
Watch pg write an essay in real time - shawndumas
https://code.stypi.com/hacks/13sentences?doomed=true
======
austenallred
This is fantastic. I've been an addict of
[http://reddit.com/r/artisanvideos](http://reddit.com/r/artisanvideos) for
quite a while, because there's something fascinating and enlightening about
watching artisans perform their work (for example, Alexis Ohanian designing
the Hipmunk bellhop logo -
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYEQpwduyPU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYEQpwduyPU)).

It's especially interesting to note that there are few, if any, words in the
entire essay that he didn't edit multiple times. A lot of times when you read
something as well-written as PGs essays you get the feeling that the person
writing them just sits down and hammers out brilliance. But in reality, at
least in the case of PG - and I would venture a guess that most great authors
are similar - greatness comes through sweat and repetition more than raw
talent, until eventually that thing becomes second nature - or does it ever? I
would kill to watch some of the great authors of all-time (a la Shakespeare,
Hugo, Dickens etc.) write in real-time - it would be fascinating to know what
their process was like.

~~~
dylandrop
Everyone revises their work, many times over. But yes the great authors do as
well. I think this tool is cool for that reason.

“I have rewritten–often several times–every word I have ever written. My
pencils outlast their erasers.” -- Vladimir Nabokov

But are you really trying to compare a bullet-point style blog post (not
really an essay) to Shakespeare, Hugo, or Dickens?

~~~
justin66
> Everyone revises their work, many times over. But yes the great authors do
> as well.

You state that as if it's some universal truth but it's certainly not. We know
that Asimov only ever wrote a first draft and a final draft and Heinlein
wouldn't even create a first draft most of the time. Neither of them is a
Nabokov or Hemingway but they certainly fall into the category of "everyone."

~~~
cafard
Quite, and Ben Jonson writes

'I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakspeare,
that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My
answer hath been, "Would he had blotted a thousand," which they thought a
malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance who
chose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted;
and to justify mine own candour, for I loved the man, and do honour his memory
on this side idolatry as much as any.'

([http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5134/pg5134.txt](http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5134/pg5134.txt))

------
dredmorbius
For a roll-your-own version of this, you can use the 'script(1)' shell
command, the timing argument, console editor of your choice, and
'scriptreply(1)'.

Script is a Linux utility which makes a typescript of a terminal session.
Traditionally this was mostly of use for shell sessions which _didn 't_
involve full-screen (ncurses) utilities, as the cursor-movement characters
would typically present a jumbled mash on your screen.

Using the '-t' (or '\--timing') arguments sends timing between movements to
stderr, or the specified file. With this, you can then replay a typescript
file, with the timing information, to show what was actually presented on
screen. An optional argument varies the replay speed.

I've made use of this to log and replay serial console activity (available on
most servers through IPMI or related hands-off / lights-out management tools),
which can be both instructive and helpful in documenting steps.

Further fun may be had by playing the output of scriptreplay through the
phosphor(6x) X11 screensaver hack.

------
trhaynes
pg actually posted this himself, 1769 days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495336)

~~~
jeroen
That was on Etherpad. I wondered how the same text ended up on Stypi and how
they are related. I found this:

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/09/yc-funded-stypi-is-
etherpad...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/09/yc-funded-stypi-is-etherpad-
reborn/)

I guess pg exported his text from Etherpad and gave it to the Stypi team.

------
insteadof
Needs a moving background showing his face as he types up each word.

~~~
krapp
No offense to pg, but I don't think that would make it any more interesting to
see.

~~~
meritt
It's a tongue-in-cheek reference to Kevin Rose's idea for a writing/blogging
platform.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6UW0JY5PUs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6UW0JY5PUs)

~~~
krapp
I know, so was my reply. Watching a writer's face while they write is probably
about as captivating as watching paint dry in a dark room.

~~~
avalaunch
I think the OP agrees with you and was being sarcastic with his comment.

It made me chuckle regardless.

------
fdej
Just waiting for someone to quote a snapshot out of context.

------
loteck
The interesting part about watching this isn't watching it being written. It's
watching it being edited. What to leave on the cutting room floor is always
the hardest part, and Stypi's "Doomed" feature does a great job of showing you
how someone comes to the decision to self-edit.

~~~
thirdtruck
Agreed, speaking as someone who's just reached the 30 hour mark on my current
round of edits to a novel.

------
goldenkey
Cool. However, I feel that watching it, doesn't really give the full effect,
requires tons of patience too. Couldn't the editing data be visualized in some
data science illustration for a real insight into what it represents?

~~~
alttab
Maybe like the final draft, overlayed with a heatmap of how much editing was
done, then on clicking, provide a tree like comment history of each branching
edit. This could show the anatomy of how different people form thoughts in
written word. T his is an insight we could learn much from at a massive scale.

I would imagine Facebook or another hosted blogging platform could get this
data with relative ease.

~~~
goldenkey
That sounds like an awesome type of interactive visualization. Great idea.

------
sblom
I seem to remember seeing this very same demo on Etherpad back when that was a
thing.

------
shadeless
It would be awesome to see something like this with code - on hackathons
especially.

~~~
wcbeard10
That would probably be insightful, but at least we have commits.

------
JumpCrisscross
This functionality seems like it would be right at home in Google Docs.

~~~
krrrh
This functionality was in etherpad, which was also YC-funded and also demoed
their software with a playback of a pg essay.

While etherpad lives on as an open source project the original company/team
was acquired by google and this resulted in google docs getting real time
cursor movement and edits shortly thereafter (google docs originally updated
via polling and often had collisions).

I think it's a shame that google never implemented more of the core ideas from
etherpad, such as playback and contributor text highlighting. It's still the
best online collaborative tool I've ever used. I had experiences writing
letters to politicians in real time with dozens of anonymous strangers who we
gathered via twitter, and collaborative grant proposal writing sessions that I
can only describe as thrilling. It's also been fun to use etherpad to
collaboratively take notes during conferences, and truly fascinating to replay
and see how largely anonymous editors quickly start taking on certain roles
without any prior discussion--one person gets very interested in fixing
spelling mistakes, someone else gets really good at finding relevant urls for
background information and links to slides, someone else just barrels ahead
with whatever the presenter is currently talking about knowing that the others
will fill in the gaps. A lot of the innovation happened in subset hardier, but
etherpad made it way more accessible and this useful.

Etherpad deserved all the attention that google wave was receiving at the time
because it really delivered on the promise of a truely flexible tool for
collaborating and communicating more effectively than email.

~~~
cbhl
> _I think it 's a shame that google never implemented more of the core ideas
> from etherpad, such as playback and contributor text highlighting_

> _Etherpad deserved all the attention that google wave was receiving at the
> time_

I find your post confusing because I thought that Google Wave _did_ have
playback and contributor text highlighting.

I suspect that the reason Docs never gained these features was that Wave was
supposed to replace it, but AFAICT Wave never saw the kind of user adoption it
needed (probably due to its sluggish performance) and was killed off.

------
BlackDeath3
What's the highlighting about?

~~~
mttwrnr
This was my favorite part of this product, the highlighted text is "doomed"
and will be altered or removed at some point in the future. It's great to see
how much editing happens after the initial draft.

~~~
BlackDeath3
Very cool :)

------
atmosx
This is fantastic, I thought I had some sort of dyslexia, because of my non-
straight, back and forth type of writing :-P

Good to know _I 'm not alone_. The more I read HN the more I find people, who
are successful in their field and have the same behaviors as me. It's relaxing
:-)

------
petergreen
I'd really love to hear pg's comments of wether there is a piece of software,
a tool, that could help him write the essays. Is there something that
constantly comes to his mind when he writes, in form of "if only there was X
so that I could Y".

Or anyone else's

~~~
pg
Not really. Vi is all I need. I could probably think of things I'd like but
don't realize I need. E.g. controlling an editor directly with my brain, so I
didn't need to type. Hard to say about the narrower question of whether there
is anything I'd want that's possible with existing technology.

~~~
petergreen
Thank you Paul. I'm missing an ability to collapse / uncollapse parts of
written text (meaningfully), so you could see only the plan, or summaries of
each chapter, or paragraphs, etc. It would require a very good interface to be
useful, but imagine the implications for consuming / learning when knowledge
is presented in this way.

honestly been wanting to build this for myself forever

~~~
corry
Have you tried using Workflowy? More of a list app, but could allow for very
structured writing as well...

~~~
petergreen
I'm a big fan. I referred 20+ people to it, so they gave me a pro acc. Love
it, but it's not for writing at all.

------
mrcactu5
who is pg? and is the playback function part of stypi?

~~~
bhaumik
Paul Graham, cofounder of Y Combinator. This is the essay he's writing:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html)

------
itchitawa
Is there a way to verify this is actually Paul Graham writing, not someone
else who reenacted it based on the published essay?

~~~
jonnathanson
I guess I'd answer the question with a _cui bono_ question. Why would someone
of Paul Graham's standing need to fake this? What would be his incentive to do
so? He has nothing to gain from faking it. And I can't think of anyone else
who stands to gain, either.

Occam's Razor explanation is that he just thought it would be cool to show.

~~~
itchitawa
Without the link from his own site we can't tell who even claims to have done
the typing. Someone who isn't PG may have all sorts of reasons to fake it.
Gentle suggestion - if you think the answer to someone's comment is obvious
then it's a good sign there's a miscommunication and you should consider other
interpretations.

~~~
jonnathanson
_" Gentle suggestion - if you think the answer to someone's comment is obvious
then it's a good sign there's a miscommunication and you should consider other
interpretations."_

To the contrary, I didn't think the answer to his comment was obvious. I don't
claim to have the correct answer. And if that's the tone my comment conveyed,
i.e., a dismissive one, then I probably conveyed myself improperly. That was
not my intent.

------
hawkharris
How can I speed up playback? I signed up for an account, but this doesn't seem
to be an option in the actual app.

------
rch
So much fun, but why on new years?? I'd love to watch.

------
simbolit
what happened to Stypi? their last blog entry is more than a year old (which
usually is a sign of death/abandonment).

~~~
dlevine
They were acquired by Salesforce: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/01/the-team-
from-yc-backed-sty...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/01/the-team-from-yc-
backed-stypi-heads-to-salesforce-to-work-on-enterprise-collaboration/)

------
szabba
Any ideas on connecting Vim to this?

------
trevyn
Real time?

~~~
nightpool
Real time, as in a 1:1 ratio between the time it took him to write it and the
time it takes for you to see it played back. Not as in live, where you see it
as he's typing it.

~~~
pg
No, that's not true. The keystrokes are played back at a constant rate with no
breaks.

~~~
bazzargh
I'm still waiting for XEP-0301 to become ubiquitous (which transmits key
delays with text, and would be closer to what the GP thought he saw) - I
really miss this feature in chat systems.

[http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0301.html](http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0301.html)

And the great demo:
[http://www.realjabber.org/real_time_text_demo.html](http://www.realjabber.org/real_time_text_demo.html)

------
kbar13
This is really cool.

