
British teenage designer of Summly app hits jackpot - shreex
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16306742
======
garethsprice
"D'Aloisio is by no means a typical teenager - he is polite, highly motivated
and enthusiastic."

Wow, wonder how many other groups they'd be able to get away with stereotyping
like that.

"D'Aloisio is by no means a typical (woman|Mexican|black person|obese person)
- he is polite, highly motivated and enthusiastic."

Ouch.

Makes the BBC sound out of touch, considering that most teenagers are under a
historically unprecedented amount of pressure to succeed (eg:
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6221872>).

~~~
ticks
I'm cynical when I read these sorts of articles, especially when the person
involved has good links through relatives: "the son of a lawyer and an
investment banker".

It should be praised that someone can show initiative like this, but I just
can't help thinking it's happening too easily - especially getting free PR on
the BBC website.

~~~
eigenvector
A couple days ago BBC was carrying the story of a 15-year-old who had become
the youngest person to climb the Seven Summits (the tallest summit on each
continent). He was, of course, the child of two wealthy mountaineers.

------
brador
I understand the writer needs an introduction to the article, but F everything
about starting with this:

"Most teenagers will find any reason under the sun not to do their homework."

No most won't and stop repeating it.

~~~
msinghai
The writer was, at some point in his life, a spoiled teenager. Most of my
friends and other teenage students near me, (By the way, I'm from India, 15)
love to do their homework, as, it's challenging and we feel something after
completing it. Same is the case for most of the teenagers in other parts of my
country, nearly everyone does their homework properly.

~~~
dextorious
"""The writer was, at some point in his life, a spoiled teenager. Most of my
friends and other teenage students near me, (By the way, I'm from India, 15)
love to do their homework, as, it's challenging and we feel something after
completing it."""

Yeah, we sure buy this...

~~~
eigenvector
I am from India. I find the remark quite plausible.

------
tripzilch
Heh. They should have asked him what "ontological detection" means.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=%22ontological+detection%22+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22ontological+detection%22+-summly)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science)>

There's _no way_ he fit a useful semantic network in an iPhone app, and I
doubt he interfaces with an external one such as OpenCyc, or in fact uses any
kind of automated reasoning that can sort of be classified as "ontological".

It's VERY impressive for his age (even if it doesn't actually work that well
outside the demo/testcases, according to a commenter below), but more general
terms such as "it uses Computational Linguistics" would sound just as
impressive and are actually descriptive instead of meaningless buzzwords.

~~~
dextorious
"There's no way he fit a useful semantic network in an iPhone app"

Define "useful".

It doesn't have to be big to be useful. A perfectly fine for summation
purposes semantic network can fit in an iPhone. The bloody thing has several
GBs of storage last time I checked.

------
amigo___
I feel I have to say something positive in light of the other comments; this
is great to see from a 16 year old.

------
llambda
Isn't it redundant to summarize BBC articles? A bit off topic, but I do think
it's a horrible way to demo your app considering that the BBC's online news
outlet has been publishing articles that feature "paragraphs" which are rarely
longer than a single sentence for years. In other words, summarized news.
Still an interesting concept. Quite interesting that this idea has already
been pointed out well over a year ago out by one HNer, Geee, via Open Text
Summarizer. Makes you wonder what he's actually using to summarize the
content.

------
Geee
Interesting that I suggested this idea for someone asking for app ideas on HN
almost 2 years ago.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1450570>

------
lowglow
Regarding the hype of this app -- this is a response from a friend who is a
journalist and has covered this kid's app :

"unfortunately the kid is pretty good at marketing himself, and a 16 year old
app developer makes a good story"

~~~
sumukh1
This is true. This gizmodo article covers how he "markets himself":
[http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app-
deve...](http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app-developer-
cry)

------
davidcann
I don't think a $250,000 _investment_ is considered a "jackpot".

~~~
Maro
It's probably not a jackpot in terms of this project, but imagine how much
this kid will learn in the process. It's a jackpot for his growth as an
entrepreneur, if he sticks with it.

------
toyg
A MacBook when he was 9 ? Damn, I'm 32 and still cannot really justify one.
And I'm sure his parents had nothing to do with his funding arrangements, of
course.

I hate to talk about privilege, and this kid is clearly smart, but the smell
of upper class is hardly bearable, sorry.

~~~
arethuza
Nitpick: being the son of a banker and a lawyer hardly qualifies you as "upper
class", even if that was relevant.

~~~
eatmyshorts
Nitpick: being the son of an investment banker (not a retail banker; there is
a big difference) and a lawyer (barrister in the UK) likely places this family
in the top 1% of income earners in the UK. By most people's definitions, that
qualifies their family as "upper class".

~~~
sp332
In Britain the "upper class" is more about political power than just how much
money you make in a year.

~~~
toyg
That's not been true at least since Blair got into power.

------
citricsquid
App aside, this kid has a fantastic camera presence, although some of his
words made no sense ("quickly and instantaneously") I would guess a large part
of his success is down to his ability to talk so well.

~~~
padolsey
It's odd you say that because the one thing I noticed was that he didn't seem
be very comfortable describing the product in laymen's terms. His word usage
seemed forced and his hand movements too. He had good camera presence insofar
that he was bold and moderate in volume. Beyond that, I don't see what you
mean.

------
brador
Any insight into the tech this is using?

~~~
dmn001
Opening the ipa file, and browsing the contents, there are a couple of plain
text files - containing stop words, dictionaries and others on natural
language processing.

The summarised results from the app are very random - pick any article other
than the test case in the video and you won't get any useful output, 3 random
sentences usually.

~~~
chr15
I thought it was a stretch that D'Aloiso taught himself the linear algebra,
statistics, probability theory, NLP, and machine learning required to
implement such an algorithm. Especially since he doesn't take a deep interest
in programming.

~~~
dmn001
It appears to be an iteration of his previous app Trimit:
[http://www.fastcompany.com/1772823/the-15-year-old-brain-
beh...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1772823/the-15-year-old-brain-behind-the-
trimit-app-and-why-young-app-store-entrepreneurs-can-succee)
[http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/15/trimit-summarizes-emails-
bl...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/15/trimit-summarizes-emails-blog-posts-
and-more-with-a-shake-of-your-iphone/)

I am guessing that he just outsourced the AI/algorithm part based on the
articles content: 'we' and 'The Trimit team' and Nick just designed the UI.
Overall, great concept, but poor execution (in terms of accuracy) and
journalists seem to be buying the hype.

------
pan69
"I find the product and the design of the product much more interesting than
the programming"

Of course. Programming is hard work.

------
looper888
Good job kid. Keep it going

