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Web browser macros! ...to automate logins plus some daily and weekly reporting and repetitive "check something" tasks. Once set up, macros are a huge time and typing saver. Formerly I used iMacros for this, and now the open-source Kantu extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kantu-browser-auto...


That sounds interesting. However despite being generally aware of repetitive tasks, I can't imagine many use cases. Would you mind sharing some more detailed examples what you're using it for?


2015.... A quick test gives me much better results today with Google cloud vision: https://ocr.space/compare-ocr-software


...that link is not to google cloud vision


I should have explained this. The linked page allows you to try out several online OCR services instantly and compare their results with an overlay. This includes Google Cloud vision and MS Azure. My idea was that anyone can use this link to verify my test results. In other words, this link is much more useful for non-developers than the official API docs at https://cloud.google.com/vision/ (which anyone can find easily anyway)


The "best tool" is different for web developers and non-coders. If you are a non-technical person that just needs some data there is:

(1) hosted services like mozenda

(2) visual automation tools like Kantu Web Automation (which includes OCR)

(3) and last but not least outsourcing the scraping on sites like Freelancer.com


The ability to create searchable PDFs is very useful and convenient. But creating searchable PDFs does not require a deep understanding of the document format (like column detection etc). You just place the words at the right coordinates of their bounding boxes. You can test this for example here: https://ocr.space - select the option to create a searchable PDF. It works even for the most complex documents.

Now, creating a Word document from a scan is a different beast because it requires layout analysis. This is where Abbyy with its long experience still has a good lead.


"The common element in all these deaths is a gun. But the causes are very different, and that means the solutions must be, too."

Nonsense... Proof: Any other country that has introduced strict gun control. It makes all the numbers go down.



Gun deaths went down in the US at a similar pace as the Australian graph, without any significant gun control... http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/201...


Your chart is gun deaths per 100,000 but the other chart posted was total gun deaths in Australia, so that's not a fair comparison. Here's the gun deaths per 100,000 for Australia: http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/10/rate_of_al.... You can see from the chart that both the US and Australia show a significant drop in the 1990s. The US levels off by 2000, but Australia keeps dropping through about 2005. It's entirely possible that the further drop could be due to Australia's 1996 gun law.


> It's entirely possible that the further drop could be due to Australia's 1996 gun law.

Since the trendline is basically the same until it tapers off around 2003, it's hard to say; but since the trend is identical (and identically noisy) before and after 1996, it is unlikely it had any effect. You would expect an increase in the trend if it did.

Especially when you compare this to the identical trend in the U.S.[0] and Canada[1] at the time, it's hard to make a case that any effect was experienced.

Homicide in western countries just sorta trended downward since the mid '80s until the early 0ughts.

See:

http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/10/rate_of_gu...

Or more importantly, see:

http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/10/rate_of_ho...

[0]: http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/194/rate_of_h...

[1]: http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/31/rate_of_ho...


The second chart you posted has no labels, title, or context, and as such is pretty useless.


is it bad to look at the first image and think: "needs AB testing"?


Gun violence decreases, but violence as a whole does not.


When gun violence decreases, fatalities decrease. A violent attack without a gun is less like to result in fatalities. A suicide attempt without a gun is less likely to result in a fatality, and so on.


Source? Murder rates didn't drop below trend.


Source ?


False. In the UK and Australia it didn't even make mass killings go down.


Nope... I am actually happy to admit that I am a below average driver (as driving is sooo boring), and from what I read, the AI is already driving better than me - if used in the conditions it is designed for.


Birkenstock does not mind anyone selling cheaper sandals, but they do mind that "after deeming that Amazon wasn’t doing enough to guard against fakes."... which is actually reason I buy less on Amazon these days. I can never be sure if I am simply getting a "good price" or a cheap look-alike product.


+1 If time is an issue I would first migrate to a C# (or even VB.NET) based desktop app, and then later (if needed) add a web front end with ASP.NET


FWIW, here is a similar project done in C#: https://github.com/A9T9/OpenCV-Face-andmore-Tracker


In the "better than Tesseract" category is also Microsoft Azure OCR (not as good as Google) and the OCR.space OCR API (also not as good as Google, but 100* times cheaper/free, and supports PDF).

The best - and most expensive - solution is still Abbyy OCR. They provide an SDK than can be used locally.

A new local OCR solution is Anyline.io, but I have not used them yet.


Sorry to hijack this but I have a question about your comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14441748

How did you get Copyfish to play nice with Zhongwen/Perapera? I've tried it with Chrome and Firefox and nothing seems to get them to pick up on the OCR text.


I'm trying to read things like street signs, speed limits, store names, from not-necessarily-axis-aligned pictures - so far it seems only Google OCR can do those (and does them quite well). Is Abbyy worth trying for that use?


No API, but mapillary is doing that with machine learning:

http://blog.mapillary.com/product/2017/02/06/towards-global-...

It seems likely that Google is doing something similar.


I can probably help you with that, send me an email.


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