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British teenage designer of Summly app hits jackpot

bbc.co.uk

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Re: British teenage designer of Summly app hits jackpot

#31

Post by tripzilch »

garethsprice wrote: post #15

"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 unprec…

> "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.

Here on HN, try "Redditor" ;-)

Re: British teenage designer of Summly app hits jackpot

#32

Post by msinghai »

brador wrote: post #16

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.

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.

Re: British teenage designer of Summly app hits jackpot

#33

Post by raphman »

dmn001 wrote: post #22
brador wrote: post #19

Any insight into the tech this is using?

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.

Is there any legal and simple way of obtaining the ipa file without using iTunes (i.e. on Linux)?

Re: British teenage designer of Summly app hits jackpot

#34

Post by eatmyshorts »

arethuza wrote: post #13
toyg wrote: post #3

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.

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

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".

Re: British teenage designer of Summly app hits jackpot

#35

Post by tripzilch »

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

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22ontological+detection%22+...

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.

Re: British teenage designer of Summly app hits jackpot

#36

Post by sp332 »

eatmyshorts wrote: post #34
arethuza wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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".

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

Re: British teenage designer of Summly app hits jackpot

#37

Post by brador »

msinghai wrote: post #32
brador wrote: post #16

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.

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.

It's the BBC, so I guess the writer is from the UK. In which case, she is propogating the "I'm an idiot and I can't be bovered to work" attitude that seems prevalent among some of the youth there. Shame really, and from the BBC too.

Re: British teenage designer of Summly app hits jackpot

#38

Post by toyg »

sp332 wrote: post #36
eatmyshorts wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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

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

Re: British teenage designer of Summly app hits jackpot

#39

Post by rudiger »

toyg wrote: post #3

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.

What's so privileged about getting a MacBook 7 years ago? Why does it matter that a 9-year-old kid's parents handled the "funding arrangements" (ie. bought their son a laptop)? And clearly he could justify one: video editing and iPhone development starting from when he was 12 years old.

Re: British teenage designer of Summly app hits jackpot

#40

Post by wtvanhest »

calpaterson wrote: post #28
wtvanhest wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it does. Less than 20% of Americans make over 100k per year. Entry level in IB makes 70+ min. After a graduate degree we are talking 100 to 300k per year. By the time that person has had kids, especially a nine year old they are probably making 500k min. I don't know British IB salaries, but I imagine they are as high. Law could be anywhere from 50k to 1mm so it really depends.

You (and the grandparent) are misapplying the American conception of class (money) to a Briton. It's about birth and schooling here - money is irrelevant. The boy seems likely to be middle class. (Upper class means a member of the aristocracy in the UK, FWIW).

Got it. Good to know
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