jbondeson

We never did get to see the vision that was presented in that KS...

[1] 2012 was two years before Brackets/Atom and three before VSCode.

It's lazy and reductionist thinking that allows people to arbitrarily draw lines in whatever way they feel will best push their narrative.

Quick, 1981/1982[1] Millennial or X?

[1] Those born in 1981/1982 graduated in 2000

I reject this form of behavioral nihilism and prefer to believe that ideas can exact change in this world[1] and move people up and out of the status quo, and lament the failure of even efforts I think were doomed from the beginning.

[1] Which isn't to say I reject the notion that a large portion of people are just out to get theirs and to hell with the rest

I'm sure given just enough time the "community" will structure itself into a perfect replica of a modern bureaucracy.

edit: I'm not just extrapolating from this one post a gander over at /r/btc or /r/bitcoin shows the same lovely trend

Out of curiosity what is your overall vision for the library? Are you looking for a System.Drawing high-level API or more of an OpenCV-like low-level API?

I'm just so sick of all the navel gazing going on between the Bernie or Bust'ers, the Establishment Dems, the NeverTrumps, the Pro-Trumps, the Libertarians, and on and on and on.

Every last one of them is pushing some absurdly reductionist hot take argument in their bubbles and papering over the real issues plaguing people.

The last year has ripped covers off the culture war that the US has been slowly boiling in like a frog. BLM and Trump aren't one offs, there are tons of people with serious gripes in this country, and for myself I'd rather call out the BS that obscures this than just sit here and let it stand unchallenged.

That is such an absurd and reductionist dismissal of this election that is no different than the equally wrong people saying "59 million people liked all the old sexist, homophobic, racist and xenophobic attitudes, and 59 million other people didn't"

What you are doing here is just perpetuating the problems that have plagued this election cycle and made it so people are completely unable to discuss real issues.

The rest of it: Likely Voter Models, Demographic Weighting, etc would be pretty easy to have open source and reproducible once you've solved the issues.

So yeah, I'm definitely on the "keep reinventing" side of this debate.

ACO for dynamic environments generally require much more attention to how the problem is applied to the environment or the generation of a more hybrid approach.

When it comes to static problems like TSP, the translation of the problem has a lot of influence on how likely the heuristic is to fall into local optima. For instance in the case of ACO you have pheromone trails that are intended to dissipate faster as the distance between food increases. When translating something like TSP you have a decision to make: you can go literal and use the physical distance between edges on a graph (causing closer nodes to be more heavily weighted). Or you could use the total distance of the circuit (causing edges that occur in better solutions to be more heavily weighted). Or you can blend them both -- which is what it looks like the author did.

These algorithms are heuristics and are not intended to necessarily give you the "best" answer, but to get you a "pretty good" answer on messy problems that don't neatly fit into a problem that has been heavily researched like TSP.

Great work, and I look forward to seeing future posts on the solutions you've been able to come up with!

On 3D deformation, you're officially in academic research land. Nearly all algorithms require you to have a solid guess as to what the aspect ratio of the target object is. Other algorithms use heuristics based upon what you expect to find on a page. One particularly fun algorithm used the baseline of text (I believe for that paper it was Arabic) and fit a high-order curve to it which was then reversed. Unfortunately I haven't seen a truly generic approach that doesn't require a implementation-specific input.

[1] Frankly my feeling is that RGB to grayscale is a mistake and holding back many of these algorithms

The actual OCR and data extraction likely occurs on the server side, but the document recognition on device is a much better user experience.

[1] USAA and Mitek were suing each other over the patents from 2012-2014.

Document identification like this is unfortunately the "easy" (and it's not particularly easy to do real time) part. The next two steps involve 3D de-deformation since unlike a flatbed scanner you cannot assume the paper is actually completely flat -- imagine a previously folded page, etc.

I love this stuff as it is at a crossroads of a half dozen different disciplines. Lots of money to be had if this can be done is a really robust manner.

Edit:

A couple examples of why this gets really hairy really fast:

* You'll notice that all the documents are shown on a high contrast background (dark wood grain) without a lot of stark lighting. One of your first steps in edge detection and line identification is image segmentation to remove background from foreground and then start removing noise. If you have a white piece of paper on a white table, or a large lighting contrast (say from an open window casting daylight on half the page) it really wreaks havoc with the algorithms.

* Imagine you're trying to recognize a page from a text book in the middle of the book. The way the page lies you end up with non-rectangular pages (they curve due to the spine) which kills the hough line transformation (there are also hough circle algorithms, but you get the point) and the rectangle selection.

Also due to the fact that the wealth of the nation is centered in many of these urban centers I'm probably more worried about them wielding too much power in our current era of money/lobby dominated politics.

If that's not racial profiling, I don't know what is.

So, yeah, probably not a winning strategy.

There are tons of opportunities for efficiency gains all over these companies as they are some of the most low-tech back office operations I've seen. There's a definite gap between the biggest companies and the rest. These companies are notoriously conservative on all facets of their business, and they are a very tight knit industry. They all know what each other are up to, and they're leery of being the first mover on a technology.

This is one of many "old school" industries that are going to see some of the biggest innovation in the coming years. That will only be accelerated if we see fuel prices start to inch up again.

This isn't taxis where you can bank on regulatory arbitrage to take a cut. They seemed to be trying to make money on customer acquisition and scheduling, but I'm sure they realized too late that their partner companies don't spend a huge amount of money on those activities.

So I wouldn't say that it's been entirely avoided.

Brewing can certainly be done on the cheap if money is more constrained than time and effort. And there are definitely no shortage of creative ways people have devised to save some money.