Download the full collection of Paul Graham essays in ePub for easy reading | Hacker News Reader

Download the full collection of Paul Graham essays in ePub for easy reading

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104 pointsofou40 comments

I just finished 'Hackers & Painters' by PG, it's a really nice holiday read. The tone is light, but he gets you thinking about the world.

The book is from 2004 so the chapter about 'the modern web' was not very ground breaking anymore, it did gave me a nostalgic smile :)

My brief review: the essays on technology are quite good, even great. The essays on politics and culture are shallow and bad.

PG is a good example of violating the Tom Watson quote: “… I’m smart in spots, and I stay around those spots.”

However, it’s helpful that PG writes political stuff. You shouldn’t have to be good a politics to practice it.

wow Watson is very smart.

Any time PG strays from tech - and specifically VC-funded startup tech, but not always - the results get increasingly bad.

This is an interesting counterpoint to “Hackers and Painters” and is worth a read. https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

As someone who has a MA of fine arts and teaches programming to (among other arts) painters I think this criticism is spot on.

If I'd mention Graham's point to our esteemed art history profs they would probably laugh at the man. Especially given how much the approaches and mindsets of actual painters differ. The only thing I'd say is: "Some painters share similar traits with some hackers". But this could be A) literally said about every two subsets of humanity and B) not all of those traits are positive.

Nice!

I made something similar a while back (https://github.com/MrPike/RSS2Ebook) to scratch a similar itch (No idea if it still works).

I made this other thing https://github.com/asdofindia/blogspot-to-ebook/ to scratch this other itch.

Sorry if this is ignorant.

But if I read out the essays on a YouTube episode would that be infringing copyright or annoying anyone if I give full credit ?

That would certainly be copyright infringement.

Thank you

"Annoying"—smart to ask. Infringement doesn't have any effects if the copyright holder takes no action. Holders sometimes even prefer their content to spread via "infringers", such as transcripts of commercials which are often re-performed in recordings by voice talent as samples of their work (demos). The client who paid the agency to write the script usually prefers more people hear about them. This is so common even SAG-Aftra, the union representing some voice talent, suggests (in writing) that it is fine to transcribe and re-record commercial scripts.

Depends. I think simply reading it would be infringement, you would have to add some substantive value. A good example is that youtubers will discuss wired reddit threads and events. Technically they do not own the copyright to any of the comments; however, it could be argued because they are doing voice overs + animation of the events how they see it, then it's a "derivative work" at that point.

In this case specific case though, i highly doubt that pg will take any action. The motive behind his work always seems to get the word out and not make a quick buck, by that logic then someone "infringing" on his essays is actually a net positive for him because more people will now read his work.

If you want to do it, just record one or two. Upload them as unlisted. Then reply to pg on Twitter, telling him, “Look, this is what I made. Is it cool with you if I continue, and may I make them public?”.

He has already given his okay to some GPT-3 based answer generator which was posted here a few months back.

Would be nice to have it in audio format

Convert to epub and use text to speech on your e-book reader.

Not the best, but you didn't ask for the best :)

Related to the copyright discussion in another thread... does anyone have a sense of legalities if someone recorded audio versions of these and released them for free? I suspect you'd need the author's permission.

That would be infringement—but there is no effect if the copyright holder takes no action.

[From another comment]: Holders sometimes even prefer their content to spread via "infringers", such as transcripts of commercials which are often re-performed in recordings by voice talent as samples of their work (demos). The client who paid the agency to write the script usually prefers more people hear about them. This is so common even SAG-Aftra, the union representing some voice talent, suggests (in writing) that it is fine to transcribe and re-record commercial scripts.

Is this legal (is there an explicit license allowing redistribution)?

Well it’s not explicitly disallowed.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gfaq.html

> Can I mirror an essay on my site?

> I'd rather you linked to it instead.

Well, the author’s preferences should be ideally followed IMHO.

> I'd rather you linked to it instead. I like to keep track of which ones people read, because it gives me ideas of what to write about next. I also like to be able to fix typos.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140701175447/https://www.ycomb...

  Legal

  TERMS OF USE

  When you click on a link, our server will send you the corresponding page.

That is for YCombinator though (and also says all items are copyright YC if I read it correctly - not sure how hacker news falls into that).

The absence of a copyright or license notice implies full rights to the author

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_notice

There's no redistribution happening. Running code on my pc to download and view content from a copyright holder's website is commonly called “browsing the web”.

Edit: strike that, the “example output” is in fact a complete copy of the intended output, not just a stub. They should probably clear that with the author or remove it.

Yeah. It just goes against the spirit of the internet to take someone’s blog and package it up as a GitHub repo without their explicit approval.

The GitHub only contains a csv with links to the blog, so it seems to respect Paul's request.

The have a releases page that contains the final epub

I'm using the same RSS that Paul explicitly shared on his website created by Aaron Swartz [1].

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/rss.html

When someone uses the “But my HTTP requests!” defense, they’re either being intentionally obtuse, really do believe they’re in the right, or both.

This isn't redistribution. It's a tool to download it for your own personal use. If this is illegal then so is using Firefox to browse the web page (It also fetches the content for your own personal use).

If you redistribute the generated epub, that's a different issue of course (though that is just as possible to do with copy-paste or saving the html in a browser). Don't ban tools for their misuse.

The code is not redistribution. The csv is not redistribution.

graham.epub and graham.mobi in the root of the project is very much redistribution.

https://github.com/ofou/graham-essays/blob/main/graham.epub

https://github.com/ofou/graham-essays/blob/main/graham.mobi

You're right, I missed those. OP should probably remove those from the repository (and those on the releases page), just to stay in the clear.

I'm sure PG wouldn't mind, these essays are in public domain under his blog.

They are not in the public domain.

    time.sleep(0.05)  # half sec/article is ~2min, be nice with servers!

Looks like a typo there :)

woops! Thanks for pointing it out!

The “examples” appear to be the complete output, i.e., are actually full copies of all the essays. That's probably not a great idea given that there's no explicit license on the source material, that he's said elsewhere he'd prefer people link rather than rehost, and has a book of many of the essays who's publisher may or may not have purchased the distribution rights.

It'd probably be less intensive for the server if it used HTTP KeepAlive and no delays, it's not very much data, so minimizing HTTP overhead by "getting it over with" is probably more polite.

Is there a PDF version of it?

Nope yet, but you can easily create one using `pandoc`.

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