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

http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/34828/Paul_Graham%27s_Essays

by kylec • 18 years ago

66 39 18 years ago

wordle.net

kylec5• 18 years ago

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

pg• 18 years ago

What do the colors represent?

kylec5• 18 years ago

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

Kilimanjaro• 18 years ago

The applet is retarded if there is no interaction.

An image is enough.

andreyf• 18 years ago

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

kylec5• 18 years ago

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

eyudkowsky2• 18 years ago

Where is this website?

DaniFong• 18 years ago

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

thaiyoshi• 18 years ago

I'd like to see one of Hacker news.

LPTS3• 18 years ago

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

xirium• 18 years ago

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

jasonkester• 18 years ago

ok.

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

johnyzee• 18 years ago

This is sweet - a visualization of the collective psyche.

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

dcurtis• 18 years ago

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

kylec5• 18 years ago

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

tlrobinson• 18 years ago

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) }

goodkarma• 18 years ago

Ruby code is so damn elegant. :)

aaronblohowiak• 18 years ago

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

xlnt4• 18 years ago

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• 18 years ago

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

LPTS3• 18 years ago

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.

izaidi3• 18 years ago

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.

xlnt4• 18 years ago

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

aleo• 18 years ago

AFAIK pg was 29 or 30 when he started Viaweb.

icky• 18 years ago

> 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. ;)

Prrometheus2• 18 years ago

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.

joshuaxls• 18 years ago

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.

Prrometheus2• 18 years ago

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.

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

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