

Times Haikus - selamattidur
http://haiku.nytimes.com/

======
shalmanese
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.

------
simonsarris
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.

~~~
sw007
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."

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

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

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

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

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

------
gwern

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

Nice; even a seasonal word.

------
graue
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>

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

<https://twitter.com/poetryninja>

~~~
qu4z-2
Not quite haiku, but this is my favourite poetry-twitter-bot.

<https://twitter.com/pentametron>

------
tome
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.

~~~
jacobharris
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.

~~~
sthatipamala
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.

------
ktf
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>)

~~~
jacobharris
I LOVE the HAIKUBOT. Great work

------
conesus

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

------
jdmitch
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?

------
bw2
I wonder if he used any code from a story [1] posted last week.

[http://mobile.theverge.com/culture/2013/3/18/4118916/finding...](http://mobile.theverge.com/culture/2013/3/18/4118916/finding-
hidden-haikus-in-public-tweets)

~~~
jacobharris
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.

------
greenmountin
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.

------
quarterto
Someone complaining "these aren't _real_ haiku" in 3... 2...

~~~
martythemaniak
The cadence of these

Don't match my expectations

Try harder NY Times

~~~
lurker14
Haiku Challenges Expectation of Cadence Counting Syllables

~~~
martythemaniak
The real challenge is

to manage expectations

and make us happy

------
danso
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.

~~~
ktf
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 :)

~~~
jacobharris
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...

~~~
mjcohen
the modern haiku

is no longer restricted

five seven five haa!

