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Times Haikus
- tome 14y agoThis is hilarious. With a bit of tweaking it could be made to only detect "haikus" whose lines end at suitable grammatical boundaries rather than word boundaries. I think this would give rise to a higher quality selection.
- jacobharris 14y agoThere are a few awkwardness checks we do that disqualify some haikus. For instance, if the second or third line has a comma right near the front or back, or if there are month or title abbreviations, etc. But I'm always looking to refine it further.
- sthatipamala 14y agoIt would be nice if lines didn't end with prepositions or determiners (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_determiners http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_determiners). Those words depend on whatever follows, so it causes an awkward split. It shouldn't be hard to add such a check.
- quarterto 14y agoSomeone complaining "these aren't real haiku" in 3... 2...
- martythemaniak 14y agoThe cadence of these Don't match my expectations Try harder NY Times
- lurker14 14y agoHaiku Challenges Expectation of Cadence Counting Syllables
- martythemaniak 14y agoThe real challenge is to manage expectations and make us happy
- simonsarris 14y agoOh my I adore this. His deadly prose is so authentic that it has a life of its own. But ordering street food and riding the subway had become old hat. "As an engineer, I'm sort of a student of how things fall apart." I love short stories, and I firmly believe that one of the secrets to good storytelling is to be compact in emotion (let it expand in the reader's head) and start as close to the end as possible. These haikus are the perfect amount of prose to package up NYT stories.
- amouat 14y agoIsn't it just automatically extracting sentences that can be broken into 5, 7, 5 groups of syllables? I don't think anyone has made any attempt to summarise the article. Very interesting though.
- jetti 14y agoThe process is described in the about section (http://haiku.nytimes.com/about http://haiku.nytimes.com/about). There is an algorithm that extracts the haikus but they only make it to the website when a journalist thinks it good: "The algorithm discards some potential poems if they are awkwardly constructed and it does not scan articles covering sensitive topics. Furthermore, the machine has no aesthetic sense. It can't distinguish between an elegant verse and a plodding one. But, when it does stumble across something beautiful or funny or just a gem of a haiku, human journalists select it and post it on this blog."
- amouat 14y agoAh, very good! The other interesting point is they use a dictionary that includes number of syllable information that have augmented with words like "Rihanna". Part of me wishes this page had been submitted instead of the top level.
- jacobharris 14y agoYes, to clarify, I started with the base CMUdict for syllable counts, but I had the program keep track of any term misses it ran into. This way I could augment its vocabulary. It also helped me find some tokenization bugs and also try some rules for dealing with compound words like "unsportsmanlike"
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- binarymax 14y agoBecause of the auto-scroll, this was a bit out of reach: http://haiku.nytimes.com/about http://haiku.nytimes.com/about
- pizza_ 14y agoIt would be nice if they were a bit longer.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jdmitch 14y agoif: in_ruby=i=o= gets();taken_care_of_by_a= function_like = puts(i) (from http://web.colby.edu/jasperry/2011/11/10/a-ruby-haiku/ http://web.colby.edu/jasperry/2011/11/10/a-ruby-haiku/) and: Haskell is concise Functional well-typed and neat It is like Haiku (from http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haiku http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haiku) and: Journo is coffee's literate publishing app terse prose, wordy code (inspired by http://ashkenas.com/literate-coffeescript/ http://ashkenas.com/literate-coffeescript/) ...then why is terse programming less expressive and terse literature more expressive?
- conesus 14y agoStellar job journos But this raises the question How much does it cost
- bw2 14y agoI wonder if he used any code from a story [1] posted last week. http://mobile.theverge.com/culture/2013/3/18/4118916/finding-hidden-haikus-in-public-tweets http://mobile.theverge.com/culture/2013/3/18/4118916/finding...
- jacobharris 14y agoSorry, I actually wrote the haiku finding logic in November and it's been running since then while we figured out the look of the tumblr and the moderation workflow.
- shalmanese 14y agoI've been automatically doing the same thing with reddit comments for the last year: http://www.reddit.com/user/haiku_robot http://www.reddit.com/user/haiku_robot If you sort by upvotes, there's a number of gems in there.
- danso 14y agoI'm not an expert on haikus, but I'm guessing that in English, there's an accepted convention that each line in a haiku generally serves as an independent clause? So: What she has given them is institutional hagiography is less "aesthetic" than: The story's not clear; Durer may have cooked it up just to do a nude One extra layer of machine work could be to use NLP to filter out phrases in which the fifth/seventh syllable doesn't belong to a word that is not a noun. It would be interesting to see how much more it would filter/improve the auto-generated haikus.
- ktf 14y agoEh, I think the only somewhat-hard requirement is seventeen syllables, and even that is often waved in favor of aesthetics. Plus they really tend to work better in Japanese anyway. Somewhat on-topic: Jack Kerouac made attempts to "Americanize" the haiku form a bit, which I always thought were pretty neat. I think they're collected in a book called (something like) Book of Haiku. I still like your idea though :)
- jacobharris 14y agoAccording to the American Haiku Society (yes, it exists), the syllable count is actually less important than including a seasonal word and a "cut" between two different sets of imagery. But that's a little harder to teach a bit of hack code to do... so...
- mjcohen 14y agothe modern haiku is no longer restricted five seven five haa!
- ktf 14y agoAwesome! Similar in spirit to (though far cooler than) a simple project I threw together to learn/play with Ruby: http://haikubot.herokuapp.com/ http://haikubot.herokuapp.com/ Not sure my single Heroku dyno with stand up to any kind of HN-hammering, so click with caution :) (Or see https://github.com/keithfancher/HaikuBot https://github.com/keithfancher/HaikuBot)
- jacobharris 14y agoI LOVE the HAIKUBOT. Great work
- greenmountin 14y agoIf you scroll down to the first entry it was posted April 1st, 2013 (from an article in November 2012). Just wanted to note that for anyone else confused.
- gwern 14y agoI slugged two shots of plum brandy, convinced we had wandered back in time. Nice; even a seasonal word.
- graue 14y agoThis is really neat. I hope it stays up after April 1st. Autogenerated haiku fans might also want to check out Twitter Haiku, which generates haikus from your recent tweets: https://sleepy-mesa-7562.herokuapp.com/ https://sleepy-mesa-7562.herokuapp.com/ It strings words together randomly so it's a bit more dada. An example from my tweets: Leaving shut when pain Like em sleeping no day keep Me dream normal sure It was written by Patrick Estabrook, a fellow student(?) here at Hacker School. Looks like the source is on GitHub: https://github.com/patrickmestabrook/HaikuGen https://github.com/patrickmestabrook/HaikuGen
- obviouslygreen 14y agoAs long as we're talking autogenerated haiku on Twitter... https://twitter.com/poetryninja https://twitter.com/poetryninja
- qu4z-2 14y agoNot quite haiku, but this is my favourite poetry-twitter-bot. https://twitter.com/pentametron https://twitter.com/pentametron