Cyclops has company as machine moves to replace net cord judge (1995) | Hacker News Reader

Cyclops has company as machine moves to replace net cord judge (1995)

independent.co.uk

11 pointsFairDune7 comments

I had to read the article just to parse the title. Each noun in the sentence has at least two different interpretations, and the choice of verbs is poor imo (but maybe [title] English has evolved over 25 years). If you don't know that this is about tennis and that there is a Cyclops product in that market, you'll probably be lost.

Translation for those who don't want to read an entire article just to reconstruct the meaning of the title:

Context: Tennis

Cyclops ("the 'magic eye' service-line machine) is no longer the only machine helping with tennis rulings. A new machine can now determine if the tennis ball touches the net during the serve.

This does not replace the umpire (who now operates this machine via a button), but only another person (the net cord judge) who would have to sit close to the net, in danger of being hit by 100+ mph shots.

Wow. Even after reading your comment, which I fully understood, it took me another bit to parse the title. I think it is the context; I expect news about companies on HN, so the other meaning of company did not click for a minute.

Thanks for the explanation!

There's a risk, when attempting to condense prose, that goes like this: you go through several iterations, replacing phrases with shorter ones and rearranging them, ending up with something that looks good to you, but only because you have been through the process and know how you intend it to be read.

For this reason, it is a good idea to have someone else read tour 'final' draft, and to periodically put aside your work for a while and do something else. I do not suppose these are options for people writing headlines, and neither is punctuation (here, a comma after 'company' would have helped.)

This can happen when implementing an algorithm as well, and when it does, comments can be useful.

"As Brother Francis readily admitted, his mastery of pre-Deluge English was far from masterful yet. The way nouns could sometimes modify other nouns in that tongue had always been one of his weak points. In Latin, as in most simple dialects of the region, a construction like servus puer meant about the same thing as puer servus, and even in English slave boy meant boy slave. But there the similarity ended. He had finally learned that house cat did not mean cat house, and that a dative of purpose or possession, as in mihi amicus, was somehow conveyed by dog food or sentry box even without inflection. But what of a triple appositive like fallout survival shelter?"

(Brother Francis goes on to assume that it is a shelter for the Fallout, which as far as he knows is a wandering demonic spirit, to survive in.)

-- A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.

Thank you very much! I was confused by the title to the point where I thought this was a sentence generated by an AI created in 1995.

For some reason, that made me think of a concept I thought about when I was 19: a Brazil-like, future dystopian company that had only AI management and AI work assets maintained by a small cadre of human workers to keep it going. There would be no human customer service in the AVR tree, and it could only be contacted by fax, email, and back then, snail mail.

It makes one wonder when the first essentially fully-autonomous corporation will come online (not named Cyberdyne).

The net cord judge doesn't seem a huge deal, but it does take away jobs.

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