All of pg's hacker-news comments [using the archived post data] | Hacker News Reader

All of pg's hacker-news comments [using the archived post data]

jsomers.net

9 pointsjsomers11 comments

Now all you have to do is feed it to a travesty generator, and you can have your very own PG bot.

Sample output:

This is the least useful time to have done that would lead to horrible bugs. But I don't think boundp exists either. So far I haven't needed it. readall keeps calling read till it runs out of input, and returns itself. This turns out to be quite handy. is is just CL eq (or rather eql) Unset variables are not null; that would not be hard, but their valuations are not null; that would not be hard, but their valuations are not null; that would not be hard, but their valuations are not null; that would have reacted so angrily if I'd said Microsoft was dead in 1995. They would have been ambivalent about it. Why pre-announce it? To prevent people from using competitors. MSFT used to be called progn. (It's surprising how much better that little change makes...

That 'valuations are not null' loop is pretty trippy. Fed through Apple's Text-To-Speech engine, we have some grade A techno mixing fodder...

Where did you get that generator? I want one!

I just fed it into the first Google result for "travesty generator":

http://www.eskimo.com/~rstarr/poormfa/travesty.html

(I only fed in part of the PG text, though, as the generator takes longer the more text you feed in... probably melting this poor guy's web server.)

You can find code for other generators online, like jwz's:

http://www.jwz.org/dadadodo/

Wow. This is almost stalker-esque. If you find yourself bidding on his used keyboard on ebay, seek help.

I enjoy pg's writing. in toto, these comments effectively comprise one giant essay, except that they're more focused. So why not?

In the same way, I don't regret reading Feynman's, Lewis Carroll's, or James Joyce's letters. Thoughtful people tend to write thoughtfully, whatever the context.

Incidentally, I probably would buy Knuth's keyboard.

It just seems that this link: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg has all the same data, and more "context", as you can see his comments and peoples replies.

Also, the majority of his comments are somewhat, uh, boring when you see them all laid out. Just simple comments/replies a lot of the time really.

I would hardly call this a "giant essay", it's more like half of a Twitter feed...

Unless I'm mistaken, that page doesn't go back more than a day, which would mean it has less than a 1% of the data.

Could be there's a "more" button I'm not seeing, though.

Surely any devout pg stalker reloads once an hour. Probably with a ruby or arc script.

Now that you mentioned it I bet a twitter feed with all of pg's comments would have a lot of subscribers, all you need is to throw in some random advertising and it might be a good way to monetize the crowd's obsession with pg.

The amount of flattery pg receives on this site is sickening.

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