Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

25 Years of Eggs

john-rush.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 86 posts

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#61

Post by extraduder_ire »

cheschire wrote: post #6

Absolutely loved the article, the process, and the results. Hated the price. You could pay a human to read receipts, 1 every 30 seconds (that’s slow!), $15/hr (twice the US federal minimum wage!), plus tax and overhead ($15x1.35) comes out to $20.25/hr over 5 hours. $101 all in. Sure, sure, a human solution doesn’t scale. But this sort of project makes me feel like we haven’t hit the industrialization moment that i t…

When I tried doing mechanical turk jobs out of curiosity, one of the tasks was checking/amending OCR'd receipts. (image on the left, textbox on the right)

It was less than a cent per receipt, but doing each was much quicker than 30 seconds. This was in 2017, to give you some idea how good OCR was.

Even before then, I've been disappointed no major chain encodes the receipt data into a QR code or something at the bottom of the receipt to side-step this whole thing. The closest you get is some places doing digital receipts nowadays.

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#63

Post by andai »

knollimar wrote: post #35
cheschire wrote: post #6

Absolutely loved the article, the process, and the results. Hated the price. You could pay a human to read receipts, 1 every 30 seconds (that’s slow!), $15/hr (twice the US federal minimum wage!), plus tax and overhead ($15x1.35) comes out to $20.25/hr over 5 hours. $101 all in. Sure, sure, a human solution doesn’t scale. But this sort of project makes me feel like we haven’t hit the industrialization moment that i t…

There's no way there wasnt a more efficient way of doing this. Way too many tokens per receipt. I'd wager gemini flash could get decent results. Id be willing to try on 100 receipts and report cost

I set up the same thing a few months ago with Flash, seemed to work fine. I didn't test more than a few receipts though (concluded that my spending wasn't a problem, I just needed to make more money lol), so can't vouch for the reliability at scale. But it handled really wrinkled, faded old receipts quite well.

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#64

Post by andai »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #25

>Everyone needs a rewarding hobby. I’ve been scanning all of my receipts since 2001. I never typed in a single price - just kept the images. I figured someday the technology to read them would catch up, and the data would be interesting. This is perhaps among the best openers I've ever read. [spoiler: the tech caught up, the data is interesting] I read a lot. This article, entirely.

I have the same thing except instead of receipts, I've been saving everything.

"Some day, AI will be able to sort this out."

Now I'm just waiting for the token costs to come down ;)

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#65

Post by andai »

petercooper wrote: post #52
ismailmaj wrote: post #28

I don't know why people mess with tesseract in 2026, attention-based OCRs (and more recently VLMs) outperformed any LSTM-based approach since at least 2020. My guess is that it's the entry-point to OCR and the internet is flooded by that, just like pandas for data processing.

Quite, I threw a so-so photo of an old, long receipt at Qwen 3.5 0.8MB (runs in <2GB) and it nailed spitting 20+ items out in under a second. AI is good at many things, but picking modern dependencies not so much.

Are you running it with Ollama?

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#66

Post by petercooper »

andai wrote: post #65
petercooper wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite, I threw a so-so photo of an old, long receipt at Qwen 3.5 0.8MB (runs in <2GB) and it nailed spitting 20+ items out in under a second. AI is good at many things, but picking modern dependencies not so much.

Are you running it with Ollama?

LM Studio in this case

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#68

Post by ThrownOffGame »

PowerElectronix wrote: post #23
vitus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends what dates you're looking at, but energy (gas prices and more) and food (including eggs) are generally recognized as way more volatile than the rest of the CPI. Eggs were actually quite stable for the 20 years prior to 2001, so maybe don't put your life savings into egg futures... Egg prices: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000708111 CPI: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL Core CPI (without…

That is very curious, yes. Eggs seem to just start to increase dramatically after 2000 and indeed outdo the CPI, disregarding the peaks and valleys of the different shocks to egg production like covid and the avian flu. I read that the price includes free range, eco, etc varieties which are more expensive and in more demand nowadays, probably just that explains a good chunk of the price increase.

[dead]

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#69

Post by TurdF3rguson »

smcg wrote: post #56

Many states passed requirements for cage free eggs that went into effect by end of 2024 so that has had some effect on prices.

I think it's mostly been caused by avian-flu related shortages and rising feed costs. I've personally had an avian-flu disaster, it's a nightmare to recover from.

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#70

Post by electroly »

cheschire wrote: post #6

Absolutely loved the article, the process, and the results. Hated the price. You could pay a human to read receipts, 1 every 30 seconds (that’s slow!), $15/hr (twice the US federal minimum wage!), plus tax and overhead ($15x1.35) comes out to $20.25/hr over 5 hours. $101 all in. Sure, sure, a human solution doesn’t scale. But this sort of project makes me feel like we haven’t hit the industrialization moment that i t…

From some minor historical experience with Mechanical Turk, I bet you could get humans to do this for one or two cents per receipt. You do them all three times for error checking for $0.03-$0.06 per receipt. I used to pay a nickel for much, much more than 5x this amount of transcription per job, and I got the feeling that I was overpaying based on how eagerly I got responses in and that I saw a lot of the same workers repeatedly.

These days, are MTurk workers simply feeding it into AI anyway, though? It's been a few years since I've run an MTurk campaign. At the time it was clear that humans were really doing it, as you get emails from the workers sometimes.

Post reply on HN