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Comment by new299 | Hacker News Reader

The post starts with a false premise that:

"[a medium post has been] doing the rounds the last few days, describing how an automated license plate recognition (ALPR) system being developed for the Australian Victoria Police could just use the open-source ALPR system OpenALPR instead"

The original post was pretty much a tech demo, and noted a bunch of issues. I think the point was that an ALPR project shouldn't really cost $86M.

ALPR is a well studied problem, there are a number of commercial solutions. I've no doubt there are even a number of solutions already deployed in Australia. Such systems are routinely used, for example, to monitor the speed of traffic (see Traffic master).

And as the original post showed, there are even open source solutions to the problem that work pretty well.

So yea... $86M seems like a lot when there are probably off the shelf systems you can buy at a much lower cost...

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The Victorian police system was first running in cars on public roads in 2012. No doubt there are plenty of solutions available today that have been developed since then, but they probably weren't considered at the time. That $86m has covered development of the software and hardware and at least six years of running costs for the program. So yea, I'm sure $86m sounds like a lot when you compare it to some random piece of software that does a small portion of the project.

The first ALPR systems were deployed in the late 1970s.

Fixed camera systems were rolled out in Australia in 2005...

So.. ALPR is not new. In 2012 there were multiple systems available. 86MUSD seems like a lot to adapt existing research or existing systems. Even if that includes acquiring/maintaining several vehicles.

Maybe the whole project is being mischaracterized. Perhaps it included requirements completely unrelated the ALPR (face recognition, driver identification? don't know...).

But with the information available, 86MUSD seems like a lot.

For a start, it's not USD (why on earth would an Australian organization talk about costs in USD?). And of course we know it includes requirements completely unrelated to ALPR, it connects to a bunch of existing databases and systems to do live tagging of stolen vehicles, vehicles owned by people with an active warrant or suspended license, etc.

In 2012 USD a Australian dollar were basically 1 to 1 exchange rate. So it doesn't really matter does it? As to why I might expect it, well... USD is pretty much the international standard, so on an international website I often expect things to be quoted in USD...

Right... "connecting to a bunch of existing databases". Does not sound like it's worth 86MUSD to me. But there we go, I guess we just disagree on this point.

That medium post is entitled "How I replicated an $86 million project in 57 lines of code". While it does contain some caveats, it's not like some copy editor misrepresented the authors intent when coming up with the headline.

Indeed.

How I replicated an $86 million project in 57 lines of code

The thesis is that the author created the equivalent of the multi-million dollar project.

"Replicated", not "imitated", "prototyped", "created a POC", etc.

Titles bring clicks; titles bring scrutiny. Live by the sword, and die by the sword.

In think the author of the original article really shot himself in the for by going with such a clickbaity title. I went into the post with low expectations, but I thought it was actually not bad, and as you say the point really was that the Australian government seems to be paying a lot of money for this system.

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