[HN Gopher] A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to man...
___________________________________________________________________
A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count
pearls
Author : morsanu
Score : 518 points
Date : 2021-05-24 05:44 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (countthings.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (countthings.com)
| notimetorelax wrote:
| To counter other's points on pricing - in the end it's a question
| of utility vs price. 1k$ per year to cut time to count by 80% may
| be a great deal to many.
| 6510 wrote:
| who is responsible now?
| j7ake wrote:
| In this case, it would be reasonable that the person who uses
| the app would be responsible. The app takes the image and
| labels every pearl with a number. So the person just needs to
| check there were no missing or mislabeled pearls, which is
| much easier than counting.
| sellyme wrote:
| Of course, but $100 per year to do the same is an even better
| deal.
|
| I can only assume that their support for custom requests is
| absolutely incredible, because it should be pretty trivial for
| any potential competitor to put up a similar concept for a
| tenth of the price and still be making a profit.
|
| But that's always the case with enterprise software I suppose.
| The improvement from 98% to 100% "quality" (whatever that
| means) is well worth a drastic price hike for most businesses.
| mjburgess wrote:
| This was my first thought: I could do this in half a day.
|
| Then you look at their site and all the domains of
| application. My guess is they probably use a variety of
| models to get _100%_ : edge detection, CNN-style object
| detection, all sorts. And then aggregate/choose between the
| resulting predictions. _Then_ they will probably have some
| layers of geometrical estimators.
|
| The challenge here is 100% and on a wide variety of images.
| They'll need to maintain and collect data across a lot of
| domains, and find ways of coping with non-ideal ("in the
| field") input.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I absolutely expect this to be harder than it looks. If it
| was easy Google lens would do it.
|
| I had a similar shock when trying to do OCR from photos of
| receipts.
| yorwba wrote:
| Google Lens isn't going to include a menu item for every
| single computer vision task with a simple specialized
| solution.
|
| OpenCV provides circle detection out of the box: https://do
| cs.opencv.org/3.4/d4/d70/tutorial_hough_circle.htm... The
| only part that's somewhat difficult is tuning the
| parameters correctly. I've found setting all thresholds
| very low (generating lots of false positives) and then
| culling overlap to work very well when I had to count
| individual atoms in electron microscopy images a few years
| ago.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > The only part that's somewhat difficult is tuning the
| parameters correctly
|
| Well, yes, that's what the value provided by the service
| is.
|
| > count individual atoms in electron microscopy image
|
| This sounds very cool - what sort of order of magnitude
| numbers were they, and how accurate was it in the end?
| imtringued wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27262146
|
| Replicating that dataset will cost you $10000 just to take
| the photos.
| shoo wrote:
| the article said it saved about three months of labour. if best
| alternative is someone counting in old labour intensive way
| with annual salary of around $50k then that's an O($10k)
| profit.
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| I am not impressed, they could cut 1000% by using: big bawl,
| pipe, simple mechanical sorting mechanism, and electronic
| counter.
| XCSme wrote:
| I am not familiar with pearls, but a mechanical sorting
| mechanism could damage them I think. Also, how is a mechanical
| sorting mechanism or an electronic counter simpler, cheaper or
| faster than a photo?
| ladyattis wrote:
| Okay, 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 wrong reasons for tasks that aren't
| that novel. Just my two cents.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| Hardware also has errors. This is a task of a keeping record,
| verification process.
| hugh-avherald wrote:
| Wouldn't an egg counter be much more expensive? To say nothing
| of customizing it for pearls.
| avibhu wrote:
| In a an image with sufficient contrast between the foreground and
| the background, thresholding and using the fast radial symmetry
| transform[1] should do the trick. I have some really old code
| that I wrote a few years back that does something similar. I was
| able to use the same algorithm for counting objects in images
| captured from a Neubauer chamber [2] and saved countless man
| hours at my university.
|
| Disclaimer: the project is really old, and from a time when I
| barely knew how to code. Lots of bad coding practices et al.
|
| Github: https://github.com/vibhuagrawal14/segmentation-of-
| overlappin...
|
| [1]
| https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F3-540-47969-...
|
| [2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Images-of-Canis-
| familiar...
| dkarp wrote:
| Would a solution like that work for a video feed where you need
| to make sure you're not double counting as objects move along?
| Gaessaki wrote:
| I think what the CountThings app is doing is great. There are too
| many industries where tasks are being performed inefficiently due
| to a lack of applying readily available technology. They had the
| foresight to develop a product for a very common problem and make
| a business out of it.
|
| I'm a bit surprised that this is making the rounds of HN though.
| OpenCV and other computer vision libraries have trivialized such
| counting applications for decades now. ML isn't really necessary.
|
| The watershed algorithm for example, comes built-in and allows
| segmentation which can then be followed up with blob counting:
| http://www.cmm.mines-paristech.fr/~beucher/wtshed.html
|
| I don't want to diminish OP's work since the product seems to be
| well-developed and respond to a real need. I guess the challenge
| must have been making the app robust enough to support different
| workloads, lighting conditions, etc. I suppose the novelty factor
| is seeing to what extent the technology that we as developers and
| engineers work on every day is often disconnected from practical
| application.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| For a non-tech company, implementing it may be easy but the
| hard part is getting someone around when it stops working. This
| saves 3 months for the pearl company, they're not paying
| someone full time for an implementation of computer vision
| counting.
|
| SaaS allows this cost to be distributed across many clients,
| making it accessible for businesses that can't afford to keep
| around a full infrastructure and the engineers required to keep
| it running.
| pokoleo wrote:
| This article is perfectly within HN's audience!
|
| * Clever way to distribute "the future" to a niche/under-served
| audience
|
| * MVP (likely) buildable in a week/weekend
|
| * Marketing material demonstrating success
|
| * "This could be my passive income side project" appeal to
| bored tech company engineers
|
| It underlines the thesis in some patio11's content:
|
| > The future is here, it's just not widely distributed yet.
| varjag wrote:
| The thesis is originally from William Gibson.
| wavefunction wrote:
| Just for reference for those unfamiliar, William Gibson
| said "The future is already here--it's just not very evenly
| distributed"
| varjag wrote:
| LOL you're not getting this done trivially with OpenCV.
|
| https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates
| [deleted]
| cogman10 wrote:
| Count things isn't trivial, but this specific use case
| (counting circles) is trivial with opencv. I've done it
| myself making a robot follow a ball :)
| jjk166 wrote:
| I still wouldn't consider this trivial. It takes a good bit
| of playing around with parameters like radius range and
| filters to consistently get all and only real circles. Even
| under ideal conditions, it's probably more than an hour of
| trial and error, and it's very easy for a layman to not
| fully understand why they're not getting the result they
| wanted. I'm no expert on jewelry but I imagine even a 0.1%
| error rate would be quite expensive, and that level of
| performance would be a real challenge for even someone very
| experienced with opencv.
| chrischen wrote:
| Agree. Especially if you can control the image quality,
| background, etc, this can be done with less fancy methods.
| Heck, they probably don't even need an image based
| solution. They could have also used mostly mechanical
| machines like how coin counters/sorters work, or used a
| bigger version of their old counting plate method but with
| detectors in each slot.
| varjag wrote:
| They could even make people count them by hand!
| chrischen wrote:
| Well no that wouldn't be fully automatic. A counting
| machine that just funnels the pearls through a switch is
| simple, automatic, non-patent encumbered, and cheap.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Background helps a lot, but if your things are relatively
| the same color, it's pretty easy to just filter out
| anything not within that color range and look for
| circles, even with an inconsistent background (though,
| admittedly it's harder).
|
| That's effectively what I did with the ball tracking. I
| had a red ball and filtered out everything that wasn't
| roughly that shade. Certainly someone could have messed
| with me by wandering into frame with a red shirt :D
| serf wrote:
| amassing a library of scripts for various shapes is time-
| consuming, true.
|
| however few of those templates do anything that openCV can't
| be massaged to do well, too.
|
| Given that people are likely going to use only a few of the
| templates that they find useful for their own work, I find it
| hard to be able to find the value in paying 100/mo for a
| massive library filled with techniques that aren't useful for
| my particular work plus a UI with some polish.
|
| Not only that , but counting stuff in the work place is often
| done as part of a process; it's dead easy to pipe openCV
| output into any system that might need to be aware of the
| count; it's not quite as easy with 'Counting Things' without
| a human in the loop.
| suifbwish wrote:
| Yet we still have humans counting pills in pharmacies
| 6510 wrote:
| terrible example. You can just make a square from pearls and
| multiply. If you need to do a lot of it make a box with numbers
| on the side, tilt it then count and add the remaining row. The
| weight is probably not irregular enough to justify the tool.
| There are better examples on the website.
|
| Pricing is just silly. I'm sure it is worth that much to some
| 0.001% of the potential market.
| voiper1 wrote:
| The pictures show them as different sizes.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| Natural pearl sizing varies widely and they aren't perfect
| spheres either.
| damagednoob wrote:
| I thought the tray in the thumbnail was the solution. What about
| a padded tray with dimples in rows of 10?
| morsanu wrote:
| 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.
| sumedh wrote:
| How did you come up with the pricing strategy. I imagine some
| big companies might pay more if they can save lot of money with
| this.
| morsanu wrote:
| We iterated through different ideas and numbers. It's not an
| easy task, I can tell you that.
|
| We also try to have a good variety of choices: enterprise
| license, yearly, monthly or even packages of 24h.
|
| And we also have some free demo counting template, you don't
| need a license while using them. Including one to help people
| involved in the vaccination process:
| https://countthingsqanda.com/?p=1587
| Someone1234 wrote:
| I really like the flexibility of the 24 hr ones.
|
| There are some industries/operations that need this, but
| only seasonally and that really fills a niche not filled by
| the monthly subs.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| I just wanted to say that if you can count particles of things
| in microscope images, you can probably make great inroads at
| companies that do drug testing, like Covance or PPD in America.
| They're paying chemists to circle blobs on paper and count
| them. I bet they'd even appreciate someone to count their
| circles!
| morsanu wrote:
| Thanks for the idea. Getting the app in front of companies
| that need it is one of our challenges.
| gield wrote:
| The company I work at did a project like this where the goal
| was counting of different types of bacterial colony forming
| units (CFUs) that were cultured in Petri dishes [0]. We
| presented our results at ESANN [1].
|
| [0] https://radix.ai/cases/gsk-vaccine-development
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.05337
| kasperni wrote:
| First, this looks amazing. I have a couple of very specific
| questions.
|
| Would it be able to count diamonds? I'm just wondering because
| the refraction of diamonds is very high.
|
| Would it be able to count items located inside clear zip lock
| bags?
|
| Also can it do any kind of categorization of the items? For
| example, 10 of type X, 20 of type Y?
| joosters wrote:
| There's a 'raw diamonds' counting template listed on
| https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates
|
| The categorization is an interesting question - those
| templates all seem to be of similar items.
| morsanu wrote:
| Yes, we should be able to count them if they are visible in
| the picture. Please email our support with a couple of sample
| images. We are also doing classification for some of our
| templates/clients.
| zerovar wrote:
| Probably a very naive question but, how did you know/find out
| that an app to count things could be a profitable business?
| morsanu wrote:
| No, it's actually a pretty good question.
|
| We are a custom ML & computer vision software company and
| about 7 years ago we got several requests in a short time
| period for counting items in images. We thought it was a
| great idea for a product and kind of started our journey as
| an internal startup.
| dumb1224 wrote:
| Depends on the industry as well. Cell counting is a huge
| part of life science research and it's a well established
| business in lab-based pipelines (integral part of
| commercial solutions). However if you try to enter the
| realm of clinical field such as histology and pathology
| assistive technology it suddenly becomes tricky. Same with
| innovative diagnostic tools. You need clinical trials for
| those.
| amelius wrote:
| What approach does it use? Does it use image segmentation (e.g.
| U-net) followed by classic image analysis? Or does it get the
| counts directly from the network?
| malpighien wrote:
| Is not it something anyone can do for free using image J with a
| bit of scripting.
| danielheath wrote:
| Is this a bad time to remind HN of that famous comment on the
| founding of dropbox?
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Sorry, out of the loop; what comment?
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
| ipaddr wrote:
| Technically many could do what dropbox did to create a
| similiar product when they were part of yc class. Many HN
| have a personal dropbox setup they made themselves.
|
| The key that allowed them to be a billion dollar business
| was marketing, hype, strategy all things that could apply
| to any product technical or not.
|
| If you want to make something similiar you could probably
| get to 80% really quickly. Putting together a product with
| a reputation is a different event with timing luck and
| risk. Building that 80% is low risk but high personal
| reward.
|
| Has anyone built something to read and identify palms or
| lines in the hands?
| morsanu wrote:
| If you have the skills, you should definitely try it.
|
| We have a full team working on this for about 7 years.
| Constant improvements to our algorithms, new challenges, new
| technologies. A ton of other functionalities besides counting
| (e.g. forms, reports, integration). A lot of work on the
| backend, UX. Also, a lot of sales and marketing involved.
| malpighien wrote:
| It is impressive you do it so fast. In case you have not
| thinked about it, some people will be interested by it in
| life sciences. Best I could do with the picture available
| on your website https://imgur.com/a/FKEkiFz compared to
| https://countthingsqanda.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/01/5-17... I got some wrong counts but
| the picture is really tiny to work with.
| edge17 wrote:
| Could you talk about some of the niche use cases of the app?
| I'm curious what the long tail of use cases looks like.
| joosters wrote:
| How accurate is the counting? For examples like the case study,
| I presume your customers will want very close to 100% accuracy,
| but many other use cases will only need rough numbers. How do
| you calibrate / verify your app?
| matsemann wrote:
| You have to take into account the error rate of human
| counting when making the comparison.
|
| I can also imagine the new process have other benefits. Like
| before, if a customer complained of getting fewer than
| ordered pearls, they would probably have to acknowledge that
| as a counting error on their side but not knowing. Now they
| have a picture/data to refer back to.
|
| At least that's how it is where I work; the automation leads
| to reduced errors, and when they happen the amount of data
| makes it easier to track where it went wrong.
| klyrs wrote:
| The article shows a photo with the pearls highlighted with
| circles. I'm generally skeptical of AI, but this system
| produces a certificate that a human can verify much faster
| than doing the work themselves. IMO, that's the right way to
| do it. You can trust the system 99% of the time, and check a
| random 1% by eye every day. Or, you can keep a human fully in
| the loop and still save time (though, if the error rate is
| too low, humans will get bored)
| morsanu wrote:
| For most of our clients, we get to 100% accuracy. For some
| more difficult scenarios, a lower accuracy is ok for
| estimations (e.g. estimating the crop in agriculture).
|
| It's also super easy to correct mistakes or to add items that
| are not visible in the image.
| BorisTheBrave wrote:
| You don't mean 100% accuracy, that means mistakes are
| impossible. Perhaps your error rate is very rare, but it's
| a bit concerning you don't attempt to quantify it.
| jmmcd wrote:
| I disagree. If we consider a single customer with a
| particular application, we probably imagine an iterative
| process like this: the customer supplies some sample
| images, the system gets a few wrong, they add special
| cases, fine-tune the hyperparameters, whatever, and after
| all this they literally get 100% on the customer's
| _holdout_ data. If that happens for several customers
| then the GP statement is justified (no other number is
| possible for these customers).
|
| Possibly you're thinking of a single error rate across
| all customers? For other customers, as stated, it's not
| 100%. But taking an average across multiple customers is
| not meaningful when some are counting pearls and some are
| counting crops.
| leucineleprec0n wrote:
| Suppose it depends on which part of the chain he
| attributes error, plausible lighting or poor positioning
| - anything that is an employee duty - does throw it off
| and then they scrub it. But yeah. Still.
| dintech wrote:
| One thing to consider is that humans don't have 100% accuracy
| for large numbers of things.
| antattack wrote:
| It seems to me that it would be useful for the app to count
| items on the left and right of a ruler (or some line) so
| correct number of items can be separated out from a pool.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Do you need help with Salesforce integration?
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Don't we all?
| La1n wrote:
| Is 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
| geoduck14 wrote:
| 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?!?
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| Coz this company is making money. And the customer is
| satisified.
| wyldfire wrote:
| It's not that it's impressive as a novel approach. It's
| impressive because they found a market with a need and
| delivered a product to meet that need. It's simple enough
| that it seems like an obvious need and yet complex enough
| that there's not that much competition.
|
| ImageJ is suited to the needs of scientists and engineers.
| Perhaps one could craft a workflow using ImageJ but it would
| be much less integrated than the mobile app from the article.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Everyone 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.
| matsemann wrote:
| Why do I "need to know" that? Why does it matter it's not
| rocket science?
| alexcnwy wrote:
| This is very cool, well done!
|
| Are you using deep segmentation models or more traditional
| computer vision techniques?
| _tom_ wrote:
| Why is an advertisement on the top spot on hacker news? Clearly
| as it has gotten more popular, the need for filtering has gone
| up.
|
| I mean, it is missing any technical background. This is a basic
| puff piece of content written to promote their site. This should
| never have gotten on the site.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Nobody cares that this is just an ad? It's got too many
| paragraphs of bullshit filler for something that's basically
| "they're taking pictures and counting the pearls using machine
| learning".
| sbierwagen wrote:
| I've got bad news for you regarding every other submission on
| HN.
| joelthelion wrote:
| Nobody here will buy their app; people are mostly interested in
| the idea and in the business model.
| kbelder wrote:
| I'm planning on sending this link over to our warehouse guys.
| We sell containers of many small things.
|
| And... I could probably build something like this. Not as
| nice. And not in four hours. It'd take more than four hours
| of meetings to get it started. The app's price is well worth
| it, if we can work it into our processes.
| morsanu wrote:
| Of course we are trying to promote our business, writing some
| case studies is one way to do it.
|
| But I shared this here not because I thought we will get
| clients from HN (probably we will be getting some competition
| instead) but because I thought it's an interesting application
| of technology that people would enjoy reading about.
|
| Maybe we don't see things the same way but even learning about
| the manual process of counting pearls was interesting for me.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| >> Nobody cares that this is just an ad?
|
| Seems like a pretty poor ad in that case -- they are
| advertising a profitable business sub-niche to a huge audience
| of engineers, many of whom have the knowledge, execution, and
| money to build a clone service and drive down margins.
| choeger wrote:
| Couldn't they use a machine like a coin counter?
| drran wrote:
| Yes.
| cesis wrote:
| There exists an entire industry for counting and sorting
| things(e.g. optical bean sorting).
|
| There also are rather cheap optical tachometers(measuring
| rotations by applying reflective tape on rotating surface). I
| would guess such devices could also be tailored for counting
| falling objects.
|
| And also there are multiple old- school tricks for similar
| tasks. E.g. if you need to count nails, weight them all, then
| weight a single nail, then divide the weights to get count.
| amilios wrote:
| probably more difficult because of the irregular sizes of the
| pearls.
| sellyme wrote:
| Pearls are going to be far less uniform than coins, a software
| solution is likely going to have better accuracy.
| Nition wrote:
| Pearls come in all different sizes.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| This scales better. Also, going by the pictures in the article,
| the pearls are of varying sizes, so making a machine to count
| them would be a tad more tricky.
|
| When you're counting things of uniform size and density (like
| screws or coins, one type at a time), the usual trick is to
| weigh them all, then weigh a single one, then divide the two
| numbers.
| nly wrote:
| I'm no expert, but I believe Pearl is quite easy to
| scuff/scratch.
| fimdomeio wrote:
| Humans on the other hand are really good at looking at patterns.
| I imagine a tray with some recesses that would receive the pearls
| after a bit of shaking or a funnel that would put all the pearls
| in a line and then somehow group them/count them should not be
| that hard to do.
|
| And yes outsourcing this to someone else and employing machine
| learning apparently also works.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I think that was the old solution: they have a large tray with
| 100 slots and a bar which allows for multiples of 10 to be
| counted. The digits are done manually. The problem was that
| pearls could fall out of the tray and, as they are round, roll
| around on the floor taking up to 30m to find. It is a mechanism
| for counting out a specified number rather than determining how
| many are in a bag, which may be more limited. Another problem
| was that if workers forgot the partial sum, they would need to
| start again.
| jiofih wrote:
| No need to imagine, there's a picture of that tray right at the
| top of the article.
| faebi wrote:
| > 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.
| viraptor wrote:
| 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.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| 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.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| To be fair, a machine that spots bad apples is rather
| useless, as by the time you spot them the whole bunch is
| already spoiled.
| bserge wrote:
| Next, an app to identify _bad apples_ heh
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| 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.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Here is some help for them:
|
| https://csharp.hotexamples.com/examples/AForge.Imaging/BlobC.
| ..
| alisonkisk wrote:
| The "counting" is not the hard part of the app. The
| productionazion, templates, UI, marketing is the hard part.
| agnosticmantis wrote:
| The tray used in the demonstration is almost white (beige?).
| Wouldn't a black tray (hence darker background and higher
| contrast) increase accuracy?
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| As someone who was worked in Japan for 13 years, I can vouch that
| this is a very strong testimonial. A Japanese company will not
| adopt new technology like this unless it highly accurate.
| GistNoesis wrote:
| The really fun challenge, is counting how many distinct domains
| countthings is using for their promotion. You probably need to
| use Hyperloglog :)
| morsanu wrote:
| After you complete the challenge, I'll give you the correct
| answer.
|
| Hint: not that many.
| xuki wrote:
| For anyone who's complaining about the price, take a look at
| their whole offer:
|
| https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates
| [deleted]
| raverbashing wrote:
| Counting elements from pictures is how old again now? 20 years?
| 30 years?
|
| Sure, it's more reliable and you can run it on a phone. But maybe
| this could have been solved 20 years ago. (Yes, it might not have
| been as convenient, but for something that apparently is so
| important, it could have been applied earlier)
|
| Japan, a country which in the 80s was synonymous with
| technological innovation seems to have slowed down dramatically
| in adopting new technologies
|
| Edit: of course I'm not saying it's exclusive to Japan. My
| comment was more in the way of "the first time I saw an actual
| application of CV counting things in a practical setting was 20
| years ago"
| innocenat wrote:
| People outside IT field generally don't even know how counting
| thing from picture is very trivial computer vision task. This
| is common everywhere in the world.
| umangrathi wrote:
| Are there any alternatives? Or how one should approach making
| an app from scratch?
| dpwm wrote:
| The old method used to be template matching, and it
| probably still works well enough for problems like this.
| There are almost certainly now better approaches possible
| using Machine Learning.
|
| In my experience, the main challenges with problems like
| this are dealing with varying lighting, scales, orientation
| and perspective. These can quickly become of diminishing
| returns - especially if the solution is provided as an app
| that provides near-immediate feedback.
| MathYouF wrote:
| My bet is they just invested a few months making a varied
| dataset, a few grand on mturk using labelme, some image
| augmentation, a few engineering tricks for a nice UX,some
| strategies for getting the model to converge on tricky
| test images, and got it to hit 100% accuracy fairly
| quickly.
| morsanu wrote:
| We are working on this product in-house for 7 years now.
| We are an internal startup from a company that does
| custom computer vision and ML software.
|
| No mturk, no tricks, a lot of work in ML and in UX as it
| is not a very straightforward task.
| cinntaile wrote:
| For some reason it's very common here on HN to trivialize
| the difficulty of automating tasks. But you're not new
| here so you probably are familiar with it!
| earlygray wrote:
| > It is not a very straightfoward task.
|
| I'd well believe it. I used to write computer vision
| applications for semiconductor manufacturing equipment
| and there we were able to strictly control the distance
| from camera to object, lighting etc. and even still
| getting necessary reliability was not simple. When a
| failure could lead to damaging a whole wafer, i.e.
| hundreds of thousands of dollars, 99% accurate is not
| good enough.
| potiuper wrote:
| It would be very questionable to use this in production,
| especially as pearls are very glossy and costly, without
| the error matrix being provided. It would seem more
| reliable to use the camera as a blocked / non-blocked
| sensor with what would amount to a cheap coin sorter.
| MathYouF wrote:
| Wasn't trying to trivialise your work! Just offering some
| ideas of the basic ways this could be tackled. Sorry if
| you thought I was trivialising it, the intent was more to
| support the idea that modern DL can still provide
| solutions with relatively simple methods.
| krapht wrote:
| If you think old, unoptimized, high-human labor business
| processes exist only in Japan, have I got a bridge to sell to
| you.
| jopsen wrote:
| Optimizing 100 hours per year to 20 hours isn't much either..
|
| It's 3 days, for that to break even development costs have to
| very low.
|
| Of course, selling it as a generic app for counting things is
| a great way to do this.
| YokoZar wrote:
| That part of the article confused me too, I think it's
| later implied they pay that 100 vs 20 hour cost much more
| often than once a year.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| It does mentions three months reduction of labour cost,
| which is a lot more than 80 hours.
| gitgud wrote:
| > _Japan, a country which in the 80s was synonymous with
| technological innovation seems to have slowed down dramatically
| in adopting new technologies_
|
| Japan is not a country I associate with a drop in technology
| adoption, have you been there? It's like going to the future
| jarenmf wrote:
| They are using an app https://countthings.com/
|
| This seems rather a simple task, however, the app is expensive
| ($100 per month per device) and limited with the templates for
| things it can count [1].
|
| [1] https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates
| sva_ wrote:
| Seems like a low price if it saves labor costs like in the OP.
| But they can only ask that price because it's such an obscure
| niche and other people probably didn't even consider that
| something like that is needed. Good chance they'll soon have
| competition.
|
| edit: The app has 500k+ downloads and is rated at 3.5/5. People
| seem to complain about the fact that the templates are so
| limited. Real opportunity right there I'd guess.
| morsanu wrote:
| It really depends how much time they are losing while
| manually counting. For most, the price is not high, the
| employees doing the counting can now focus on other more
| valuable tasks. We also have pack of 24hour licenses that
| they can activate when it's inventory time, for example.
| steinuil wrote:
| > This seems rather a simple task, however, the app is
| expensive
|
| It's easy to do it in an unreliable way. 1000$ a year doesn't
| seem very expensive if your business depends on it and you're
| saving a lot of time like in the OP.
|
| > and limited with the templates for things it can count
|
| It seems very specialized towards certain businesses, if you
| have a specific use case that isn't covered I'm guessing you
| can probably contact them and see if they can add it?
| morsanu wrote:
| You are totally right. We usually work with businesses that
| have a counting need and we create a new template for their
| use case.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| 1k a _month_ wouldn 't seem ridiculous unless individual
| companies currently have _several_ devices
|
| All these comments make me wonder if these people have ever
| worked with B2B pricing
| flukus wrote:
| > Before they started using CountThings from Photos, counting
| pearls took almost 100 hours a year. After installing this
| app, the time needed for counting pearls has been reduced by
| 80%. It takes only 20 hours now.
|
| Depending on what the salary is it barely breaks even, it's
| saving 2 working weeks a year. Depending how spread out the
| process is it might not even be time that can be put into
| something else, if it only save 5 minutes a day for instance,
| that's 5 minutes that's probably going towards lunch.
|
| It's fairly disappointing for an off the shelf product that
| does exactly what you want, if you had to pay for any
| customization or RnD it's probably not worth it.
| morsanu wrote:
| Besides the cost cutting, keep in mind that the employees
| that don't have to manually count are not getting fired.
| They are providing more and better client services.
| matsemann wrote:
| I think this is an important point. It doesn't have to be
| "machines took my job". When I helped automate/streamline
| a government welfare program, it didn't mean case workers
| suddenly were without a job. It meant they could spend
| less time clicking on a computer, and more time doing the
| important human to human stuff and provide better care.
| toyg wrote:
| It doesn't have to, but eventually it will. At the first
| inevitable downturn, jobs that get cut in a newly-
| automated field will never come back.
|
| People are creative, we will find new things to do
| (particularly as more and more people will get taught
| automation and coding in school, making them tech-
| adaptable for life, as opposed to the "boomer"
| generations who were often fundamentally tech-averse),
| but let's not kid ourselves that technology isn't burning
| away a bunch of jobs.
| joosters wrote:
| You missed an important part of the article:
|
| _...this app not only helps Eiko Pearl to cut 80% of the
| time needed for counting pearls, but it also helps them
| reduce 3 months of labor cost._
|
| 3 months, not 80 hours.
| flukus wrote:
| It's not really clear where that 3 months figure comes
| from. Do they have 6 people all saving 2 weeks? And if so
| do the share the device or is the cost scaling with
| employees? There's also another part:
|
| > When taking inventory, they had 2 members of the staff
| counting pearls and it took 2 full days.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| This is a B2B app.
|
| I can imagine $100 a month for having an instant count so
| simply being a bargain for many.
| morsanu wrote:
| Our app is mostly targeted to businesses. Besides counting, we
| also have a ton of other features (e.g. forms, reports,
| integrations, etc).
| matsemann wrote:
| Do you know the true cost of a developer? When they are already
| hired they may seem free, but in practice that $100 dollars is
| probably less than hour worth of time.
| joosters wrote:
| 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
| customer using this with an automated process to find out how
| many tickets another company is selling?
| talliedthoughts wrote:
| Financial analysts trying to figure out if AMC are gonna hit
| their quarterly numbers?
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Here's a hint: NO
| [deleted]
| omar_kha wrote:
| so how would you go about doing this using ml? is it a
| classification problem? Count the number of instances. Or do we
| do deep learning and say here is a picture the result is 10?
| jptech wrote:
| Instance segmentation.
| omar_kha wrote:
| Thanks for this, maskrcnn looks like an interesting candidate
| mandeepj wrote:
| They could not count by weight (before ML)? For e.g - If 100
| pearls weight 10 gm etc? They could also have used a machine for
| counting them
| bertil wrote:
| Pearl vary in size a lot; they can easily double in diameter,
| ie. possibly x 8 in weight. Weighting could be valuable, in
| addition to counting and measuring how round and shiny they are
| -- but it would be the 4th or 5th more important aspect, at
| most.
|
| Source: my distant family has a pearl farm and I implemented
| pricing algos.
| lccarrasco wrote:
| The picture in the bottom of the article shows that varying
| sizes of pearls need to be counted at the same time, making
| using weight very unreliable.
|
| Even if only similar size pearls are allowed, small variations
| multiplied by a large amount of pearls can cause issues, such
| as distinguishing 100 pearls of 99 grams each from 99 pearls of
| 100 grams each.
| meowster wrote:
| They could use a simple sorting machine that sorts pearls
| based on size (like how most coin sorting machines work - run
| all coins over a small hole, the smallest coins fall through,
| then run have a slightly larger hole after that, and so on).
|
| Then they could have a simple optical/laser sensor below each
| hole to count how many smallest, smaller, small, medium,
| large, larger, and largest pearls fall through each hole.
|
| The benefit would then be that if customers wanted pearls of
| a certain size, they are already sorted.
|
| Maybe there is an enterprising user here that reads this, can
| easily create it, and reaches out to pearl companies.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| $100/mo/dev is deemed profitable to the company si I guess
| they are happy rather going for contracts for hardware
| machines
| [deleted]
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Call me naive, but wouldn't this be a lot easier - and more low-
| tech, thus cheaper, to sort by size with a sieve, then weight
| individual size-bags, and divide by the size of one pearl?
|
| Assuming all pearls have comparative density.
| viraptor wrote:
| So you need to make / order sieves, then get the counting
| person to sort, bag, weigh the items, calculate results. This
| will have a lot of mistakes too. And you end up with a process
| working only with that type of pearls. (Edit: forgot the
| solution debugging time)
|
| The alternative here is to point the phone at a table.
|
| The labour costs are relatively high and dominate most business
| costs. $100/mth is a rounding error in comparison. If you saved
| 4h of median-us-wage of work a month, it's free.
| gowld wrote:
| This is an advertisement / press release, which is fine, but
| should be disclosed as such in the HN title.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| As someone that has worked in food science micro labs, this is a
| great product that lab operations would love for CFU counting.
|
| Excellent work on a great product. Best of luck to you!
| rootsudo wrote:
| The website copy is a bit bad, but I can see the application and
| business use 100%.
|
| I just didn't expect to see a website like this today, I guess.
| It needs more polishing, but that's the power of marketing I
| guess.
| temporalparts wrote:
| Wow, this is such a simple application of ML and it is incredibly
| valuable. On their website, they charge $100/month per device or
| $1000/year per device [0] and I bet they're making a killing.
|
| [0] https://countthings.com/en/
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| I would not say it's that simple, they do have many trained
| models with high accuracy.
|
| https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates
| [deleted]
| distribot wrote:
| I wish I could get a bead on how useful ML is. Hackernews makes
| me think it's all hype.
| darksaints wrote:
| Machine learning is extremely useful, used in hundreds of
| industries for probably a million different things. Most of
| these uses are not exciting.
|
| The latest trendy forms of machine learning, which are all
| some form of deep learning neural network, are pushing beyond
| the boundaries of human capability, but for a fairly narrow
| set of usecases. Some people get excited cause they can
| exceed human capabilities for some object recognition type of
| task, and then end up thinking that SkyNet is around the
| corner and they rightfully get called out for it.
|
| You should know though that it is rarely the experts that are
| guilty of overhyping. It's usually VCs, or product managers,
| or marketers, or regular software engineers that took an
| intro class on Coursera where they were told exactly how to
| solve a problem but haven't yet been exposed to how hard it
| is to generalize.
|
| With deep neural networks in particular, all of the new
| innovations have come from novel neural connection
| topologies. Most of the successful new topologies are the
| result of attempts to model biological function of some
| sorts, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. With neuron
| counts technically unbounded, and the topological search
| space essentially being the factorial of the neuron count, we
| will never fully explore the capabilities of neural networks,
| and only an infinitessimally tiny fraction of those would
| ever be useful in any circumstance. So deep learning is still
| extremely exciting because the opportunities are so
| boundless, yet still extremely disappointing because of how
| hard it is to find anything useful.
| rsynnott wrote:
| A reasonable summary would probably be "useful in mostly
| though not always modest ways in many areas, but _severely_
| overhyped". It's not nothing, but it's also probably not
| going to lead to self-driving cars or even fully-accurate
| voice recognition anytime soon, say.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| 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 algorithms like
| Canny edge detection, Hough transform, thresholding, Hu
| moments etc. How reliably is another question. This kind of
| stuff is/used to be called "Machine Vision" (related to
| computer vision, but in hard industry they like to say
| machine vision).
| JackFr wrote:
| 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%.
| carlmr wrote:
| I think you're not wrong. Even if the pearls aren't
| identical, if you weigh enough of them at once the
| central limit theorem will be on your side.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Maybe I misunderstand, but I don't think you meant
| central limit theorem.
| carlmr wrote:
| I did indeed. Your pearls might be heterogenous, but they
| will probably have an average weight that doesn't change
| much over time. The central limit theorem makes it
| possible to estimate quite accurately how much you have
| of a sum quantity including having a somewhat known
| accuracy of that estimate, since you get a nice normal
| distribution with known mean and variance.
| matsemann wrote:
| Cut the snark. And if you check the link, the assumption
| that items are identical is far off.
| JackFr wrote:
| Yeah I know. And the use cases of people on a beach,
| crowded theater, trees in the woods, etc. don't lend
| themselves to weighing.
|
| Honestly didn't intend to come off as snarky, just clever
| and amusing. Tough to convey tone -- risk I take I guess.
| Oh well.
| rationalData wrote:
| It's literally statistics applied to data.
|
| If your data is good and you can fit it to a model it will
| work.
|
| The problem is that data is often poor and the idealized
| models don't fit real world conditions so you can have
| problems like overfitting.
| sneak wrote:
| Sometimes I feel like the whole ML scene is just stringing me
| along.
| legulere wrote:
| Machine learning is a tool for solving certain tasks.
| Usefulness lies in finding new places to use those
| techniques. The hype is about predictions that machine
| learning (or AI in hype-speak) will be able to do things that
| it is currently not able to.
|
| Right now machine learning seems like a useful tool for
| certain tasks but not as revolutionary as e.g. the invention
| of the car.
| typon wrote:
| Google, the world's most used search engine, uses BERT to
| power it's queries.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| ML needs data engineering like electrical devices need
| electrical infrastructure (i.e. generators, transmission
| lines, transformers, last mile lines).
|
| It turns out companies have wildly different maturities and
| proficiencies with these precursors, in addition to simple
| company ages. Many from having under-invested in actual (not
| consulting BS) technology transformation and skilling for
| decades.
|
| Consequently, ML is ridiculous to consider and doomed to
| failure for company A. While company B can toss a simple
| model at their well-architected data systems and get
| immediate ROI.
|
| This is underappreciated, because VPs and consultants are not
| typically in the business of saying "Our systems are out of
| date and have poor hygiene, and we can't do this new thing
| because of that."
| alisonkisk wrote:
| There's no ML here. This is a decades old software technology
| being packaged as a phone app.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| Machine Learning is not a single thing that can be useful or
| not.
|
| It is more like the scientific method. It depends on the data
| available, and whether something in the arsenal can create
| something useful.
|
| Most experiments yield absolutely nothing, and some achieve
| delightfully counter-intuitive useful results.
|
| The criticism on HN -- perhaps correct(1) -- is not that it
| is hype but that it is not new. Is statistics great? of
| course, but its been around for decades, perhaps centuries,
| so it seems strange to proclaim how it will solve problems
| now.
|
| (1) ML can be distinguished from statistics if you want to. I
| am not interested in this particular debate myself.
| smichel17 wrote:
| The main reason I'm trying to cut down on my HN consumption a
| bit is the incessant pessimism. While a regular reality check
| is definitely useful, the "I'm so jaded by everything" vibe
| makes it hard to get excited about anything. I like being
| excited by things! It feels good and motivates me. Too much
| HN is a recipe for lethargy.
| rationalData wrote:
| I think the most important reason to reduce consumption is
| due to everything being carefully curated.
|
| Actual issues from a particular fruit company like the
| butterfly keyboard was cause of getting flagged, you
| weren't allowed to talk about it. Similar problems happen
| to this day.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Mac fans being rabid Mac apologists isn't something
| leaving HN is going to change.
| rationalData wrote:
| This doesn't come from fanboys, this comes from
| dictators.
| darksaints wrote:
| I'm as frustrated as you are, but you shouldn't see this
| as the result of dictators, but rather the result of lots
| of cult members having access to the flag button.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Users flag content on HN for dubious, political reasons
| all the time. Why would this need to be a conspiracy,
| rather than simply a vocal minority?
| rationalData wrote:
| Because the dictator will personally respond
| toyg wrote:
| As usual, there are exaggerations on both sides. ML is
| genuinely useful for moderately complex problems like this
| one, and pretty rubbish for a bunch of other stuff it's been
| shoehorned on. There is no silver bullet, as usual.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| 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 those words have any value
| anymore. Louis C.K had a very good bit on that.
|
| And then you add agenda, ads, and geek bias toward the new,
| and you got a recipe for over hype for pretty much everything
| (NoSQL all the things, Microservice all the things, PWA all
| the things, SPA all the things, OOP all the things, FP all
| the things, rust all the things, typescript all the things,
| etc).
|
| So yes, my default assumption is that stuff on HN are over
| hyped (although interesting), until proven otherwise.
| anoncake wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It's INCREDIBLY annoying.
| iagovar wrote:
| But americans do get marketing though. I bet you know about
| a bunch of companies that were doing $thing in $country
| before, probably with better outcomes, but never got the
| recognition.
|
| In Spain, for example, many industrial companies have a
| culture where marketing is nearly BS. That hurts them a lot
| IMO.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Both of these are interrelated.
|
| I think one of the reasons Americans overuse superlatives
| is _because_ they 're constantly bathed in expensive
| marketing.
|
| Consequently, everyone is used to being told everything
| is good / great / the best. Which means anyone actually
| expressing that in a human capacity has to reach for "the
| very best" or similar.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| 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.
| andredz wrote:
| As seen in this comment in another thread currently in
| the front page:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27263606 (Although
| the person that used 'best' in that story is from the
| UK).
| WindyLakeReturn wrote:
| 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.
| matheweis wrote:
| This is exactly right. Before I lived in Seattle, I was
| told (moving from the southwest), that there was no good
| Mexican food in Seattle.
|
| Of course after I moved there I found quite a number of
| excellent Mexican food restaurants, and for a few years I
| wondered what strange definition they were using.
|
| I eventually figured out that they meant that there was
| no good Mexican food _within walking distance of
| downtown_
| vgel wrote:
| Do you have any recs in North Seattle? Me and my wife
| live in Lake City and have been looking for a good (need
| not be the best ;) ) Mexican place.
| awal2 wrote:
| El Camion taco truck on Sand Point way is pretty good
| rubenbe wrote:
| Value pricing at it's finest. If the customer saves $1000/month
| per device, they'll happily pay the $100/month. As it still
| saves them $900. They don't care how complex/simple the ML
| implementation is.
| Aperocky wrote:
| But is there any barrier to entry though?
|
| By the looks of it, none, the next app will charges $5 per
| month and it could even be generic ('round objects counter')
| GhostVII wrote:
| A business would probably not want to take the risk of
| switching to an unproven app for just $100 a month in
| savings.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Until then, profit is profit.
| jjk166 wrote:
| I imagine it's all in the business development. I for one
| never would have thought to reach out to pearl traders to
| service their counting needs, and odds are they're not
| actively seeking out computer vision expertise.
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| It may not seem like it to those of us who know how to do
| it, but there actually is quite a barrier to entry. You or
| an organization needs to have the skills to utilize machine
| learning algorithms, test them thoroughly, package it in an
| easy-to-use application, then market it and compete against
| competitors. Just ask your every day Joe what you should do
| with a learning rate if your error rate suddenly spikes or
| how to monitor for overfitting. Then ask them how to form
| an LLC or how to create and audit a liability release
| waiver for clients.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I also think part of the "real skill" in this sort of
| business is making sure you have someone around when it
| breaks. If the pearl counting algo goes haywire, the
| pearl company wants to know that they'll have someone to
| contact to fix it.
| dv_dt wrote:
| The barrier to entry is that many niche markets that latch
| on to the original service over time are incredibly random
| and difficult to associate with a uniform market. You can
| build and price a cheaper app, but reaching the set of
| customers would be difficult.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Meanwhile industrial manufacturing have been using vision
| systems for years to count and inspect items. This solution is
| waaaaay cheaper than what other alternative packages are.
|
| They could probably get away with charging a lot more if they
| build a lite assembly line style counter that takes in a video
| feed. (They might already have this, I didn't look too much
| into it).
| keeble wrote:
| They can also count items from video
| https://youtu.be/EoCMUfMO2jw
| GistNoesis wrote:
| Let's just hope their engineering teams in Romania and Vietman
| get a respectable share of the profits.
| morsanu wrote:
| I'm working on this from Romania. Everything is ok.
| MichelSr wrote:
| What's the rate nowadays for devs in Romania? ~ $1k/month?
| morsanu wrote:
| It really depends on the city and the type of business.
| Bucharest wages are higher.
|
| Btw, we are not an outsourcing company. Everything is
| done in Romania: development, sales, management.
| iagovar wrote:
| Having an US office is due to business needs?
| morsanu wrote:
| Our CEO is from the US.
| iagovar wrote:
| So... he went to Romania for setting all up there?
| alisonkisk wrote:
| There's no ML here. This is a decades old software technology
| being packaged as a phone app.
| carlmr wrote:
| I think you meant to say there's no AI here. Since even a
| linear regression is ML.
| bserge wrote:
| The _much_ better cameras help a lot, I guess. I remember
| scanning QR codes with a 2014 and a 2018 (yeah, already old)
| flagship phone and being amazed at the distance the latter
| was able to do it from. At least 3x the distance from the QR
| code vs the old model, and the autofocus was near instant,
| too.
| Scea91 wrote:
| The difficulty of this depends on the acceptance criteria. I
| can imagine that the industrial requirements for FP/FN count
| make this quite an interesting and complicated problem.
| foreigner wrote:
| This is great! A really simple technical idea paired with the
| right business model = success.
|
| I've often wondered if there are other instances of this pattern
| - a phone app which solves some niche problem and is successful
| commercially being sold for a high price. Can anybody give other
| examples?
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