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A comment on Ask HN: Idea Sunday. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Idea Sunday by napoleond on Sunday April 06, 2014 @04:21PM (#7542679)
(Apologies if you're an OCR guru and this is a stupid comment, but...) I wonder if it would be easier to get an MVP together using Amazon Mechanical Turk. A quick Google search reveals that there are lots of commercial products providing OCR on nutrition labels, but getting open source OCR to work reliably with phone-quality images (poor lighting, curvature of containers, etc) is tricky.

Either way, I think OCR-as-a-service would be really useful, and nutrition labels are probably a great place to start. I think there's lots of room for improvement in the nutrition/meal planning space.

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Re:Ask HN: Idea Sunday by total on Monday April 07, 2014 @03:19AM (#7545064)
I know FoodEssentials used to do this on mTurk. I did them myself on that platform. They haven't been around in a while, though. I'd be more than happy to enter nutritional label information on mTurk should that method be chosen.
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Re:Ask HN: Idea Sunday by karangoeluw on Sunday April 06, 2014 @06:36PM (#7543472)
I don't know how hard it might be, but we have a team already (wow HN), and have started the work.
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Re:Ask HN: Idea Sunday by rplnt on Monday April 07, 2014 @05:41AM (#7545501)
You can scan barcode most of the time.
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