alt Hacker News25 Years of Eggs
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>Everyone needs a rewarding hobby. I’ve been scanning all of my receipts since 2001. I never typed in a single price - just kept the images. I figured someday the technology to read them would catch up, and the data would be interesting.
This is perhaps among the best openers I've ever read.
[spoiler: the tech caught up, the data is interesting]
I read a lot. This article, entirely.
I am amused that this in the classic 1955 Asimov story
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story)
the protagonist is interviewed as a one-man "focus group" in lieu of a national election and one of the questions he is asked is "What do you think about the price of eggs?" and he said roughly "I have no idea, my wife does the shopping."
I usually avoid shallow comments but I feel like this time it has to be said as a conversation starter: That's a lot of eggs!
Also ignoring the benefits of subscriptions, an estimate in the magnitude of thousands of dollars for extracting egg prices still makes me feel like we aren't "there" yet. This should have been a problem with a much more efficient solution given the advancements in the AI, data analysis and OCR space. I am sort of disillusioned.
I don't know why people mess with tesseract in 2026, attention-based OCRs (and more recently VLMs) outperformed any LSTM-based approach since at least 2020.
My guess is that it's the entry-point to OCR and the internet is flooded by that, just like pandas for data processing.
The AI writing of the article made me give up halfway through. It’s a neat idea but the writing style of these AI models is brain-grating, especially when it’s the wrong style choice for this kind of technical report.
Apart from the comical cost of extracting this data from paper receipts, is it more likely that stores will publish their product costs over time so trends can be observed or be more like gas stations where no prices are listed. I have no idea why a box of Cheerios costs $7 for processed oats but i see millions of reasons to obscure that data.
Overall this feels less like a quirky egg project and more like a blueprint for how messy real-world data pipelines are going to look going forward
Inflation adjusted dsta just comes to tell us that either eggs have been outdoing the CPI for 25 years or that actual CPI is way higher than what the BLS calculates.
Great article through and through. The total number of places you've bought eggs at made me feel a tad depressed though: 4 places where you lived at or spent a longer time, 5 you traveled to *.
I tend to grow bored of a location after a year or two, though I'm certainly in the minority.
* Of course you didn't buy eggs every time you traveled somewhere, so probably not the entire truth.
I haven't tried it with receipts, but I've gotten excellent OCR results with Gemini 3.0 and now 3.1 on some challenging texts: handwritten letters I couldn't fully decipher myself, vertically printed Japanese texts with tiny furigana readings next to the kanji, a 19th century book in English with extensive use of italics and small caps. Gemini is good at extracting text and formatting from complex layouts, and it might work with egg receipts, too.
> Estimated token cost $1,591
I can assume this person does in fact NOT need to worry about the price of eggs ?
> Estimated token cost $1,591 > Confirmed egg receipts 589 > Total egg spend captured $1,972 > Total eggs 8,604
...
> I can’t wait to see what 30 years of eggs looks like.
At $2.70 per receipt, i'd be in no hurry to find out!
There is a reason why reciept transcription is still the task with the highest demand on mechanical turk.
Without 25 years of photographing receipts, weeks of agents coding and billions of token spent, I can predict that egg prices increased, and the graph of my egg consumption over time is concave, part because my income has risen, part because while all prices get inflated, eggs are still cheaper than other sources of protein, and I did in less than 1 microsecond.
I will use them tokens to be able to afford more eggs.
Absolutely loved the article, the process, and the results. Hated the price.
You could pay a human to read receipts, 1 every 30 seconds (that’s slow!), $15/hr (twice the US federal minimum wage!), plus tax and overhead ($15x1.35) comes out to $20.25/hr over 5 hours. $101 all in.
Sure, sure, a human solution doesn’t scale. But this sort of project makes me feel like we haven’t hit the industrialization moment that i thought we had quite yet.