I've been automatically doing the same thing with reddit comments for the last year: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/user/haiku_robot" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/user/haiku_robot</a><p>If you sort by upvotes, there's a number of gems in there.
Oh my I <i>adore</i> this.<p><pre><code> 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."
</code></pre>
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.<p>These haikus are the perfect amount of prose to package up NYT stories.
This is really neat. I hope it stays up after April 1st.<p>Autogenerated haiku fans might also want to check out Twitter Haiku, which generates haikus from your recent tweets: <a href="https://sleepy-mesa-7562.herokuapp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://sleepy-mesa-7562.herokuapp.com/</a><p>It strings words together randomly so it's a bit more dada. An example from my tweets:<p><pre><code> Leaving shut when pain
Like em sleeping no day keep
Me dream normal sure
</code></pre>
It was written by Patrick Estabrook, a fellow student(?) here at Hacker School. Looks like the source is on GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/patrickmestabrook/HaikuGen" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/patrickmestabrook/HaikuGen</a>
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.
Awesome! Similar in spirit to (though far cooler than) a simple project I threw together to learn/play with Ruby:<p><a href="http://haikubot.herokuapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://haikubot.herokuapp.com/</a><p>Not sure my single Heroku dyno with stand up to any kind of HN-hammering, so click with caution :)<p>(Or see <a href="https://github.com/keithfancher/HaikuBot" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/keithfancher/HaikuBot</a>)
if:<p>in_ruby=i=o=<p>gets();taken_care_of_by_a=<p>function_like = puts(i)<p>(from <a href="http://web.colby.edu/jasperry/2011/11/10/a-ruby-haiku/" rel="nofollow">http://web.colby.edu/jasperry/2011/11/10/a-ruby-haiku/</a>)<p>and:<p>Haskell is concise<p>Functional well-typed and neat<p>It is like Haiku<p>(from <a href="http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haiku" rel="nofollow">http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haiku</a>)<p>and:<p>Journo is coffee's<p>literate publishing app<p>terse prose, wordy code<p>(inspired by <a href="http://ashkenas.com/literate-coffeescript/" rel="nofollow">http://ashkenas.com/literate-coffeescript/</a>)<p>...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.<p><a href="http://mobile.theverge.com/culture/2013/3/18/4118916/finding-hidden-haikus-in-public-tweets" rel="nofollow">http://mobile.theverge.com/culture/2013/3/18/4118916/finding...</a>
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.
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 <i>generally</i> serves as an independent clause?<p>So:<p><pre><code> What she has given
them is institutional
hagiography
</code></pre>
is less "aesthetic" than:<p><pre><code> The story's not clear;
Durer may have cooked it up
just to do a nude
</code></pre>
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 <i>not</i> a noun. It would be interesting to see how much more it would filter/improve the auto-generated haikus.