GitHub of the person who prepared the data. I am curious how much compute was needed for NY. I would love to do it for my metro but I suspect it is way beyond my budget.
(The commenters below are right. It is the Maps API, not compute, that I should worry about. Using the free tier, it would have taken the author years to download all tiles. I wish I had their budget!)
LeifCarrotson · 1h ago
I would wager the compute for the OCR is cheap. Just get a beefy local desktop PC, if it runs overnight or even takes a week that's fine.
It's the Google Maps API costs that will sink your project if you can't get them waived as art:
Not sure how many panoramas there are in New York or your metro, but if it's over the free tier you're talking thousands of dollars.
daemonologist · 1h ago
The linked article mentions that they ingested 8 million panos - even if they're scraping the dynamic viewer that's $30k just in street view API fees (the static image API would probably be at least double that due to the low per-call resolution).
OCR I'd expect to be comparatively cheap, if you weren't in a hurry - a consumer GPU running PaddlePaddle server can do about 4 MP per second. If you spent a few grand on hardware that might work out to 3-6 months of processing, depending on the resolution per pano and size of your model.
ks2048 · 1h ago
It says 8 million images. So, 13.2 images/second for one week.
I'm wondering about more the data - did they use Google's API or work with Google to use the data?
A game: find an English word with the fewest hits. (It must have at least one hit that is not an OCR error, but such errors do still count towards your score. Only spend a couple of minutes.) My best is "scintillating" : 3.
This is pretty cool!
I'm curious what was used for OCR? Amazon Mechanical Burp?
cobbzilla · 1h ago
Searching for “foo” is humorous, it’s mostly restaurants with signs that say “food” but the “d” is cropped.
tills13 · 2h ago
I _love_ this but it's pretty bad. I searched for "Morgue" and one of the matches was the "2025 Google" watermark which it thought was "Big Morgue"
Again, a complex problem and I love it...
egypturnash · 1h ago
I typed in "fart" and none of the results on the first page were actually the word "fart".
dumbfounder · 56m ago
I also did this. But I wasn’t mad, I was amused.
shibeprime · 1h ago
520 matches on "hotdog"
8084 matches on "massage"
in no particular order
8bitsrule · 37m ago
Gosh! Maybe one of these days someone will take time off from this cultural wonderment to construct a simple, easy to use, text-to-audio.file program - you know, install, paste in some text, convert, start-up a player - so that the blind can listen to texts that aren't recorded in audiobooks. Without a CS degree.
ya1sec · 1h ago
amazing. look up some graffiti writers you know
IAmGraydon · 2h ago
As others have mentioned, the idea is so cool, but the text recognition is abysmal.
lelandfe · 40m ago
It worked perfectly on the two tests I tried: the GSA building in SoHo, and BKLYN Blend in Bedstuy.
https://github.com/yz3440
(The commenters below are right. It is the Maps API, not compute, that I should worry about. Using the free tier, it would have taken the author years to download all tiles. I wish I had their budget!)
It's the Google Maps API costs that will sink your project if you can't get them waived as art:
https://mapsplatform.google.com/pricing/
Not sure how many panoramas there are in New York or your metro, but if it's over the free tier you're talking thousands of dollars.
OCR I'd expect to be comparatively cheap, if you weren't in a hurry - a consumer GPU running PaddlePaddle server can do about 4 MP per second. If you spent a few grand on hardware that might work out to 3-6 months of processing, depending on the resolution per pano and size of your model.
I'm wondering about more the data - did they use Google's API or work with Google to use the data?
All Text in NYC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42367029 - Dec 2024 (4 comments)
All text in Brooklyn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41344245 - Aug 2024 (50 comments)
A game: find an English word with the fewest hits. (It must have at least one hit that is not an OCR error, but such errors do still count towards your score. Only spend a couple of minutes.) My best is "scintillating" : 3.
Instead shows me thousands of “Rev“
Again, a complex problem and I love it...