

Word cloud of Paul Graham's essays (applet, see comment for png) - kylec
http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/34828/Paul_Graham%27s_Essays

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

~~~
tlrobinson
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) }

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

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

~~~
pg
What do the colors represent?

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

~~~
technoguyrob
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.

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

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joshuaxls
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.

~~~
Prrometheus
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.

------
thaiyoshi
I'd like to see one of Hacker news.

~~~
jasonkester
ok.

[http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/35745/reddit_homepage_minus_%...](http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/35745/reddit_homepage_minus_%22points%22)

~~~
johnyzee
This is sweet - a visualization of the collective psyche.

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

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

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

~~~
eyudkowsky
Where is this website?

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

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

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

<http://www.mrfeinberg.com>

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

------
LPTS
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.

~~~
izaidi
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.

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

~~~
izaidi
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.

~~~
xlnt
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.

~~~
izaidi
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.

~~~
LPTS
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.

------
xlnt
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>

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

