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USPS facility in Utah does nothing but decipher handwriting
- geetee 4y agoTom Scott video: https://youtu.be/XxCha4Kez9c https://youtu.be/XxCha4Kez9c
- leohonexus 4y agoAnd the HN discussion of that video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32388279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32388279
- intalentive 4y agoSeems like a good use case for machine learning.
- FoomFries 4y agoIndeed, and this is why they continue to downscale the number of people doing such tasks.
- noisy_boy 4y agoThey need 250 more as per the article (scroll to end).
- mkl 4y agoJust before the end is the likely reason for that: "70 hours a week". This is the last such facility, after all the others have been closed, so needing more people is not incompatible with the fact that they've scaled down overall.
- bhawks 4y agoML is used extensively for this. These folks are handling cases that are low confidence or Id imagine building labeled training datasets.
- armadsen 4y agoThere used to be many of these facilities. This is the last one. The demand has gone down as OCR has gotten better and hand addressed mail volume has decreased.
- mochomocha 4y agoYann LeCun pioneered CNNs for this actually. OCR of zipcodes for USPS. Early 90's.
- justsomehnguy 4y agoAlways wondered why USPS didn't adopt a system for writing zipcodes similar to the one used in USSR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stamp_Soviet_Union_1977_CPA_4775.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stamp_Soviet_Union_1977_C... Add: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Russian_postal_codes.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Russian_postal_codes.svg
- downvotetruth 4y agoSome might refuse to write 4s (vs U+1FBF4) and 8s like that as they require two strokes or retracing.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago... what? Can you explain how this is an issue at all and a point of concern for something like USPS?
- downvotetruth 4y agoThe (arbitrary?) 9 segment number examples from the Russian Postal Codes that were linked and were questioned as to why the USPS did not adopt them are ambiguous depending on how one chooses to fill out the segments of the numbers. For example 4 may be seen as 9. 8 is slightly less an issue, but amounts to 1 segment away from 0 and 9. If a machine or any and all perfectly rule following humans would be writing and interpreting the zip using 10 different characters mapped to the Arabic numbers, then it would be more optimal to try to maximize the mutual distance between them such as an anti-reflected binary code, which would be an increasingly challenging exercise with more segments that could start at 7.
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- xboxnolifes 4y agoThese facilities exists specifically for the edges that the ML models are failing on.
- blahedo 4y agoFascinating---most of the examples they showed were immediately legible to me, and not at all examples of "bad handwriting".
- wrs 4y agoIt is a little depressing that near-perfect cursive writing is now regarded as “illegible”. I suppose the same thing happened to copperplate, though.
- rootusrootus 4y agoMy 12 year old daughter has not been taught cursive but she read it just fine.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pcl 4y agoHaving been belittled by my second-trade teacher for my abysmal cursive, I’m pretty happy to see that particular bit of arcana go by the wayside.
- trilbyglens 4y agoAmen. I live in the Czech Republic and they still teach it here as standard, and everyone writes that way, but I just can't read it at all. Such a pointless thing in the 21st century.
- recursive 4y agoI couldn't be happier about it. It's annoyed me ever since the third grade. And every time someone tells me "your signature must be in cursive". It's nearly as bad as daylight savings time.
- yieldcrv 4y agoI hold the generation as highly regarded
- teh_klev 4y agoTom Scott did a fairly decent video on this a few months back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxCha4Kez9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxCha4Kez9c
- astrange 4y agoI'm always surprised at the strangely boring topics he manages to turn into content. Was even more surprised when I went to the UK, turned on the TV, and he was on University Challenge.
- mhh__ 4y agoCelebrity/old people university challenge. He was on only connect back in the day
- tialaramex 4y agoChristmas University Challenge is the title of the show, it's a variant of University Challenge designed to be shown over Christmas (but obviously filmed earlier in the year) where instead of current students of the named Universities (who will in most cases be undergraduates and thus relatively young adults) it's past students asking similar questions. They're not so much necessarily "celebrities" as they are "notable" in a Wikipedia sense.
- ggm 4y agoOld English jokes about lost mail to "degenerate bawd" finally making delivery to the electricity supply company
- dbg31415 4y agoMakes sense. Mormons are used to reading horrible handwriting from all the time spent looking at old census sheets.
- themodelplumber 4y agoCan't believe how many hours I spent doing that xD TBF the software tools for it were very helpful...plop down exhausted at the computer after 6 hours of church meetings and burn through a bunch of formal-ish handwriting data entry while half-braindead, necktie knot pulled down to the chest, black synthetic socks petting cat down on the floor, and bowl of favorite cereal at the ready. (Mormon alcohol equivalent is basically sugar) I have friends who set regional records for processing those old forms. I want to say hundreds of thousands of pages or some wild amount like that. There was a lot of interesting geography and plenty of bio-stats to read, so for natural readers it was quite a comfortable hit in its way. I did get into handwriting analysis later and that was more consistently fascinating on the other hand. There was always an open invite to bring found samples to the next meeting (this was not a Mormon thing, to be clear). Everyone would then take turns pointing out possibly valid observations, ooh there's a felon's claw, anybody else see that, etc. Then at the end of the meeting they'd ask the submitter to share the general or specific identity of the sample. "That's my uncle so-and-so, the rascal was on a chain gang for 10 straight years" and so on. But sometimes you would remember seeing the sample somewhere, so you had to brace yourself because it was definitely a serial killer and you'd spend the rest of the week thinking about that sample afterward. In the society library there were texts about individual letters...like people have authored multiple books about the written letter T, and so on. For my part I was paid for some analysis on the side and learned the hard way that you have to kind of hold back sometimes. It's nice to know you're accurate but a lot of people just. Don't. Want. To know that others can tell this or that about them. Lol. You can effectively front-run an individual's own self-reconciliation/processing capabilities and this often brings unwanted results. One of my own specialties was that I could usually get a good idea of someone's MBTI type through their handwriting. I had already finished my certification in Jungian typology at the time. So then, bouncing back to handwriting traits, I could identify a kind of sub-type, and this would give ideas of the various cognitive-function perspectives that were probably relevant to the individual's current stage of personality development. I never met anyone else in the field who I could really talk to about this, though it was very useful. Sometimes you have problems in life that are less conscious, so you can't Google them, LLMs don't help, etc. As a result, finding someone who knows "people _who think like you_, and how they made it" can be really helpful. Even took an IQ test based only on my handwriting once, pretty neat experience.
- nohaydeprobleme 4y agoRelated HN discussion about handwritten mail delivery from March ("What is the minimal possible UK address?"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34995370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34995370
- refurb 4y agoIts kind of wild how critical infrastructure a reliable postal system is. I moved to a country without one and it’s a massive headache. Letters may or may not arrive. If they dont arrive they may or may not be sent back to the original sender. I imagine some room in a government building with millions upon millions of undelivered mail. I couldnt even get important mail from the US government. I ended up using a family member’s address in the US.
- aww_dang 4y agoYes, here it is paid couriers or nothing. Even street names and building numbers are lacking. The postal system is just a gotcha.
- ck2 4y agoPeople after 2010 can't read cursive? Really? So weird to me. The examples in the article are crystal clear to me, no?
- canjobear 4y agoIt’s not taught anymore. I’d be interested in hearing from someone who didn’t learn cursive if the example in the article is actually hard to read.
- ReactiveJelly 4y agoI half-assed learning cursive but was never really graded on it, and printed my whole life. I hit "View all photos" and got this - Mrs. Grace Dawn, 2110 Minsp (?) Church Drive West, Dr. Koven, Ken - Nevada National Bank, W. Sahara Avenue, Las Vegas, Nevada, 89102 - M A Hill, Post Office Box 41, Whitesville, GA - Knight and Associates, Park and Main, Butte, Montana (this one I guessed based on likely words) - Twyla Sharp, HWC Box 7, Wyola, MI, 59089 These felt easy. I see some people's cursive that just looks like a ton of loops, with tiny squiggles differentiating the loops into actual letters. I'm sure it's fast for them, but it's not accessible. And as a lefty, cursive doesn't flow well for me anyway, so I only print.
- ghaff 4y agoYes, as someone who learned cursive but never really had good handwriting (and can't really write properly at all today), the examples seemed pretty straightforward for the most part.
- vinay427 4y ago> Twyla Sharp, HWC Box 7, Wyola, MI, 59089 That would be Wyola, MT. 5xxxx is not in Michigan (and neither is Wyola).
- tialaramex 4y agoOne of the things the UK's postcodes do that US ZIP codes don't do is they're alphanumeric but all the confusables are eliminated, so e.g. SS2 5QF exists, this means S52SQF, 5525QF, SS2SQF and so on are just misreadings of SS2 5QF - so both a machine and a (suitably knowledgeable) human can just correct them automatically. The use of alphanumerics is much more common everywhere in UK systems than many foreign systems and I think they're almost always a benefit. Postcodes, National Insurance numbers (~ tax IDs), Map references, Car number plates ... In many of these systems the initial introduction of alphanumerics substantially predates automation, so perhaps other countries figured numbers would be easier for machines, but this was a very fleeting benefit. You do need to eliminate confusables though, having 1I1Il and I1l1I both be valid and signify different things is clearly an enormous problem.
- yosito 4y agoI wonder how long this system will exist before ML gets good enough that it just makes more sense to send illegible mail back to the sender and say, "sorry, whatever you wrote is not a valid address, try again".
- Operyl 4y agoA lot of the stuff they process are actually machine printed, but for some reason the OCR just rejected. Had a bud that worked at the Utah facility, and the same sentient can be found through out the comment section of the Tom Scott video.
- ReactiveJelly 4y agoIf it's so easy for a human to fix it, I wonder how long the pipeline is between feeding that as training data into the next iteration of the OCR, and getting it deployed live?
- Operyl 4y agoNo idea, I heard it was a multi year problem though.
- emodendroket 4y agoThe Surface handwriting recognition has been good enough for many years to recognize my cursive handwriting, which is fairly impressive, but I do like the idea of a public service striving to be usable even by people with handwriting not easily read by a machine, just like it's usable by rural users and others who are probably not the best targets from a pure business-minded perspective.
- kristopolous 4y agoI thought the vast majority are OCR and the humans are for the ones it fails at. Regardless, all you have to do is tell people, say at the post office, that if they type the address and cut it out and tape it on, the mail will get there faster. Alternatively they could use a label maker to print out the address and then affix it to the envelope. I bet people still writing address labels by hand probably mostly don't know that there's a speedup for fast machine legibility.
- emodendroket 4y agoThis page goes absolutely haywire when I try to read it with the text flashing and jumping up and down. But that's a cool curiosity.
- cbsks 4y ago“after 70 hours a week it becomes like second nature”. Yikes, that is a lot of time working.
- UberFly 4y agoAfter 70 hours a week staring at terrible hand writing you reach a second level of consciousness. Involves drooling.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 8uhaal 4y agoSo here we are discussing how AI will soon kill us all or at least solve the big questions of science, and at the same time we employ 800 souls in Utah working 70 hours a week to decipher bad handwriting.
- laichzeit0 4y agoI think people underestimate the long tail of most problems. Even if it’s 98% good, what do you do with that last 2%? The same applies for self-driving and other computer vision related technologies.
- tomcam 4y ago> what do you do with that last 2%? My plan when I finally purchase a self-driving car is to get 800 people from Utah to help me navigate for that last 2%
- theodric 4y agoRealistically, keep running Utah until the next round of sweeping budget cuts comes, then cook up some reason to return/destroy the remaining 2% as "undeliverable" and shut it down. Good service always gets sacrificed to save 2%
- bschne 4y agoI remember a patio11 thread about exactly this — once your operations reach a certain scale, even a 0.1% of cases problem takes a whole department to deal with
- 8uhaal 4y agoShows that some things just can't be provided by the private sector and need a govt agency like the USPS. A private corp would have shut this down long ago and just required in their terms&conditions that people write in an easily OCR-able style, else the letter gets dropped without notice. Letting the govt take care of this gives people more freedom - for example the freedom to get old and have a handwriting that a machine has issues with.
- tomcam 4y agoIn the 70s I worked in the mailroom of a college that had 1500 teachers and administrators whose departments I had to learn (for $3.75/hour). We'd get those big plastic boxes full of mail, and just know that Garrido was in Athletics, Loftus was in Psychology, etc. We'd throw the mail in the slots, then rubber band them together, pack into the electric golf cart, and deliver them. I still remember dozens of names and their departments. Also Dominique, one of the receptionists in Social Studies. Sigh. Anyway, my cousin lives in a small Virginia town, current pop. 38,000 but closer to 5,000 back then. She has a slightly unusual first name. About 25 years ago I guessed it was rare enough that whoever threw mail in the town would remember it. So I sent the mail to Dorothy, Gloucester, VA (not her real name). No street address, no zip code. It got to her with apparently no delay. I tried the same thing about 5 years ago but included her last name and the zip code for Gloucester. It never got to her, which makes perfect sense.
- unyttigfjelltol 4y agoI send a fair amount of mail to addresses very near where I drop the mail-- as in, in the same ZIP, if not almost the same mail route (but not at the actual post office). I'm constantly puzzled that a) it takes a few days to reach the addressee no matter how close you drop the letter to the destination address and b) when I check, local mail is being postmarked at a regional center fifteen miles away....
- ianai 4y agoWhat’s with the ellipsis,”….”? You’re using the completely wrong system to deliver a message at a distance it’s not meant to optimize. Sure maybe that would have been routine in the 1920s when almost all business was local, but those days are gone.
- unyttigfjelltol 4y agoAh, don't you need to know the use case before you condemn the solution? Inefficient yes, but still the best solution for this edge case. The ellipses were a lightly informed nod to the explanations offered by other commenters.
- philjohn 4y agoThis is a pretty good example of the things required to keep a service running reliably that likely would not be done by a commercial company with no delivery guarantee offered. I can't imagine FedEx, UPS et al going to these lengths.
- echelon 4y agoIf a private company contracted this job, not only would they earn money from the USPS, but they could provide the service to other companies. Lots of public and private entities need this service. But even better - they'd build up an institutional set of training data for machine learning and could build the best handwriting recognizer on the planet.
- illiarian 4y ago> not only would they earn money from the USPS You mean siphon money from USPS > they'd build up an institutional set of training data for machine learning and could build the best handwriting recognizer on the planet. You mean, they'd use private people's data to build up a closed dataset they'd sell to other companies for money.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- KyeRussell 4y agoI agree that the privatisation of the USPS would be a very bad thing. However the language you’re using, esp, in the second point, is optimised to be alarmist at the expense of being accurate. You aren’t doing anybody any favours by being intellectually dishonest. Is it a closed dataset, or are they selling it to other companies? Your language evokes privacy concerns. I’m sure you know that, and I’m sure that that’s intentional. Using someone’s handwriting as training data for OCR, as part of a training dataset significantly large enough to be used as training data in the first place, does not pose a material additional privacy concern.
- IOT_Apprentice 4y agoIs it then Fed to the NSA servers in Utah as well?
- WalterBright 4y agoWith all these advances in AI, why can't we get automated handwriting recognition? I'm still trying to decipher my grandma's letters.
- code_duck 4y agoOne of these centers existed in a city in which I lived, Duluth, Minnesota, from 1995-2005. It was a fairly big deal for a city the size of Duluth, employing 1,000 people to start and ranging up to 1,400 at the peak. A former employee started a FB group that has a good photo of what these centers looked like in the 90s: https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155932292850485 https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155932292850485
- MKais 4y agoMaybe they should create a mobile application that uses the API of their OCR system and allows users to take a photo of the handwritten address in order to determine, before sending the letter, if it is readable or not. And then lose their jobs.
- masklinn 4y agoAs if the people who write unreadable and nigh impossible to understand addresses would care to use such a system. These are not “doctor’s handwriting” issues.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- michaelt 4y agoThere are plenty of details online of what makes an address easily readable. Just look at the specifications for getting bulk sender discounts.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoI would estimate that the Venn diagram of people who would use such a system, and people hand-addressing postal mail, is two separate circles.
- zinekeller 4y agoOh definitely, if you are willing to make it readable you would write it in all caps or even use a printer. It's either separate circles or a Venn diagram with the center containing only dozens of people.
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- expertentipp 4y agoThe world needs such facility for processing doctors' doodles, or to start teaching handwriting in medical universities.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoDefinitely a good use of everyone's time in a world full of electronic medical record systems.
- expertentipp 4y agoSomeone unable to write is half-illiterate, still. Not always and not everywhere printer is available or sometimes doctors don't bother issuing printed receipts.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoPrinters? Who's printing? Every prescription I've gotten in the past few decades has gone electronically, from the software they use to keep charts in.
- expertentipp 4y agoExperience will vary widely from country to country, depending on insurances subscribed and on medical establishment. Unfortunately I dealt with half-illiterate doctors in country with public healthcare and they were too arrogant to accept feedback.
- MagicMoonlight 4y ago“We are processing the requested change to your cookies settings” with a timer taking multiple minutes programmed in. What a cancer website.
- expertentipp 4y agoThere are serious businesses working on malicious compliance now.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y agoI missed that completely. I scrolled the page and the modal just moved up the screen, so I could read the article without interacting with it at all. Vile, and badly done. Hmph.
- KyeRussell 4y agoInarguably malicious, whereas the usual cookie popup crap can just be (barley) passed off as complete UX design incompetence.
- ryan-c 4y agoWow. My ad blocker killed the cookie modal, I guess, but the site freaks out detecting that the videos that are supposed to auto play are not playing, and just keeps trying to reload them. Cursed.
- chihuahua 4y agoIf auto play video ends up being broken, I consider that a desirable bonus feature of the ad blocker.
- GoblinSlayer 4y agoThey have accessibility from https://userway.org/ https://userway.org/ "Representative Accessibility and Consulting Provider".
- noufalibrahim 4y agoI can't help feeling a little sad. Handwriting was such an integral part of a person. You'd almost be able to identify a close friend just by looking at their handwriting and you'd see it frequently enough on letters and things. As someone who practices Western calligraphy and who carries a fountain pen, i can't help but feel a little sad reading articles like that prove that the written hand is dying out.
- KyeRussell 4y agoDifferent strokes for different folks, I guess. And I mean that almost literally. ‘Carrying around a fountain pen’ is definitely a bit of…fetish signalling. Dont get me wrong. I totally understand feeling sad about something that you’re into sinking further into obscurity. I’m just a little weary because it’s such Gen-X-and-above fodder to treat it as a sign of society in decline.
- b112 4y agobecause it’s such Gen-X-and-above fodder to treat it as a sign of society in decline I think it is more of a "reliance on tech", not of any gen, but of "where society is". The point of cursive, was writing fast and legibly. You can write far faster than typing, for example, on a smartphone keyboard. There is no correct or incorrect thing here, however, losing cursive means we are trapped in a world where everything we write, everything we do, is tracked. This is really more about optimal use of a medium (paper), and is equivalent to being able to type on a qwerty keyboard, which is equally learned and weird. So for me, it is about the loss of non-electronic means. And that may be OK, but we may also find it is not some day. EG, we will surely want efficient paper use, if we all end up in some controlled state. You'd be nuts to use any computing device to communicate then.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago>> The point of cursive, was writing fast and legibly. You can write far faster than typing, for example, on a smartphone keyboard. Smartphone, maybe, but I average 120 wpm on a computer keyboard and I can't get anywhere near that on a phone. By hand, if I write as fast as I think, I have trouble reading it later, myself. And if I try to write legibly --let alone trying to make pretty-looking letters-- my fingers start to hurt after a while, because I have to make such an effort. I don't think I'm doing anything wrong. Sometimes I even find some of the shapes I make as I write by hand aesthetically pleasing to look at. They're just not easy to read. I can't read cursive either.
- xwdv 4y agoI think it must be at least a decade since I’ve written an actual complete sentence by hand, a paragraph certainly must have been even farther back. Maybe I should pick up a pen.
- bennettnate5 4y agoIt's little coincidence that the last of these facilities is housed in Utah. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints contributes a significant amount to family history work, which includes reading and deciphering old records written mostly in cursive. They also encourage their members to contribute to this work. Around half of Utah's population are members of that church, so there naturally is a much larger pool of qualified cursive readers to select from there.
- rootusrootus 4y agoNot sure if this remains true today, but back when I was young you could go to your local LDS church and use their computers to search genealogical records. It may not be as useful today, but in the 80s it was some of the best stuff you could easily access.
- thesuperbigfrog 4y agoThey are online now: https://www.familysearch.org/en/ https://www.familysearch.org/en/
- puma_ambit 4y agoI went to clicking around on this thing for several hours and found out that I am a descendent of Lady Godiva. Pretty awesome to see.
- kneebonian 4y agoSo there are still FamilySearch center in many meetinghouses of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They have also put almost all their records online at www.familysearch.org If you go to the meetinghouses however you can also get access to the records of several other organizations that have partnered with FamilySearch for reciprocal resource sharing. Disclaimer: My primary client is FamilySearch
- bookofjoe 4y ago>What’s the Point of Teaching Cursive? https://archive.ph/WuZhn https://archive.ph/WuZhn >What Killed Penmanship? We’re all texters and typers now, so if you can’t read that grocery list you scrawled, you are not alone. https://archive.ph/6mm4j https://archive.ph/6mm4j
- amelius 4y agoWhy don't we have postal addresses with reasonable checksums?
- graupel 4y agoI know a few people who have been hired at this facility but washed out in the training and testing program; the speed and accuracy required to work here is outstanding and evidently quite difficult to achieve.
- juancn 4y ago"It can be hard, especially when you first start," Bousha explained. "A lot of them are not used to reading cursive and interpreting what they see. But after 70 hours a week it becomes like second nature." 70 hours a week just reading and typing addresses? Hopefully that's hyperbole.
- dumael 4y agoAn aside but "Making Money" by Terry Pratchett references a similar sub-office of the Post Office in Ankh-Morpork--the Blind Letter Office. Amusingly, Lord Vetinari is able to assist with some as their addresses are mis-spelled vague directions rather than strict addresses.
- webdoodle 4y agoConveniently right down the road from the [NSA Utah Data Center](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center).