Even if the author is correct in that Google's ranking algorithm for HackerNews will be affected by just 24 hours of downtime, wouldn't the algorithm update itself back to normal over the next 24 hours?
73 karma · joined January 2, 2014
This line gives it away. If they can remove that assumption I will be impressed, otherwise I would say they reinvented the wheel and probably could have used something off the shelf and got similar results.
"To start off with, Goodfellow and co place some limits on the task at hand to keep it as simple as possible. For example, they assume that the building number has already been spotted and the image cropped so that the number is at least one third the width of the resulting frame. They also assume that the number is no more than 5 digits long, a reasonable assumption in most parts of the world."
Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth. Someone once told me, "Even when building the imperial palace, they always leave one place unfinished." In both Buddhist and Confucian writings of the philosophers of former times, there are also many missing chapters.