Chris Mendez chrisjmendez

What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining A Unicorn

Disclaimer: This piece is written anonymously. The names of a few particular companies are mentioned, but as common examples only.

This is a short write-up on things that I wish I'd known and considered before joining a private company (aka startup, aka unicorn in some cases). I'm not trying to make the case that you should never join a private company, but the power imbalance between founder and employee is extreme, and that potential candidates would

Using Google Cloud Vision API's OCR to extract text from photos and scanned documents

Just a quickie test in Python 3 (using Requests) to see if Google Cloud Vision can be used to effectively OCR a scanned data table and preserve its structure, in the way that products such as ABBYY FineReader can OCR an image and provide Excel-ready output.

The short answer: No. While Cloud Vision provides bounding polygon coordinates in its output, it doesn't provide it at the word or region level, which would be needed to then calculate the data delimiters.

On the other hand, the OCR quality is pretty good, if you just need to identify text anywhere in an image, without regards to its physical coordinates. I've included two examples:

####### 1. A low-resolution photo of road signs

Stream URL's for Classical KUSC and Classical KDFC

New URL Pattern:

http://[bit rate].[encoder format].[file format].[call letters].live

Old URL Pattern:

scalar-vector-operations

multi-key indexing allows for indexing properties within an array. It makes things fast [ red, blue, green ]

On the way out Is red in the colors array? Is red not in the colors array? Scalar: $ne, $mod, $exists, $type, $lt, $gt, $gte, $ne Vector: $in, $nin, $all, $size

	#!/usr/bin/env ruby

	require "faker"
	require 'nokogiri'
	require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'lib', 'file_manager')

	class EmailUtil
	include FileManager

	NUM_OF_EMAILS = 5000

	---
	AWSTemplateFormatVersion: '2010-09-09'
	Description: 'AWS CloudFormation Sample Template VPC_with_PublicIPs_And_DNS: Sample
	template showing how to create a VPC with DNS and Public IPs enabled. You will be
	billed for the AWS resources used if you create a stack from this template.'
	Parameters:
	KeyName:
	Description: Name of an existing EC2 KeyPair to enable SSH access to the bastion
	host
	Type: AWS::EC2::KeyPair::KeyName

	namespace :convert do
	# https://superuser.com/a/1145254
	desc %Q{ ›› Convert from WAC to FLAC to 16-bit and 44.1 kHz. }
	task :low_res, [:wav, :flac] do \|task, args\|
	wav = args.wav
	flac = args.flac
	bit_rate = 16
	sample_rate = 44100
	sh %{ ffmpeg -i #{wav} -af aformat=s#{bit_rate}:#{sample_rate} #{flac} }
	end

	const http = require('http'),
	fs = require('fs'),
	path = require('path'),
	contentTypes = require('./utils/content-types'),
	sysInfo = require('./utils/sys-info'),
	env = process.env;

	let server = http.createServer(function (req, res) {
	let url = req.url;
	if (url == '/') {