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Word cloud of Paul Graham's essays (applet, see comment for png)
- kylec 18y agoIf the applet doesn't load, here's a screenshot: http://modos.org/pg.png http://modos.org/pg.png
- pg 18y agoWhat do the colors represent?
- kylec 18y agoThe colors, unfortunately, don't represent anything - they're generated by the applet to easily differentiate between words
- technoguyrob 18y agoThey 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 18y agoYeah I was thinking the same thing. If nothing else, PG now has some sweet cover art for his next book.
- Kilimanjaro 18y agoThe applet is retarded if there is no interaction. An image is enough.
- andreyf 18y agoDid you write whatever generated this yourself, or is it open source?
- kylec 18y agoNeither, unfortunately. It's a website that generates beautiful word clouds, so I decided to make one of pg's essays.
- eyudkowsky 18y agoWhere is this website?
- kylec 18y agoIt's Wordle - here's a link to the create page: http://wordle.net/create http://wordle.net/create
- adamhowell 18y agoAs an aside, Wordle runs under Google App Engine (http://tinyurl.com/5gxkc7 http://tinyurl.com/5gxkc7)
- wallflower 18y agoas an aside, the author of Wordle, Jonathan Feinberg, played drums for Lisa Loeb and They Might Be Giants. http://www.mrfeinberg.com http://www.mrfeinberg.com
- eyudkowsky 18y agoThanks!
- DaniFong 18y agoThis is pretty, and pretty cool. The palette is very nice.
- thaiyoshi 18y agoI'd like to see one of Hacker news.
- LPTS 18y agoIt'd be PG, Techcrunch, and twitter really big and the good stuff small.
- xirium 18y agoThe dataset is available via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=218782 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=218782 and a tag cloud is available via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227932 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227932
- jasonkester 18y agook. http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/35745/reddit_homepage_minus_%22points%22 http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/35745/reddit_homepage_minus_%...
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- johnyzee 18y agoThis is sweet - a visualization of the collective psyche. It would also be interesting to see one with websites filtered out.
- dcurtis 18y agoWired.com is the largest item in that cloud. That's kind of interesting. I wonder why Wired.com is mentioned so often. Advertisements?
- kylec 18y agoI like how prominent the words in the Grahamism "make something people want" are - it really shows his commitment to that philosophy.
- tlrobinson 18y agoThe 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 18y agoRuby code is so damn elegant. :)
- aaronblohowiak 18y agoIt is polite to sleep for a second between requests when scraping.
- xlnt 18y agoThe 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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dStWA3oHbhg
- markbao 18y agoYeah, it did that for me as well (Safari 3.1) and then it crashed.
- LPTS 18y agoI 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.
- Prrometheus 18y agoYou 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.
- izaidi 18y agoI'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 18y agoit's funny how you agree with LPTS's main point but also insulted him.
- izaidi 18y agoI 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 18y agoLPTS 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.
- joshuaxls 18y agofantastic, 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 18y agoIt'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.