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Comment by shoumikchow | Hacker News Reader

You are correct that you do not need this library to draw bounding boxes with a label. You can use OpenCV or Pillow to draw it.

However, positioning the label to be exactly above the bounding box can be a little finicky. This just takes care of the math that you'd have to do to place it right above the box. I agree that I am not doing something revolutionary with the math here, but these functions are something that I've had to use over and over again and thought it would be nice to package the whole thing. This library abstracts everything behind two main functions.

There are also a few different visualizations that you can use.

View on HN

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I guess I have more of a problem with this hitting the front page of HN than with you publishing it. If you use it a lot and abstract it into a library, that's fine, we all do that. But it looks like people are interested in it and I don't understand why.

Don't get me wrong, I like that you published it and I encourage it as much as I can. But if someone is capable of running complex object detection algorithms, they surely can position a label correctly without the need for another library?! This is just a couple of lines of code you can write without even thinking much about it.

Maybe I'm just out of touch, but it's so weird to me that people out there might find this useful.

I find it interesting, nom, that you could be adept at using object detection algorithms and still not detect the reason why people are interested in reading this article.

Same reason I might use tippy.js for popup boxes. I know I could make it myself, and make it just as well as the tippy authors have designed it, but why waste my time doing that when I know they've already thought through all of the problems that I can't even expect until I'm already in the thick of it?

Sure it's not like I haven't used libraries in the 20 years I've been coding. If it solves the complex problem I am facing, I will use it. But have you looked at the code in question? It is not complex. It is code you write in 20 minutes.

I don't understand the hate. I don't have to solve P=NP to post on HN. If I did solve something complicated, I'd be publishing a paper, not posting here. I thought this is something that might help the community. If people are upvoting it, it's because they think it might help them - save 20 minutes if nothing else.

Either way, your comments might be against HN guidelines [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com