenth best option in the city instead.
And if you recommend a place too expensive or too far away it becomes immediately clear they don't actually want the best.
All they actually want is a decent place to eat at a moderate price level.
But as Americans they can't say that. They have to pretend they deserve nothing but the BEST.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#134> All good apps have already been created. There is no room for innovation. > Hold my beer: > I made an app that counts. Honestly, the simplicity of the idea is amazing.
People often don't know what's really needed by businesses until they see the use case. I remember 2 decades ago a family friend making fun of his son's project where they identified bad apples on a processing line in a packing facility. Pretty close to this project. He saw it and still didn't get it.
Ok, so 1) this sounds immediately valuable to anyone that eats good apples and 2) who makes fun of their own kid (I mean, to the face)
Also, as a dad. Parents can be "unpleasant" people- bust so can kids.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#135> All good apps have already been created. There is no room for innovation. > Hold my beer: > I made an app that counts. Honestly, the simplicity of the idea is amazing.
And right now as we speak, there's 10s of people on this thread already working on cloning this idea. Some probably gonna make good money.
Here is some help for them:
https://csharp.hotexamples.com/examples/AForge.Imaging/BlobC...
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on your baseline excitement. If you're so hyped up that you think it can classify bad and good prospective employees from a single photo, you should tone it down because that's nonsense. If you think it's all fluff, then you are also wrong. There are many great ML applications for constrained scenarios. But this pearl counting does not require modern ML at all. It can be done with decades old image processing…
There’s also a technique called “weighing”. It’s a transformation which, by assuming the items are identical, turns quantity from a discrete value to a continuous one with some loss of precision. In many cases measurement times can be reduced my more than 99%.
Cut the snark. And if you check the link, the assumption that items are identical is far off.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of those counting templates are very niche, which makes it intriguing to think of who is using them. For instance, there is a 'Movie Tickets' counter, but it's not counting paper tickets. Instead, the example photo looks like a screenshot of a 'pick your seats' page from a theatre's booking process. So who is doing the counting here? It can't be the theatre, as they would already know the numbers. So is the cust…
Financial analysts trying to figure out if AMC are gonna hit their quarterly numbers?
Here's a hint: NO
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#138Everyone here is amazed at the ML applications. You need to know that the underlying technology is really basic and old. 15 years ago, I used a free library (blob counter) to build a VB.net application that counted and "sexed" fruit flies. The app as presented in this website is really similar. No rocket science going on here. Move along, please.
Why do I "need to know" that? Why does it matter it's not rocket science?
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about others, but because a lot of IT news comes to me from American medias, I _always_ consider it hype. The reason is cultural: american can't seem to do without superlatives. They didn't eat good carrots yesterday, there were AMAZING carrots. They don't introduce me to their friends, but to their VERY BEST friends. They are always EXCITED to do X and SO something about Y. The result is that none of th…
I live in Southeast Asia and am in a Facebook group where foreigners often post asking for recommendations. Americans always phrase their questions as, "What's the BEST pizza?" or "What's the BEST sushi?" As if they would die (or could even tell the difference) if they had the fourth or tenth best option in the city instead. And if you recommend a place too expensive or too far away it becomes immediately clear they…
Perhaps it has to do with different interpretations of what is meant by best?
If I told you the best Thai place around where I live, I would tell you a place that is best not just because of its food, but also its price, parking, distance to travel. It is the best in that it is the most optimal given my own value judgment of those factors.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#140Is ML here needed? When I was working in a lab we used the opensource ImageJ for counting cells. It seems like it'd do a great job here too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageJ
Yes. Yes. 1000 times YES!
Why are we having this discussion? Why are people in HN amazed at this? What is wrong with the world where something like THIS is impressive?!?