An analysis of Steve Jobs tribute messages displayed by Apple | Hacker News Reader

An analysis of Steve Jobs tribute messages displayed by Apple

neilkodner.com

184 pointsot29 comments

Funny that most of the references to "Newton" seem to be Issac Newton and not the Apple product.

Well, it makes sense. The only thing Steve Jobs did for the Newton was kill it.

Wouldn't the regex for "mac" also match "macintosh" and "imac" and inflate the numbers?

True, he probably should change the regex to something like "^mac" which would also match macintosh. So "^mac\s" should be fine. I would probably use: ^[M|m]ac[\s|\.]+

Wouldn't it also match "machine", "stomach", "diplomacy", etc?

You are all 100% correct about the regex. Before converting the product-identifying matching code to Python, I did it in bash using grep -iw to match whole words.

for i in newton macintosh macbook ibook iie mac iphone ipod imac ipad II+ iigs LaserWriter osx 'apple ?tv' itunes '\]\[' imovie do stevejobs_tribute.txt |wc -l`" echo "$i: `egrep -wi "${i}s?" $INPUTFILE|wc -l`" done

But this was difficult to maintain. I wanted the ability to print a 'friendly' looking product name (the dict's key) and maintain the counts in a variable.

When I made the move from bash to python, I knew that there would be some overlap when I pushed this code (in the name of shipping!). I need to split the sentences into proper tokens and then check each token for a product match. I'm already splitting the sentence into tokens for part-of-speech tagging so it shouldn't be difficult to do.

tl;dr known issue on the Mac regex, I needed to publish it and get back to work!

You can use '\b' which matches "word boundaries", so the regex would be something like "\bmac\b".

Thanks, I'm going to update the code and re-run the numbers.

Here is the Word Cloud. Enjoy!

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/4285031/Steve_Jobs_Tribute_M...

I came here to do this: http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/4286122/Remember_Steve

Interesting, but not exactly surprising. I guess when your source data is a whitelist of adulations, there are only so many conclusions you can make. NLTK looks interesting though.

It looks like the most commonly-used adjective to describe Jobs was "great" - I wonder how many of those instances were actually "insanely great".

No word cloud?

I'm over word clouds by now. If you look at my site, you'll see that I've done my fair share of them, including one generated from the script of the big lebowski.

However, Paul Kedrosky did a pretty nice job with one - check it out at https://twitter.com/pkedrosky/status/127796382684819456

Why is this blocked by my ISP under "Pornography"?

Because you have a poor ISP. No proper ISP should block anything (except maybe child porn, but that's a slippery slope). Change your DNS to either Google's (8.8.8.8) or OpenDNS.

If you live in a repressive country prohibiting pornography you should get a VPN. I'm satisfied with my choice of strongVPN.com

Unfortunately, that repressive regime I live in is my mum's house.

You should get a VPN/shell host somewhere then... or better yet, tell your mom to knock it off.

"tell your mom to knock it off."

There could be young children who have access to that computer or that network.

Just imagine they learned about Apple.

In my years of experience:

1) Filters never block shit. 2) You don't "accidentally" find porn anyway.

But god forbid they hypothetically see a breast.

#2 is patently false and the biggest reason I don't try to train people not to use Google as their URL bar. It is not cool when a tween kid tries to visit the Poly Pocket web site and finds something very different.

#1 is partially true. It won't block somebody trying to get around it, but it will prevent #2 from happening.

And a breast is the least of concerns with some of the trash parked on misspelled domains.

"It is not cool when"

Seriously now, what is the worst case scenario? This is a fabricated concern.

Most definitely. My 8-year old girl is going to have to learn about fisting and BDSM at some point. Preventing that would just make me crazy and over-protective.

Raise your kids like you want, but I would argue that the potential positive gain to be had from telling your daughter that you trust her to be responsible and come to you if she has problems is far far far greater than the: [probability that she will randomly run into that while she is still 'too young'] multiplied by [whatever harm that could conceivably cause].

I know protective parenting is all the rage, but think about it rationally.

I don't even know how to respond. It is not a fabricated concern because it happened to my kids' babysitter in my house.

Having experience with what happens when a kid goes down a pornography rabbit hole, the worst that can happen is a screwed up life. Will seeing porn guarantee a screwed up kid? Of course not. Does porn have the ability to screw a kid up? Yes.

I'll take a few steps to keep my kids and those who come to my house safe so I have the opportunity to provide a foundation so when they come across it, they aren't screwed up by it.

If information can damage your children, you made some terrible mistakes as a parent.

Kids are not miniature adults with the same ability to reason about and process data as adults. Scary movies ae "just information", yet can leave scars on some kids that don't fade for a long time.

I realize the HN crowd is strongly libertarian and wants to believe in individuals having full control of themselves and their environments. I'm drawn to that because I have similar beliefs. But that is something kids grow into. My oldest is almost there, my youngest is not even close.

My generation was the latch key generation. Parents didn't want to be bothered with kids. That gave rise to the overprotected generation (which, believe it or not, my wife and I have spent a lot of effort keeping our kids out of). Maybe we are cycling back to an under-protected philosophy, but I will have no part in that.

You can make whatever assumptions you want about my parenting and even vote accordingly (even though I've tried to keep within the bounds of HN commenting, when it comes to kids, I get passionate and may have stepped out of the lines). I'm comfortable with my four well-adjusted, successful, experimental kids. That is all I care about, though having come from a shitty childhood, I will try to give others information I've gleaned through research and experience to prevent their kids from experiencing the same. I have no problem with them telling me to go to hell.

Oh, and, really, you think you can tell me I've made terrible mistakes as a parent when you know nothing about me but a few sentences you've read on the Internet? You feel good about that?

Kids are not miniature adults with the same ability to reason about and process data as adults.

Correct, which is why you walk them through the process the first few times. Your approach is to hide the information and hope for the best.

But that is something kids grow into

No, it is not. Reasoning is a skill, and an understanding of human psychological impulses and drives is something that should be part of a child's upbringing. This can and should start as soon as the child's old enough to read or watch TV.

Oh, and, really, you think you can tell me I've made terrible mistakes as a parent when you know nothing about me but a few sentences you've read on the Internet? You feel good about that?

Sure. Your kids are eventually going to be voting on what information adults can and cannot have access to, and it sounds like you're not preparing them to make decisions I'd agree with. So I'm objecting as strongly as I can without crossing any lines.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com