Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
user: PaulHoule
created: 2010-12-10
karma: 108694

                                                                       ,-,
                                                                 _.-=;~ /_
                                                              _-~   '     ;.
                                                          _.-~     '   .-~-~`-._
                                                    _.--~~:.             --.____88
                                  ____.........--~~~. .' .  .        _..-------~~
                         _..--~~~~               .' .'             ,'
                     _.-~                        .       .     ` ,'
                   .'                                    :.    ./
                 .:     ,/          `                   ::.   ,'
               .:'     ,(            ;.                ::. ,-'
              .'     ./'.`.     . . /:::._______.... _/:.o/
             /     ./'. . .)  . _.,'               `88;?88|
           ,'  . .,/'._,-~ /_.o8P'                  88P ?8b
        _,'' . .,/',-~    d888P'                    88'  88|
     _.'~  . .,:oP'        ?88b              _..--- 88.--'8b.--..__
    :     ...' 88o __,------.88o ...__..._.=~- .    `~~   `~~      ~-.
    `.;;;:='    ~~            ~~~                ~-    -       -   -
Software developer, community photographer and wanderer between worlds.

I live on a farm near Ithaca, NY. I've given talks on nuclear energy, chatbots, the semantic web and other topics and my publications have been cited in scientific and medical journals as well as Wired Magazine and Nintendo Power.

Some systems I've worked on: a voice chat service for the Brazilian market, the market leading open access e-Print server, e-business systems for car dealerships, wineries and a pallet recycling company, decision support systems for sales territory assignment, a collaborative visual editor for knowledge graphs, a social network for a secret society, a rich metadata database for the global performing arts with hundreds of Postgres tables that we should have built in RDF, a similarity metric for generic concepts (people, places, creative works, ...), a search engine for patents powered by a neural network, conversion of Freebase to an RDF graph with perfect referential integrity, an automatically curated collection of more than 1 million images of thousands of topics, a study of statistics of the sound of crumpling paper, and three efforts to commercialize foundation models before LLMs.

I served on a committee researching the application of OWL, RDF and other semantic web concepts to the ISO 20022 financial messaging standard which culminated in the publication of ISO/TR 22126-2:2025 "OWL representation of the ISO 20022 metamodel and e-repository"

My submissions to Hacker News are chosen by myself working together with YOShInOn, a smart RSS reader that couples a workflow engine with a BERT-based classification, clustering and recommendation engine.

Software-related side projects are going slow while I focus my effort on building up a large stock of photographs to post to my socials. These show up first here:

https://gen5.info/fox/

Astronaut of science fiction and fantasy. North American Weeaboo. 狐系ケモノミミ

paul.houle@ontology2.com (607) 821 1243

submissions:

A strong, reversible, and conformal adhesive gel for diverse plants
3 points | 0 comments
Prognostic value of adding delayed phase to cardiac computed tomography
2 points | 0 comments
Improving the circular economy adoption for near-end-of-life offshore wind farms
3 points | 0 comments
In plain sight: A new pink-fruited species of Actaea L. from New York
2 points | 0 comments
Using biotelemetry to assess drone effects on whale sharks
2 points | 0 comments
Autonomous underwater glider passively follows sperm whales by their voices
2 points | 0 comments
Anthropogenically Induced Geophagy in Gibraltar Barbary Macaques
2 points | 0 comments
Mixed-use districts don't reverse the dismal economics of sports venues
1 points | 0 comments
Improving the carbon footprint assessment of milk production
3 points | 0 comments
Object-Level Explanations for Image Geolocation Models: A GeoGuessr Use-Case
2 points | 0 comments
Detection of animal sounds using data augmentation and transfer learning
3 points | 0 comments
Execution Feedback Matters More Than Pipeline Topology in 1-3B Code Generation
1 points | 0 comments
Barocal can cool your food and drink by squeezing a hunk of plastic crystals
2 points | 1 comments
Multichannel soft microfluidic force sensors for application in laparoscopy
1 points | 0 comments
Robotic fish prototype cuts aquaculture stress while inspecting nets and water
3 points | 0 comments
Sprite: From Static Mockups to Engine-Ready Game UI
1 points | 0 comments
Enhancing Hydrogen Production Efficiency Through Magnetic Field Application
1 points | 0 comments
Secure On-Premise Deployment of Open-Weights Large Language Models in Radiology
2 points | 0 comments
A spatial code aligns sensory maps in the nose and brain
5 points | 0 comments
Ben Lerner Hears Ghosts in the Wires
2 points | 0 comments
USGS Finds 328 Years of Lithium Imports Buried in Appalachia
7 points | 0 comments
The Neat Little Vehicles That Run a Cemetery
4 points | 0 comments
Forgery and Wage Theft: Playground Contractors Hit with Fines
3 points | 0 comments
Ubiquitination of glycogen and metabolites in cells and tissues
2 points | 0 comments
2026 Volvo XC60 T8 Recharge Review: Solid Combo of Competence and Comfort
4 points | 0 comments
Mechanical forces from the beating heart may help prevent cancer cell growth
6 points | 0 comments
The often-ignored system controlling your mood, memory, and focus
3 points | 0 comments
2026 Toyota Sequoia Capstone Review: Terrible Use of $90k
4 points | 0 comments
What studying animals teaches us about toxic work environments
3 points | 0 comments
Solar booms in industrial US Midwest as energy crisis persists
10 points | 0 comments