[HN Gopher] I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia using machine...
___________________________________________________________________
I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia using machine learning
Author : furkansahin
Score : 211 points
Date : 2025-06-18 07:58 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (monroeclinton.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (monroeclinton.com)
| furyg3 wrote:
| Regarding the discussion of ger/yurt districts in cities, it's
| also important not to underestimate the cultural significance of
| the nomadic lifestyle and yurt culture.
|
| Changing climate (desertification) and economic conditions have
| meant that a lot of people have given up their nomadic lifestyle
| and moved to cities or their outskirts (mostly Ulaanbaatar). They
| often are reluctant to do so, it's a big step, and they often
| hope it is a temporary one.
|
| They set up their yurts not only because of housing shortages,
| but many are also hesitant to move into apartments or other
| permanent structures as it's seen as the last step in giving up
| this nomadic lifestyle. Often they are setting up their yurts
| next to permanent structures, either because they are living in
| the 'yard' of relatives or to expand their residences and stay
| connected to their culture.
|
| You can see examples of this in the first images.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It also sounds like they would already have one, and / or that
| it would be relatively easy to move if they want or need to.
| Don't they go back to their more rural homes for special
| events, for example?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Moving a ger can be a significant effort, especially a large
| one. Most urban dwellers find owning the trucks and vans that
| can hold these things pretty impractical if they're not
| moving regularly.
|
| There's a fairly large domestic tourism industry catering to
| urban city-dwellers who want to go live in a nice ger for a
| couple weeks to feel connected to their history.
| qq66 wrote:
| Agree - ger living is not necessarily a failure of public
| policy, it could just be a cultural decision. Even Genghis Khan
| lived in a ger. Of course, for some people, it's likely to be a
| matter of necessity, for others, a matter of choice, but it's
| not prima facie bad.
|
| > When ineffective policy results in a large chunk of the
| populace generationally living in yurts on the outskirts of
| urban areas, it's clear that there is failure.
|
| That's not at all clear.
| aaron695 wrote:
| > That's not at all clear.
|
| LLMs agree with OP. It's a failure, with important culture.
|
| Steelmanning it, it's better than a corrugated metal shanty
| town. Although they would die in the cold.
|
| The rich in the gers burn coal, the poor plastic. There is no
| water or sewerage.
|
| It's one of the most polluted capitals in the world -
| https://www.unicef.org/mongolia/environment-air-
| pollution#:~...
|
| Ulaanbaatar - https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?param
| s=47_56_7_N_1...
| ty6853 wrote:
| I'm not sure about Mongolia, but elsewhere I've seen wooden
| platforms for yurts under which water and sewage is ran,
| much as you would do with a crawlspace type house.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| What's the point of citing unspecified "LLMs"? Do you
| expect this to be persuasive? And why more than one?
| umanwizard wrote:
| The most annoying thing about modern life is people citing
| LLMs to try to win arguments about subjective questions.
| They are biased to agree with anything you ask them, and
| will do so unless it's blatantly factually untrue.
| mlinhares wrote:
| The most annoying person in a chat group is the eternal
| LLM responder, that person that takes any question and
| feeds it to an LLM and replies back in the chat with it.
| We're now creating groups without these people to avoid
| the bullshit.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| My pet theory is that LLM posters get more flak than they
| otherwise would because the equally terrible commenters
| who simply googled it, or worse, formed an opinion and
| googled up a cherry picked link to support it crowd feels
| threatened by them.
|
| (both groups are trash, IMO)
| kragen wrote:
| Please do not call people "trash" here.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Even if you ignore agreement, LLMs are trained on the
| content of the internet which is wildly biased toward the
| mean or lowest common denominator urban english speaking
| viewpoint depending on the subject.
| alwa wrote:
| I bet I could talk an LLM into supporting ger life.
| Probably in 40 words' effort or less.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| I've traveled across Mongolia on a motorcycle many years ago,
| and one thing I never expected is how absolutely everyone
| living in a permanent house also has a yurt in their backyard,
| regardless of how good the house is. This made no sense to me
| as an outsider (like, do you really need a _second_ house?) so
| I asked a local about this, and was given a funny look. Yurts
| are just hardwired into the culture, it 's a status symbol,
| it's where you invite a guest, it's what you use when living
| outside, it so many things at once.
| sfn42 wrote:
| So it's basically Mongolia's answer to the Finnish sauna
| datameta wrote:
| Only insofar as both building types are recognized
| externally as inextricably linked to the culture, right?
| Sauna is deeply rooted in Finnish culture but not quite to
| the level or multipurpose use of ger.
| tough wrote:
| sounds like the concept of a pool/guest house to me
| throwup238 wrote:
| Mongolia is also really struggling right now with a mass
| migration off the plains because of several very cold winters
| that have decimated their flocks. There just isn't enough room
| for them to move into permanent buildings even if they wanted
| to.
| codesnik wrote:
| I've been in a Uzbekistan palace, I think it was Khiva. And it
| was, well, a palace, with courts and richly decorated rooms.
| But at certain fully enclosed by walls court there was a
| circular place where yurt have been standing. Khans were
| tracing their lineages back to Genghis Khan, and it was
| unbecoming for the khan to spend nights under the firm roof,
| even if it's in a middle of the city with long sedentary life
| style traditions. All the visiting relatives wouldn't approve.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshhovli_Palace
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshhovli_Palace#/media/File:K...
| that circular spot.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Yurt is a lot of fun to say. Great word.
| iLemming wrote:
| 'yurt' is a Turkic word (don't confuse with Turkish), means
| "dwelling place", also commonly used for "home country" in
| languages like Uzbek. Yurt for the nomads was far more than
| just a place to sleep. Mongols I believe use a different word -
| 'ger'. Fun fact - Turkic languages were lingua franca of the
| Mongol Empire. Mongols perceived their language as "sacred" and
| wouldn't let non-mongols teach it freely. That could be one of
| the reasons why we have Turkic languages spread across the vast
| territory instead of Mongolic.
|
| Just so you know, Turkic languages span an enormous landmass
| from Turkey in the west, across the Caucasus, Central Asia,
| Russia, China, parts of Iran, Afghanistan and Mongolia. This
| represents one of the largest continuous language family
| distributions on Earth - spanning roughly 13,000+ kilometers
| east-west across Eurasia.
| shpx wrote:
| It seems like a waste that you didn't use the 89,259 yurts that
| are already outlined in OpenStreetMap as input, though you
| would've probably had issues aligning the outlines with google
| maps imagery
|
| https://taginfo.geofabrik.de/asia:mongolia/tags/building=ger
|
| I'm also guessing your model doesn't handle yurts that are on the
| border of a tile.
|
| Finally, that's a much smaller number than I expected for a
| country of 3 million.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Finally, that's a much smaller number than I expected for a
| country of 3 million.
|
| 172k of them? That still seems like quite a lot of yurts;
| certainly more yurts per capita than anyone else has.
| shpx wrote:
| Wikipedia says 30% of 3.5 million are "nomadic or semi-
| nomadic", which would be 6 people to a yurt. I couldn't
| figure out what percentage of the country was done, but if he
| did 270,559/37,258,617 zoom 17 tiles then there could be
| another 100k in the other 99% of the data.
|
| Living away from other people and not next to anything in
| particular is what I associate with nomads, the heuristic of
| searching a radius around landmarks doesn't make sense to me.
| I scrolled around a random remote desert area in Mongolia on
| Google Maps and found a yurt every couple of minutes.
| shiandow wrote:
| I'm confused why you wouldnt just do some random sampling
| to get some statistical bounds. At least then you'll know
| if you are close.
| biorach wrote:
| > Finally, that's a much smaller number than I expected for a
| country of 3 million.
|
| 172.7k yurts. Assuming that these are family residences for the
| most part, if we take an average occupancy of 4 (which is
| probably too low - the fertility rate is still quite high
| there) gives ~691k people living in yurts - approximately 20%
| of the population of 3.5 million - sounds reasonable.
| ViscountPenguin wrote:
| About 45% in 2010 apparently
| https://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic-
| social/census/docume...
| pmontra wrote:
| My quick estimate before clicking the link was:
|
| From my memory: 3 million people, 1.5 living in the capital.
|
| Let's say 1 million are living outside cities.
|
| 4 people per yurt.
|
| 250,000 yurt.
|
| Add some extra yurts because there will be people having more
| than one or people living in a house with a yurt in the garden
| or yurts used as warehouses, etc
|
| 300,000 which is almost the double of the count from the ML
| app.
| joshvm wrote:
| This is a nice idea that often comes up in geo/ml projects.
| (Why not just use OSM for all your labels?)
|
| To start, OSM doesn't use Google Maps imagery for annotation
| due to licensing concerns. As someone else mentioned, it's
| rarely clear whether researchers have the right to use Maps
| imagery let alone download/re-publish it. Part of the reason is
| that Google sub-licenses imagery from several different
| providers who are usually extremely protective of IP. So
| immediately you'd have image/label alignment issues.
|
| Even if you had access to the image that someone used for
| labeling, it's non-trivial. They might not even have used an
| image! For example you might walk around and take a GPS reading
| next to every object and use the keypoints as object centers.
| Sometimes the annotation quality is low, for example if you
| want to try using building outlines or roads as segmentation
| targets for aerial imagery. Or things are simply misaligned.
| Also since yurts are inherently mobile, you might not even be
| able to use those labels because objects have moved and there's
| no guarantee they'll be present in Google Maps.
|
| Finally you'd have issues of omission/commission, because you
| would have to assume that OSM is complete. That's very
| sensitive to how active the local community is. Some places are
| accurate down to the fire hydrant. Where I live, there are
| plenty of unmapped businesses that have been here for years.
| Though you could definitely use it to cross-check your own
| labels + predictions.
|
| The standard for detecting objects on tiles is to discard
| border predictions and rely on overlap (sliding window)
| prediction + non max suppression (NMS) to handle duplicates.
| The overlap is usually something like 1x receptive field of
| your model, and your "discard" region is a bit larger than your
| max expected object size.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Nice! Now how will you validate the result?
| pimlottc wrote:
| Ideally you'd verify against an in-person count of yurts over
| some control area. Otherwise this is just based on an
| assumption of what yurts look like on satellite.
| proxysna wrote:
| Nice write up, also great to see Docker Swarm being used.
| icameron wrote:
| Intrigued by this. What was the rate of false positives? For
| example are there storage tanks, silos, above ground pools
| mistaken for yurts?
| amelius wrote:
| They use a semi-commercial solution (free for educational use).
|
| I'm curious what the topology/architecture of the DL model is
| like. And are there better ways to approach this problem?
| tomtomistaken wrote:
| Nice, thanks for sharing! What would be the best way (and data
| source) to observe the number of yurts over time?
| bz_bz_bz wrote:
| There are zero yurts in Mongolia using machine learning.
| 9dev wrote:
| I chuckled a little, but as a non-native speaker: what would be
| the correct phrasing? "Using machine learning, I counted all
| the yurts in Mongolia?"
| wrp wrote:
| Just add a comma. "I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia,
| using machine learning"
| bogtog wrote:
| Better yet, "I used machine learning to count all the yurts
| in Mongolia"
| umanwizard wrote:
| This definitely doesn't flow better in English.
| davio wrote:
| https://www.amazon.com/Eats-Shoots-Leaves-Tolerance-
| Punctuat...
| rendang wrote:
| Unfortunately, that isn't a correct use of a comma
| wrp wrote:
| In this case, "using machine learning" is an independent
| clause, so the comma is required. Without the comma, it
| modifies "yurts in Mongolia".
| dahart wrote:
| The phrasing is correct and pretty normal, it's just
| potentially ambiguous. English is like that sometimes. I'm
| not a grammarian, but I think "I counted all the yurts in
| Mongolia using machine learning" would normally be
| interpreted correctly by most people, with 'using' referring
| to the subject 'I'. The way you'd write the other
| interpretation is "I counted all the yurts in Mongolia that
| use machine learning". Your proposed alternative is also
| correct and less ambiguous.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| As another commenter said, the phrasing isn't wrong, just
| ambiguous. I would add the word "by" to make it unambiguous:
| "I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia by using machine
| learning."
| umanwizard wrote:
| I'm a native speaker and the original phrasing was fine and
| sounds like completely correct idiomatic English to me.
|
| Yes, the syntax is ambiguous, but ambiguously-parseable
| sentences happen all the time in all languages and we resolve
| the ambiguity using context clues, which in this case is easy
| to do.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Ambiguity is the soul of wit, in this case
| alistairSH wrote:
| "I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia using machine
| learning"
|
| It's not wrong, but possibly ambiguous, and I'd bet an
| English teacher would prefer it was phrased differently. In
| speech, I wouldn't bat an eye at that arrangement. But, if I
| were to write the headline, it would have been...
|
| "I used machine learning to count all the yurts in Mongolia."
| vram22 wrote:
| good one.
|
| or even just add a comma at the right place:
|
| "I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia _,_ using machine
| learning "
| zem wrote:
| the phrasing is fine, is just that that sort of construction
| is a common source of humour in english. one famous example
| is groucho marx's
|
| "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got
| into my pajamas I'll never know."
| p00dles wrote:
| thank you for this
|
| *edit (I mean this sincerely, it made me laugh and I did not
| see it at first)
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I'd bet quite highly that it's non-zero.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| The yurts themselves? Seems unlikely. Someone living in a
| yurt? Absolutely.
| bogtog wrote:
| I assumed a yurt was a type of person/job, so I initially read
| the title the same way
| hkon wrote:
| Cool, how can this be used for taxation purposes?
| snickerer wrote:
| The gers are standardized. There is a big daily market in
| Ulaanbaatar where you can get all spare parts and complete gers.
| In 2017, the price for one ger was something like $1000.
|
| For that money, you get a well-isolated easily movable tiny house
| in a country where you are allowed to settle everywhere (but if
| you have 2000 sheep with you, you should better discuss the usage
| of the pastureland with the locals) without paying rent (outside
| the city).
|
| Choosing a ger for housing is not only about tradition and
| culture. It is quite rational in that situation.
| ty6853 wrote:
| Do they build some kind of foundation for them?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Depends. Permanent ones, and tourist gers, yes. Actual
| nomadic gers are just placed on the grass with rugs.
| xenophonf wrote:
| It'd be a lot more accurate--not to say more honest--to say the
| author _estimated_ the number of all the yurts in Mongolia using
| machine learning. ML algorithms are stochastic; their outputs are
| whatever the algorithm deems the most probable of the options
| generated from the given inputs. They barely give a thought to
| all the ways their count could be wrong--no error analysis, no
| confidence intervals. There's a meaningless prediction score of
| 40%, and they blithely add "a hundred or so" to the count.
|
| This is anti-information. People reading this uncritically will
| come away with completely wrong ideas about the number of yurts
| in Mongolia, about machine learning algorithms, about data
| science in general.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| > People reading this uncritically will come away with
| completely wrong ideas about the number of yurts in Mongolia
|
| Who is harmed by carrying around a mistaken number for this,
| especially if they notice the 40% confidence?
|
| As to the rest, I read it as an application of tools for an
| interesting question, not a comprehensive or authoritative how-
| to. It's scaled napkin math, and napkin math is very useful.
| xenophonf wrote:
| Assuming you selectively quoted me in good faith before
| asking "who is harmed", you should read the whole SEP entry
| on the ethics of manipulation, and then you should review the
| works it references.
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-manipulation/
|
| But to answer you directly:
|
| - Whoever hires the author for their software engineering or
| data science expertise in part because of this blog post will
| pay for substandard work.
|
| - By deceiving their audience as to the accuracy and
| precision of the demonstrated techniques, the author
| undermines the audience's ability to make good decisions
| about when to use or how to reason from the results of
| machine learning algorithms.
|
| - The author disrespects their audience when they
| misrepresent themself, their work, and their results.
| tboyd47 wrote:
| Keeping an eye on the steppe nomads is always a good idea.
| decimalenough wrote:
| PSA: Downloading Google Maps satellite imagery tiles is forbidden
| by the TOS. This is enforced, too, and I'm quite surprised the OP
| managed to download tiles for all of Mongolia without getting
| banned.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Just create another account.
| datameta wrote:
| I don't understand the reasoning behind that besides market
| exclusivity.
| ViscountPenguin wrote:
| I don't think google owns lots of their tiles. If you view
| google maps on desktop you can see the copyright of an
| individual area, and it's often random aerospace companies.
| datameta wrote:
| Ah, makes sense! Thanks
| sorokod wrote:
| "In total I found 172,689 yurts with a prediction score of
| greater than 40%."
|
| How should one interpet the "prediction score"?
| heyitsguay wrote:
| Object detectors output detection bounding boxes along with
| confidence scores. The higher the score, the more confident the
| model is that the associated bounding box is a correct
| detection.
|
| When used in applications (like this one), the user typically
| establishes a confidence threshold and then every detection
| above that threshold is treated as a positive detection, the
| rest are discarded. The choice can be arbitrary or (sorta)
| principled.
| sorokod wrote:
| Ok, then "prediction score" is the confidence score? And the
| confidence threshold for an artefact being a yurt is 40%?
| unholyguy001 wrote:
| No validation versus some kind of ground truth . His training
| data set is very small and geographically limited. His model is
| likely pretty inaccurate
| nixass wrote:
| Where was this when Morrowind came out? :)
| rnhmjoj wrote:
| All very cool, but wouldn't it be a lot easier to just detect
| circles within a certain range of size and color using some basic
| computer vision, like a circle Hough transform?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| One potential issue with this is that gers actually leave
| circular patterns once they've been removed, where the soil is
| disturbed and the grass is light-starved or dead. It takes a
| couple years for those to fully disappear after the ger is
| removed. Gers themselves can be any color. White is traditional
| (from a time when white wool was more expensive), but not
| mandatory.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| Maybe I missed it but did the article give an answer for the
| number of yurts?
| GLdRH wrote:
| It's in the article, second to last passage: "In total I found
| 172,689 yurts with a prediction score of greater than 40%."
| timewizard wrote:
| You estimated. This is not at all a "count."
| caycep wrote:
| this is 1 step above yak shaving i suppose
| michaelhoffman wrote:
| Using machine learning, he counted all of the yurts.
|
| Counting all of the yurts that happen to be using machine
| learning is a way more difficult problem.
| ludicity wrote:
| Man, I had almost forgotten how much fun it was to read about ML
| projects of the variety I studied in university, before all the
| discourse shifted to plain English prompts.
|
| I know of some government entities in Australia doing similar
| work, but the effectiveness/quality level of the author's work do
| make me despair for our government a bit. They're blowing years
| of Very Expensive Consultant spend and they can't even classify
| an entire parcel of land correctly, let alone count some little
| yurt-shaped blobs.
| m0llusk wrote:
| So hop on the bandwagon before you get left behind by Mongolians
| in yurts.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-06-18 23:00 UTC)