Word cloud of Paul Graham's essays (applet, see comment for png) | Hacker News Reader

Word cloud of Paul Graham's essays (applet, see comment for png)

wordle.net

66 pointskylec39 comments

I like how prominent the words in the Grahamism "make something people want" are - it really shows his commitment to that philosophy.

The interesting thing is I counted about 17 instances of "make something people want" in pg's essays and the number of times the individual words are used is much much higher:

    742 make
    753 something
    1589 people
    719 want

fyi, here's the Ruby code for grabbing the text of all the essays:

  require 'open-uri'
  require 'hpricot'
  
  text = ""
  
  listing = Hpricot(open("http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html"))
  
  (listing/"font"/"a").each do |a|
    url = a.attributes["href"]
    
    puts url
    
    essay = Hpricot(open("http://www.paulgraham.com/"+url))
    essay.search("script").remove
    essay.search("link").remove
    essay.search("meta").remove
    essay.search("style").remove
    
    text += essay.inner_text.gsub(/[\n\r]/, " ") + " "
  
  end
  
  File.open("pg.txt", 'w') { |f| f.write(text) }

It is polite to sleep for a second between requests when scraping.

Ruby code is so damn elegant. :)

If the applet doesn't load, here's a screenshot: http://modos.org/pg.png

What do the colors represent?

The colors, unfortunately, don't represent anything - they're generated by the applet to easily differentiate between words

They are really nice colors, though. Wow. The whole thing is. This is the kind of stuff I'd expect to see on a carefully crafted magazine cover, not generated on-the-fly with a script.

Yeah I was thinking the same thing. If nothing else, PG now has some sweet cover art for his next book.

The applet is retarded if there is no interaction.

An image is enough.

fantastic, and pg's essays are great. but why is this so important? please, please, please, please, please, please, please don't become sycophants. that's what makes these social link sites so terrible.

It's just a cool script, run on a set of work that most of us are familiar with. What's so wrong with that?

I think some people might be reading too much into the intent of the author.

I'd like to see one of Hacker news.

ok.

http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/35745/reddit_homepage_minus_%...

This is sweet - a visualization of the collective psyche.

It would also be interesting to see one with websites filtered out.

Wired.com is the largest item in that cloud. That's kind of interesting. I wonder why Wired.com is mentioned so often. Advertisements?

The dataset is available via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=218782 and a tag cloud is available via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227932

It'd be PG, Techcrunch, and twitter really big and the good stuff small.

Did you write whatever generated this yourself, or is it open source?

Neither, unfortunately. It's a website that generates beautiful word clouds, so I decided to make one of pg's essays.

Where is this website?

It's Wordle - here's a link to the create page: http://wordle.net/create

As an aside, Wordle runs under Google App Engine (http://tinyurl.com/5gxkc7)

as an aside, the author of Wordle, Jonathan Feinberg, played drums for Lisa Loeb and They Might Be Giants.

http://www.mrfeinberg.com

Thanks!

This is pretty, and pretty cool. The palette is very nice.

I got a question for all you people who follow PG real close. Do you think 23 year old PG would be following someone like 2008 PG this obsessively, or be sick with people who worship someone like this?

Nothing against PG. Just curious.

I'm not really one of the people to whom the question is being posed, but my guess is 23-year-old pg would be too busy working on his startup to care about, let alone get "sick" about, what complete strangers choose to spend their time being interested in.

AFAIK pg was 29 or 30 when he started Viaweb.

it's funny how you agree with LPTS's main point but also insulted him.

I don't agree with him -- I have a ton of respect for pg (and I happen to really like this word cloud), but I'm relatively new here and I didn't want to act like I was speaking for people who've been following his work longer and more closely than I have.

LPTS said pg-obession is bad and made the point in terms of what pg himself wouldn't have done. you agreed that pg himself wouldn't have done it. therefore, like it or not, you agree with LPTS.

I suppose I didn't explicitly say that "young pg" would be into hero worship, but I didn't mean to imply the opposite -- I just thought it was a silly thing to be talking about. I was trying to reframe the argument and I guess I didn't succeed.

All these people seem to admire PG, but the way to emulate him is to stop trying to emulate someone else so strongly, stop trying to create an identity by taking giant pieces from people you admire, and take the risk of digging into discovering this stuff for yourself. The path PG tread is now tired and stale. What made PG good was that path he made. But there should be more cognitive dissonance between admiring him as a trailblazer and worshiping him incessantly while trying to emulate the same path he walked.

I like PG too. Don't get me wrong. I like reading his stuff. But this fanboy shit depresses me.

I know you didn't mean to imply to opposite, but you did. Someone who's so busy wouldn't have time for obsessing. As you said.

You only have one life. It's smart to collect data points from other people's successes and failures to shape your ideas. Otherwise, you might waste time following low expected value paths.

>Do you think 23 year old PG would be following someone like 2008 PG this obsessively

I'm sure there's a 23 year old "PG" who follows PG right now.

> Do you think 23 year old PG would be following someone like 2008 PG this obsessively

Yes, especially if he's giving stock tips from the future. ;)

The image looks wacky in Safari if you roll your mouse up and down. It does partial rendering of it, but what renders first varies. Firefox is boring and doesn't do partial rendering. I uploaded to youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dStWA3oHbhg

Yeah, it did that for me as well (Safari 3.1) and then it crashed.

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