Times Haikus | Hacker News Reader

Times Haikus

haiku.nytimes.com

126 pointsselamattidur35 comments

I've been automatically doing the same thing with reddit comments for the last year: http://www.reddit.com/user/haiku_robot

If you sort by upvotes, there's a number of gems in there.

Oh 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.

Isn'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.

The process is described in the about section (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."

Ah, 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.

Yes, 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"

One approximate hack that works pretty well is to count the number of blocks of vowels separated by consonants. It breaks on some words, but was close enough to use for something I was working on. (Datamining rhymes from lyrics.)

Slight tangent but if you love short stories then you'll probably like the famous "6 worded story" by Ernest Hemingway. Unbelievable that he could write such an emotional story in 6 words. If you haven't read it - it's here:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Here's a collection of modern-day 6-word memoirs: http://www.smithmag.net/sixwords/

This wasn't Hemingway. It's been traced back to several newspapers from the early 1900s.

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/28/baby-shoes/

Because of the auto-scroll, this was a bit out of reach: http://haiku.nytimes.com/about

There is also a link in the upper-right corner of the page that avoids this problem.

Thanks, my fault, Ghostery completely hid that from me.

    I slugged two shots of
    plum brandy, convinced we had
    wandered back in time.

Nice; even a seasonal word.

This 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/

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

As long as we're talking autogenerated haiku on Twitter...

https://twitter.com/poetryninja

Not quite haiku, but this is my favourite poetry-twitter-bot.

https://twitter.com/pentametron

This 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.

There 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.

It would be nice if lines didn't end with prepositions or 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.

Awesome! Similar in spirit to (though far cooler than) a simple project I threw together to learn/play with Ruby:

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)

I LOVE the HAIKUBOT. Great work

    Stellar job journos
    But this raises the question
    How much does it cost

if:

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/)

and:

Haskell is concise

Functional well-typed and neat

It is like Haiku

(from 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/)

...then why is terse programming less expressive and terse literature more expressive?

I wonder if he used any code from a story [1] posted last week.

http://mobile.theverge.com/culture/2013/3/18/4118916/finding...

Sorry, 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.

If 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.

Someone complaining "these aren't real haiku" in 3... 2...

The cadence of these

Don't match my expectations

Try harder NY Times

Haiku Challenges Expectation of Cadence Counting Syllables

The real challenge is

to manage expectations

and make us happy

I'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.

Eh, 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 :)

According 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...

the modern haiku

is no longer restricted

five seven five haa!

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