[HN Gopher] Show HN: Using YOLO to Detect Office Chairs in 40M H...
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Show HN: Using YOLO to Detect Office Chairs in 40M Hotel Photos
I used the YOLO object detection library from Ultralytics to scan
over 40 million hotel photos and identify images with office
chairs. This helped me create a map showing hotels suitable for
remote work. Map: https://www.tripoffice.com/maps Yolo:
https://www.ultralytics.com/yolo The whole process was done on a
home Mac without the use of any LLMs. It's based on traditional
object detection technology.
Author : nomad86
Score : 209 points
Date : 2025-01-21 12:22 UTC (4 days ago)
| maalber wrote:
| Interesting idea and execution! So basically you wanted to find
| hotels where the rooms have office chairs and a desk? Or just in
| any of the images, e.g., a lobby?
|
| Side note; I love how YOLO, a deep learning based model, is now
| being referred to as traditional object detection. Template
| matching gang rise up.
| nomad86 wrote:
| In our hotel photo database, we have everything: rooms,
| lobbies, bathrooms, pools, exterior shots of buildings, etc.
|
| I trained an AI to recognize ergonomic chairs, but sometimes
| there were errors. For example, a chair in a hotel's SPA was
| always identified as an ergonomic chair. That's why we manually
| reviewed all 50k photos to verify them.
| arnolmido wrote:
| 50k manually? How long did it take you?
| nomad86 wrote:
| I don't know, I assigned this task to trusted specialists
| from India.
| maalber wrote:
| Wow, manually reviewing 50k photos is a lot! Would you be
| willing to share what the cost of that was?
| nomad86 wrote:
| I created an app similar to Tinder that facilitates
| manual verification. Around 60 photos can be verified in
| one minute. The whole process took about a week and
| didn't cost much.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Sounds like YOLO verified the work of the specialists
| too! (;->
| karamanolev wrote:
| Doesn't sound that much. When I was playing with
| datasets, for simple tasks I only took around 3 seconds
| to classify an image. That's 1200/hour or on the order of
| 40 hours of work. That can't cost much when outsourced.
| moralestapia wrote:
| RLHF in the wild, nice.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > I trained an AI, but sometimes there were errors.
|
| I edited that down to a proper summary of AI in general
| ec109685 wrote:
| This desk is pretty useless, despite having an office chair:
| https://www.tripoffice.com/nigeria/lekki-ng/souz-suites-
| apar...
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Or just in any of the images
|
| I just looked at hotels I'm familiar with, and images with
| highlighted chairs were not limited to the guest rooms. Some
| are definitely from shared spaces at the hotel.
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| Do you have any insights on which hotel brands have the best
| chairs? Is furniture standardized across brands?
| nomad86 wrote:
| I haven't checked it, but such data should be easy to get from
| our database.
| jll29 wrote:
| IMHO There is a huge gap for affordable hotels for normadic
| workers and business people.
|
| Hotel rooms suck when you need to use them for work. Typically
| there are massive beds and I travel alone if for work. There is
| no proper chair, no writing table at all or one too small, and
| the sockets tend to be in the wrong corner of the room.
|
| If I was an entrepreneur outside of software looking for a gap, I
| might have invented a hotel chain for work stays. But I'm not, so
| here is the idea for you to get rich with it (so I can stay there
| one day).
|
| I like the OP's idea of using ML models to gather intelligence
| from hotel photos. For years I took a photo of nearly every hotel
| room with my laptop on the desk so that I could go back and re-
| book the rooms that were suitable if there was a conference in
| the same city again in the future.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Once I specifically booked an airbnb because they promoted
| their 17" LCD with hdmi, usb-c and dvi inputs. I'm like, why
| don't more offer this?
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| I think the answer is the first word in your sentence. How
| many times have you stayed at a hotel? Now how many times
| have you stayed at a hotel because they promoted a good work
| space? Both cost about the same to run, and one has a much
| greater need.
| notahacker wrote:
| Plus people that do like to spend much of the year
| travelling around doing deep work are (i) relatively likely
| to book short stay apartments instead of hotels and (ii)
| relatively unlikely to be particularly fussy about working
| environments since they're actively choosing travel over
| convenience and optimal working environments
| ghaff wrote:
| If I think I just can't work without multiple monitors
| and a high-end office chair (and maybe printer), I
| probably won't travel or I'll get a co-working space of
| some sort. When I traveled a _lot_ for work, it was some
| combination of the event /trip _was_ my working and /or I
| just worked on my laptop wherever.
|
| I'm semi-retired now but I'm temporarily staying in a
| Marriott property (Springhill Suites) that does have a
| usable desk and office chair which is just fine for
| writing at for me--though people with very specific
| requirements probably wouldn't like it.
| intelVISA wrote:
| Plugging in random USBs is brave!
| choilive wrote:
| Depends on where you're looking.
|
| There are usually plenty of "business" oriented hotels near
| airports, business parks, central business districts,
| convention centers, etc . (And that definitely reflects on the
| trip office map). Touristy areas have more tourist/traveller
| oriented amenities.
| seb1204 wrote:
| The one with a room they call business center which has a
| printer and a fax machine?
| chefandy wrote:
| They know what they're doing. Most hotels 'are' built for work,
| but they're built for what most workers use them for: work
| _travel_. Though probably common for developers, I'll bet it's
| pretty unusual for the other like 96% of people to want to do
| deep work in a hotel room. Especially if you're on the road for
| work, you're probably the sort of worker that needs to
| physically be somewhere remote to accomplish a goal, which
| makes it even less likely you're going to be doing deep work in
| your hotel room. Most have "business centers" where you can
| bang out a zoom call, rally the troops before a meeting you
| flew in for, print something out for a presentation, or
| whatever. I'm sure most professional use cases are far better
| served by those accommodations than amping up their rooms for
| the handful of people that need to be in a room by themselves
| sitting in one spot for long enough for the chair to be a big
| factor while they travel.
| godelski wrote:
| Hanlon's Razor
|
| I think there's a simpler explanation: most people don't do
| work when they go to hotels, they do the work like you are
| discussing. Doesn't mean they are intentionally being hostile
| to remote workers.
|
| One thing I've realized about the world is that a lot of
| people do things just because others are. "Momentum is a
| bitch." I will bet you very few people are thinking this way,
| at least very few that make decisions. And the ones that do
| probably think it is not worth the money. There's a ton of
| things where markets don't exist simply because the
| environment doesn't exist, so the people that can make the
| environment don't because there is no market. It's the whole
| "build it and they will come" thing. People are very risk
| adverse. People are hard to move. Would hotels benefit from
| this? Probably. I mean even not just considering nomads, most
| people work from their computers[0].
|
| But it very easily could be one of those things where there's
| push because there's no market and there's no market because
| there's no push.
|
| [0] The way people have been talking about working at CES has
| sounded silly. There was a LTT video where they mentioned how
| WiFi used to be better in some locations so those rooms were
| more desirable and the hotel's solution was to make it
| standard for everyone. They seemed to be suggesting that they
| brought down the quality rather than balanced.
| chefandy wrote:
| I'm not sure how what I said could be interpreted as
| suggesting they are hostile to remote workers.
|
| And I think there's a very good chance hotels would not
| benefit from this. Maybe in a tech center, but that's a
| tiny fraction of hotels. Good office chairs are designed to
| be very adjustable, but they do tend to break when people
| twist one thing too far the wrong way because they don't
| know how it works, and it would probably take staff 10
| minutes just to figure out it was broken rather than just
| misadjusted. They're also expensive as hell, and charging a
| guest $3000 because their luggage got caught on and tore up
| the mesh seat is probably not going to fly. Small higher-
| res monitors are also more expensive than huge TVs, and as
| or more delicate. The staff would spend more time than is
| probably worth it telling gran and gramps that they can't
| use the "little television" like that. All of this stuff
| has to be handled with smoothness and grace 24/7 by a desk
| staff that don't regularly use these items in their
| professional lives. You can't just say "it's a computer
| monitor gramps don't use it" and hang up the phone. Many
| people also consider office equipment ugly, and how the
| room visually hits when you walk in is a huge
| consideration. Some weary overworked travel-worn office
| drone would probably want to jump out the window if they
| opened the door to their safe place of respite only to see
| a the better part of a corporate workstation looking back
| at them.
|
| Designing experiences can be complicated and difficult, and
| that's even more true because many of the most important
| aspects of it aren't even consciously perceived by the
| intended audience. They all just fit organically unto a
| unified experience.
| matt-p wrote:
| The best solution to all these problems is to have a
| extra 'co working' room that any guest, or for a fee
| anyone, can use and just bill an extra $15/day to use it
| (or whatever) including the coffee machine.
|
| Working and sleeping in the same room is actually not
| that great for you most the time.
| chefandy wrote:
| Most hotels that I've stayed in recently have one that
| they call a "business center" or similar. They're the new
| hotel gym.
| matt-p wrote:
| Most that I've stayed in don't but often have pools and
| gyms. I suspect it comes down to if they're targeting a
| 'business traveler', for example it's definitely a thing
| in 'corporate' hotels or ones by a airport.
| chefandy wrote:
| Most of the hotels I stay at are on the east coast, so
| that might make a difference because of how much business
| travel there is there, but even the more family-focused
| ones in touristy areas have them.
| FredFS456 wrote:
| > There was a LTT video where they mentioned how WiFi used
| to be better in some locations so those rooms were more
| desirable and the hotel's solution was to make it standard
| for everyone. They seemed to be suggesting that they
| brought down the quality rather than balanced.
|
| This was from their podcast 'WAN Show' a week or two back,
| specifically about hotels in Las Vegas.
| gruturo wrote:
| I agree with your point, generally, but after COVID-19,
| remote working is opening new use cases: I occasionally like
| to travel to somewhere nice, far away from the office, and
| work from there for a week, because I'm now allowed to.
|
| So I too now care about a decent chair, desk and maybe even a
| tv I could turn into a second screen. Wifi can be there or
| not, I bring my own connectivity just to play it safe, this
| is now quite cheap. Bonus if the place is a couple time zones
| away from my office so I have my mornings or afternoons free.
|
| I'm not a huge fan of AirBnB but it's been more reliable than
| hotels for a few of these factors: hotel TVs are locked-down
| and many won't accept an HDMI input, assuming there's a
| socket at all. Normally you're not offered (barring
| extravagant prices) more than just a bedroom, so the chance
| of table and chair being any good (or existing) are not so
| good), etc.
| chefandy wrote:
| As far as business investments go, I'd need to see some
| really solid market research showing enough people were
| willing to choose a hotel for these amenities in-room
| rather than a one with a "business center" as many
| currently have, a coworking space, coffee shop, or even a
| public library. People wanting specialized private spaces
| like that don't generally look to hotels to meet their
| needs, and considering how quickly hotel room outfitting
| expenses scale, it really has to be worthwhile. For
| example, an in-room stationary bike would probably be
| cheaper and more popular than a good office chair and
| monitor, but it just doesn't make sense because enough
| people will be satisfied with an in-hotel fitness center. I
| think its really easy to assume our use cases are far more
| universal than they are.
| elicksaur wrote:
| As someone who has thought about this remote style, but
| hasn't done it, I don't think I'd want to be in the hotel
| room much. I'd much rather find a coffee shop to work
| from where I can get some of the vibe of the city while
| still working.
|
| Otherwise, you'd only get a few hours per day in the
| evening of experiencing anything you couldn't do at home,
| so what'd be the point of spending home rent +hotel
| +travel for the week?
| ghaff wrote:
| I suppose it depends somewhat on why you're there and how
| well you can work in an ambient social environment. Mind
| you, I don't really disagree but, if I'm focused on a
| computer screen, I'm not sure how schlepping my laptop to
| a random coffeeshop is that different from being in my
| hotel room.
| kristoffervh wrote:
| Take a look at CitizenM. I travel a lot for work and that is my
| go-to place due to how tailored it is for also getting work
| done.
| petepete wrote:
| I like CitizenM, the only negative is a lack of kettle in the
| room.
| veeti wrote:
| In my experience Holiday Inn Express usually has a good
| computer chair too.
| ekianjo wrote:
| I travel a lot and I agree that most hotels suck for work. But
| the primary function of a hotel is to provide a safe place to
| sleep. If I want to do work, my best bet is to stay late in the
| office where I spent the day, since most people will leave at
| some point. I get good chairs there, large rooms and monitors
| if I need. It's much better than trying to retrofit a small
| hotel room into something else.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| Yeah and even if you're a guest of the office I can't imagine
| most places would shoo you out after your business with them
| is concluded.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I usually stand at the ironing board (they're typically height
| adjustable). Keyboard goes on board, laptop goes on trashcan
| which is on board (just to get the screen higher). I usually
| bring some paracord so I can tie the whole contraption to
| something heavy so it doesn't wobble. Sometimes I'll use the
| cord to hang a second travel monitor from some nearby art--
| still working on a proper harness for it.
|
| It's fun. I occasionally get work done too.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| lol, sounds janky but fun. Would like to see a picture.
|
| I'm surprised ironing boards are so readily available.
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| Not really, businessmen/women usually need their stuff
| ironed.
| echoangle wrote:
| And they are ironing their stuff on their own in their
| hotel room? Isn't there a service for that?
| ghaff wrote:
| Costs money (which may or may not be reimbursed) and
| time. Providing an ironing board and iron are cheap and,
| while doubtless less common than it used to be, is
| probably something some number of people expect. (I've
| never personally used them in a hotel.)
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| Yeah if the hotel is nice enough then usually you can
| have suits and shirts pressed for a fee. If they don't
| have on-site "wash-and-fold" then they probably won't
| press clothes either.
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| Sure, but if your company isn't going to pay it, then you
| are going to prefer to iron it yourself. :)
| blincoln wrote:
| Hotel laundry services of any kind are unbelievably
| expensive in my experience. Usually US$10-30 _per item_ ,
| or the local equivalent, with e.g. socks and underwear
| being at the low end, slacks and collared shirts at the
| high end. Dry cleaning, of course, is a significant
| premium beyond that.
|
| I thought it was just a US thing when I was younger, but
| I've found it to be true even in other countries.
| fragmede wrote:
| the world will come to learn about hand held steamers
| eventually.
| oefrha wrote:
| For all the problems of AirBnBs and co., every single one I
| ever booked was better for working with a computer than every
| single hotel room I ever booked within 2x price.
| bfeynman wrote:
| That seems like nonsense. Hotel chains and esp business
| travel ones it'svery standard for hotels to have desks and a
| chair. Not saying it's that nice but those are way cheaper
| than airbnbs usually
| lodovic wrote:
| I think companies such as WeWork or Servcorp try to fill that
| gap. I don't like working in the same room that I sleep in -
| you have to keep the room tidy for video calls, handle
| housekeeping, and hope that the seat won't break your back. The
| rent-an-office locations are usually pretty well equipped with
| good desks and large monitors.
| ghaff wrote:
| When I was traveling a lot that would have seemed like way
| more logistics than I would have wanted to deal with--and I
| doubt my company would have covered. Presumably if you're
| traveling on business you're in the location for some other
| reason than working on your computer for most of the day.
| ghaff wrote:
| I used to travel a _lot_ for work. Hit about 180 days one year.
| (OK, about a month of that was vacation.) I 'm not primarily a
| developer but I do a lot of writing. Honestly, I've never felt
| particularly constrained from doing that on the road but, then,
| although I have a nice home setup, I don't _need_ that nice
| setup to work.
|
| And I like having a king bed even if it's just me. (I do like
| having a desk and some sort of office chair though even that
| isn't really critical most of the time.)
| wslh wrote:
| In many hotels there are other spaces where you can work beyond
| your room.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Hotel rooms are simply not designed to be places to do work in.
| They are places for you to sleep in, so of course, the bed is
| the centerpiece.
|
| I took a look at business hotels in Japan. These are hotels
| explicitly designed for work travel and nothing more. Small
| rooms, bed, shower, but not much to actually work. And it
| actually makes sense. If you are on a work trip, why would you
| want to work in your hotel room? The whole point of a work trip
| is to visit a work place, that's where you are going to work,
| not your hotel room. In fact, from my limited experience of
| work travel, doing more work is the last thing I want to do
| when I am back at the hotel, it is often an exhausting day, and
| there is a good chance I have to get up early the next day, so
| the hotel room is for relaxation and sleep.
|
| If you really want to work in your hotel room, or do anything
| other than using the bed and shower for that matter, you are
| probably better off with "apartment hotels" and short term
| rentals. If available, student residence rooms can be a minimal
| option for working and sleeping, that's what they are designed
| for. Note that there are also hotels with co-working spaces.
|
| Maybe what you want, that is essentially a short-stay student
| room for grownups will happen one day, but I see many obstacles
| in making it a "get rich quick" investment. It may not be a
| great hotel for those who just want to sleep (or have other
| kind of fun). And if you want to eat in there, you will lack
| the amenities an appartement offers. And if you are not alone,
| a co-working space may be a better option.
| 2143 wrote:
| I was going to say what I'm about to say as a reply to the
| parent, but then I saw your comment mentioning Japan.
|
| The rooms in Clayton Bay Hotel in Hiroshima absolutely has a
| nice proper work desk and a work chair. So if anybody here is
| ever in Hiroshima Japan, you now know where to stay :)
|
| Not sure if this applies to all room types though.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm not related to that hotel in any way other
| than having stayed there one night some years ago.
| codingdave wrote:
| You are assuming that the work place you are visiting is your
| own company. Most of my travel has been for consulting,
| demos, and such things. You go to someone else's workplace to
| meet with customers. It is not a place you can grab a desk
| and do your own thing. So when you need to prep for the next
| meetings, your hotel room is the perfect place to do such a
| thing.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| >I might have invented a hotel chain for work stays.
|
| That's basically what wework is. I know you can't officially
| sleep there. I don't know what they would do if you slept in
| one of the 24/7 access plans though.
|
| Also you are vastly overestimating the amount of "work" people
| do in hotel rooms that are not in tech.
| ghaff wrote:
| I worked for a mid-size tech company for many years and did a
| lot of travel (not as a developer). Sure I'd check email and
| maybe do some writing. But, while I liked having a halfway
| comfortable chair, I was pretty much content to work with my
| laptop on my lap if that were the only option. I wasn't great
| at focusing on writing an article for one of our in-house
| pubs say, but that had very little to do with work amenities
| and more with the fact that I traveling to attend an event
| etc. so I had a lot of distractions.
|
| (For an extended trip to a single location where I was only
| intermittently at a customer etc., maybe I'd consider asking
| for a co-working space but I never did and don't think I'd
| have gone to the trouble.)
| _august wrote:
| Nice idea! What did you use for your hotel dataset source? I've
| been wanting to work on travel based app idea with hotel
| integration, but seems like most providers (like booking.com)
| lock down their data.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > What did you use for your hotel dataset source
|
| Do you hear that noise? It sounds like something is scraping
| _august wrote:
| perhaps, but they build out a full booking flow that doesn't
| take you off-site: https://www.tripoffice.com/united-
| states/new-york-city-new-y...
| nomad86 wrote:
| This is not scraping. Many hotel sites share photos with
| their partners, we work with Lexyl (HotelPlanner).
| splonk wrote:
| You can sign up as an affiliate with both Booking and Expedia
| to get API access to their data. It's meant for people who are
| going to run their own hotel booking sites with Booking/Expedia
| content, so it's not quite as trivial as a random free signup,
| but it shouldn't be too hard to do for a real business. OP's
| site appears to be affiliated with Lexyl, which owns some other
| hotel booking sites, so I assume they already have this access.
|
| That said, I would consider scraping, even with API access. In
| some ways the API access is both limited and binds you to their
| terms of service, and depending on the legalities in your
| jurisdiction, scraping could be more effective.
| stevesearer wrote:
| This is really interesting. I've been looking for a way to
| automate the next step in this process after you know which
| photos have chairs: knowing the model and manufacturer of each
| chair. Unfortunately training a model suitable for the long tail
| of possibilities is beyond me.
| a2800276 wrote:
| Ok, I'll bite: why have you been looking for ways to identify
| the make and model of hotel chairs?
| stevesearer wrote:
| I run officesnapshots.com and we currently identify visible
| products manually (not just office chairs).
|
| This allows us to show our readers which specific products
| are in the photo they are looking at which is a service we
| offer to the manufacturers.
|
| It is advertising, but like hyper-specific and relevant to
| the photo you're looking at.
| windows2020 wrote:
| This is like an automated version of 'Commercially Available
| Chairs in Star Trek' but for hotels. https://www.ex-astris-
| scientia.org/database/chairs-trek.htm
| zeristor wrote:
| This will come in handy to be able to perform the Riker
| manoeuvre:
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=lVIGhYMwRgs
| ggm wrote:
| How did you go with duplicate detection? (For context, aside from
| being amazingly generally useful to anyone with non trivially
| edited images, lots of hotel chains reuse content)
| cenamus wrote:
| Perceptual hashes are very good for that, maybe with some
| adjustments for mirrored images and some crops
| ggm wrote:
| Yes. Most of the systems I used a couple of years ago (immich
| for instance) were still quite immature.
| punnerud wrote:
| Can use dhash that is more robusts to compression, crops and
| color changes. Mainly look at the features in the image.
| mkl wrote:
| The README explicitly says it's not good for crops, and
| from the algorithm description it can't be. Or is there
| another thing called dhash with a different algorithm?
| https://github.com/benhoyt/dhash.
| https://github.com/Rayraegah/dhash is similar but
| horizontal only.
| anticensor wrote:
| Another use of YOLO, beating CAPTCHA puzzles:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08831
| MaheshNat wrote:
| How much did you end up spending?
| mkl wrote:
| They did it on their own computer.
| https://github.com/ultralytics/ultralytics
| MaheshNat wrote:
| Why stop at just office chairs? Why not detect all categorizable
| objects in every photo and rank based on that?
|
| Could also crop just the object detection regions of each image,
| run those cropped images through CLIP/SigLIP, then UMAP and
| HDBSCAN to view a 2 or 3 dimensional latent space clustering of
| office chair types.. might reveal some info as to what kinds of
| chairs exist in what geographical regions. Could use a VLM to
| auto-tag each cluster given a couple images from each one. Could
| run PCA on the CLIP embeddings and have some sliders for each
| principal component.. maybe the first is chair color or size or
| whatever
|
| much data = much fun
| nomad86 wrote:
| I tried to detect models of specific chairs, but it's very
| difficult. To train the AI model, you need many photos of the
| same type of chair, and on the internet, you can usually find
| only one stock photo of each chair.
| pinoy420 wrote:
| Make synthetic dataset with reposing
| myself248 wrote:
| There's an Internet Movie Car Database, and independently, an
| Internet Movie Firearms Database. Surely there are more.
|
| I feel like they should be one database with object_type=car
| and object_type=firearm respectively. And then I can finally
| search by object_type=vacuum_cleaner and find out the wild-
| looking ball-shaped vacuum in that sci-fi movie whose name
| escapes me...
| drewbitt wrote:
| Some hotels I clicked on are being recognized for their 'business
| centers', that one crappy little room with two ancient desktops
| and a printer.
| Tepix wrote:
| Even shared workspaces often get this wrong. On their pictures i
| see desks with crappy chairs and no big monitors to connect my
| laptop to. Bizarre.
| instagraham wrote:
| I have no programming expertise but I'm looking for ideas that
| use YOLO to detect stuff like this. I was thinking of a way of
| automatically tagging and collecting data from my daily commute
| dashcam/GoPro footage - number of EVs, demographics of traffic,
| etc.
|
| I want this to be a project that teaches me the ropes but since I
| need instant gratification, I'd like if the result also offered
| value to others.
|
| The one thing I want to avoid is cleaning up data, since
| spreadsheets give me the ick.
| IanCal wrote:
| Have a look into Sam, groundingdino, groundedsam
|
| https://github.com/IDEA-Research/Grounded-Segment-Anything
|
| You can use that to take images and generate annotated
| segmented images/masks that you can then train a YOLO model on.
| I've done this for prototypes before and it's a very quick way
| of getting started as you can hand off the really annoying
| annotation work to a machine.
| a2800276 wrote:
| How happy are you with the results?The execution is great, but I
| feel the idea didn't really validate well. Every single sample
| ended up with pictures like this:
| (https://hotel.trvcdn.com/380/de/800024805/700034633/nh-
| colle...). While I'm impressed at how accurately you can detect
| chairs with wheels, that doesn't seem to be an indicator of an
| ergonomic workspace. Quite frankly, I would have preferred (and
| been fine with) sitting on the bed with my laptop in every hotel
| I clicked on.
| dchuk wrote:
| I travel extensively for work. Where are you guys staying that
| doesn't have a basic desk and chair with outlets and stuff ready
| to go? Even the most basic Marriott property has a totally
| comfortable workspace in every room
| tobi_bsf wrote:
| I travel extensively for work, and in Europe this is a real
| Problem. I stayed in Steigenberger Hotels in a "Business Suite"
| that does not had a chair and a desk. Marriot properties like
| moxy for instance are guaranteed to have no desk in the room.
| OfCounsel wrote:
| I stayed at the Hyatt Centric in Boston. Take a look at the
| photos - no desk or chair.
|
| Moxy (Marriott) hotels tend not to have desks either.
| camhart wrote:
| Did you do anything to retrain the model, or just use it out of
| the box?
| nomad86 wrote:
| We manually labeled almost 1,000 chairs in various photos to
| train the model.
| pknerd wrote:
| I wonder how good Gpt and Claude could do it. What would be the
| computational cost difference?
| nomad86 wrote:
| At first I wanted to use Google's Vertex AI for this purpose,
| but the costs were too high.
|
| Besides, in this case, we would also have to upload 40 million
| photos to the cloud for Google to evaluate what's on them.
|
| YOLO is the best for such tasks; it works locally and is really
| fast.
| tobi_bsf wrote:
| You should remove pictures that contain multiple office chairs, i
| saw a lot of pictures that got properties marked as postive
| beeing their business centers or conference rooms.
| bemmu wrote:
| What I'm most curious about is how does one get 40 million hotel
| photos? Is this offered through some Booking.com API etc.?
| teruakohatu wrote:
| I was also wondering this. The hardest part about this would be
| scraping 40m photos.
| nomad86 wrote:
| All major booking sites share hotel photos with their
| partners.
|
| We are in several partner programs, but now we mainly work
| with HotelPlanner.
| diimdeep wrote:
| Without at least some technical details and insights from process
| of doing so this is just ad for your website. And it does not
| even work in country with 146 million people, but author is from
| "democratic" european country so not surprising.
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| You posted this in 2023 too. Thought it sounded familiar!
| mkl wrote:
| All 8 of their submissions are versions of it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nomad86
| bambax wrote:
| This is pretty cool; however this account has been repeatedly
| posting this same story since 2023 and never anything else...
| weird
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nomad86
| bemmu wrote:
| Well, it's been a while since it was last posted, so seems
| fine. Interesting how it only caught on once it triggered some
| techy interest.
|
| I can understand why. My thought pattern was also like "oh
| YOLO, I know that, interesting to see some application for it,
| oh cool idea, upvote".
| franga2000 wrote:
| From a few minutes of clicking around, most of these "office
| chairs" look entirely unsuitable for longer periods of work. I've
| also never seen a hotel room without at least a basic "school
| chair" and those are far more comfortable than a lot of the
| plastic slab or designer clamshell things I see in these photos.
| ncruces wrote:
| I've checked locally. Most of these aren't really hotels, but
| short term rentals.
|
| I don't have an huge issue with short term rentals per si. They
| are an important niche for tourism when you take the whole
| family, whereas most (esp. city) hotels are not really
| appropriate for a family of 4 or 5.
|
| OTOH, (esp. city) hotels are usually fine for the business trips
| they were designed to cater too.
|
| This leaves us with "digital nomads." Helping these find ways to
| put additional pressure on the housing market through short term
| rentals will only cause locals to get politicians to further
| restrict them.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| I would like to do a variation on this theme where instead I scan
| pub photos for pool tables and create an index in London.
|
| It can be hard to find a pub with a pool table these days!
| ghaff wrote:
| Heh. Other than a place in SF that had a bunch of pool tables
| near the Moscone, haven't seen one in a bar in ages. There used
| to be one in the bar that we hung out at in my grad school.
| vergessenmir wrote:
| How do you get access to 40M Hotel Photos?
| mcculley wrote:
| This is a great idea. What I have found worse in hotel rooms is
| not the chair, it is that the desk is at a stupid height relative
| to the chair. I use a standing desk at home and would love an
| easy way to use a standing desk at a hotel without carting around
| a tripod.
| thenthenthen wrote:
| What can YOLO detect actually? I am interested in satellite
| imagery, what are the options in this field?
|
| Disclaimer: i am working for myself, i have no money, a 15 year
| old laptop and obsessions
| aduffy wrote:
| YOLO is a pretty simple and flexible architecture. Like most of
| these models, you can label some data and just freeze the
| intermediate layers and just retrain the final predictor head.
|
| Checkout as well darknet, which runs at really high fps on
| super cheap hardware
| javiercr wrote:
| Awesome! How long did it take to run locally on your Mac? Any
| details you can share about the stack used for processing (other
| than YOLO for detection)?
| tminima wrote:
| Hey, cool idea. Would you be able to tell me the tech stack for
| the whole app? I want to build a similar application for some
| other use case. I have built a static map with all my labels
| using leaflet in Python. To turn it into something like you have,
| what technologies will I need?
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