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You can watch how much I rewrite here
- tempodox 4y agoActual site: https://byronm.com/13sentences.html https://byronm.com/13sentences.html Avoids the senseless friction of the twitter link.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
- _def 4y agoNot helpful
- Ensorceled 4y agoTheir "About" says "stay mad" ... which is all you need to know.
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
- somehnacct3757 4y agoWhile we're on the topic of writing styles, has anyone ever told you your writing style is very similar to Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces?
- Ensorceled 4y agoI check on profiles before I flag to see if someone is 1) a troll or 2) a contributor having a bad day or 3) maybe I'm misreading their comment. Saying "stay mad" is VERY common troll behaviour.
- closewith 4y agoI guess you don't see the irony of your comment?
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoOk, but do you do Lisp like Paul???? That’s what I thought!
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- keyle 4y agoWhat's interesting is I thought people write entire paragraphs and then rewrite entire paragraphs. Here the case is, from the first sentence, it gets rewritten 20,000 times. I should rewrite the last paragraph it's a bit wonky but I'm on mobile and I got kids to put to bed. Such is life.
- carlsborg 4y agoTime to figure out the 13 core insights: decades. Time to flesh them out in an essay: 15 minutes. Thanks for sharing. Idea: animated documents. It starts with the core points. and if you have more reading time you move the slider and more detail appears, highlighted.
- stavros 4y agoI made something like what you describe, except you click on topics rather than use a slider: https://skorokithakis.github.io/expounder/ https://skorokithakis.github.io/expounder/
- jboynyc 4y agoNicky Case's Nutshell works similarly -- and can even be recursive! https://ncase.me/nutshell/ https://ncase.me/nutshell/
- perihelions 4y ago- "It starts with the core points. and if you have more reading time you move the slider and more detail appears," That sounds like visibility cycling in org-mode (?)
- atoav 4y agoThis is one of those things when freelancing in creative professions. There is a particular (business) type of customer who will always be like: "Why should I pay you so much? It only took you 4 hours!" The thing is in certain fields it takes dekades to be able to do it in just 4 hours — or it takes dekades to do it at all. If you don't like that, go to your nephew and let him do it as an exercise. It is worse the more people think "they could do it themselves" — e.g. graphic design is one of those fields where customer interaction can become absolutely exhausting if you have the bad luck of gaining the wrong customer base.
- silvestrov 4y agoDatabase schema design is the same: the best design often looks very obvious when presenting it, but the road to it can be long and difficult. Except that in this case your clients are other developers.
- mattjaynes 4y agoLink to the resulting essay (for those that quickly got distracted by the great content, like I did): http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html
- ecmascript 4y agoTwitter doesn't even let me click the link unless I signup or login. Great website.
- azangru 4y agoReplace twitter.com with nitter.net in the url.
- kleiba 4y agoThat does not seem to be any different from how most people write I suppose?
- tempestn 4y agoIt's certainly different from how I write. I do most of the repeated rewriting of each sentence in my head before typing it out, rather than after it's down. I'll go back and make edits, but generally only once a logical block is finished and I can read it all together. That's the cool thing about this; there's normally not much way to know how other people go about the process of writing.
- james-bcn 4y agoIt looks like a fairly inefficient way to write to me. What I've learnt is that writing and editing are two different things, and you shouldn't edit as you write. So you write a first draft quickly, without worrying about the exact words too much, and then edit. The reason this is better is because writing and editing use two different brain "modes" - writing is best done in diffuse mode because it is creative, whereas editing is best done in focused mode.
- wrycoder 4y agoWell, it's certainly different from Hemingway two-finger typing on a manual typewriter. Or, Jefferson writing on (expensive) paper with a quill pen and iron-gall ink, with only the occasional overstrike. Supposedly, Kerouac wrote On the Road on a manual typewriter fed with a continuous paper web. So, yeah, different. Instead of composing a sentence in your head and then writing it down, you waste a lot of time editing it in place. It seems very disorganized to me.
- fastball 4y agoDirect link to the content[1] if you don't want to load twitter. Context is that this is a live view of Paul Graham writing his "Startups in 13 Sentences"[2] article in real(ish?) time. [1] https://byronm.com/13sentences.html https://byronm.com/13sentences.html [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html
- fhe 4y agotip to anyone following the link: you can drag the progress bar at the top, and make the playback much faster. one observation: PG does plenty of local edits (reworking over and over one sentence), but not so much changing the order of sentences, or moving paragraphs around -- these are the things that I have always been told (such as in college writing workshops) I should be doing. maybe such "macro" edits are not needed in such a short piece. and truth be told I never found much need for them either, even for pieces that are quite long.
- SyneRyder 4y agoI'm surprised to find that I actually laughed out loud, midway through watching the edits. I didn't expect to find humor in the rewriting process. And a lesson I got from the edit that made me laugh: don't tell people what you're not saying, just tell them what you're saying. (Or, more succinctly: Don't equivocate.)
- uberux 4y agoWhat is this tool you've used to record the writing? Reminds me of Procreate record feature
- rroot 4y agoEtherPad, see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32896112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32896112
- dang 4y agoThis was done in EtherPad and there were a couple HN threads at the time: The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495336 - Feb 2009 (126 comments) Watch Paul Graham write his latest essay - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557191 - April 2009 (22 comments)
- dang 4y agoI was in the room when he started typing this - I walked into YC that day to be met by PG bubbling with delight about how Etherpad had implemented playback and he was about to try it out. He was like a little kid about to get a birthday present. IIRC, he wanted it so he could see how he actually writes. I watched over his shoulder for a little while, but it feels intrusive to be standing there breathing down someone's neck while they think and write, and hey, I could just play it back later, so I left. Memory is fallible after so much time but I think he told me later that he wouldn't keep using it because he was so used to vi. I want to add that he was going to try to get the Etherpad guys to implement vi shortcuts but that feels suspiciously like the sort of embellishment that creeps into a story years later.
- Agentlien 4y ago> Memory is fallible after all this time but I think he Waiting with bated breath for the continuation. Not often you see dang write about things which aren't moderation. edit: After seeing the continuation I'm just nodding along. Very few things could make me abandon Vim.
- giansegato 4y agoin replit we just implemented playback mode, it's called history mode, and we do happen to have vi shortcuts (couldn't live without them) (I'd expect pg to know this already, but hey, here it is)
- mattmaroon 4y agoHa! I once saw PG writing an essay at his home and he told me what it was about, then when it came out it was so radically different that it felt like not much must have remained. But I didn’t watch long because it does feel intrusive watching someone write. It’s like you’re reading their mind.
- Izkata 4y ago> Memory is fallible after so much time but I think he told me later that he wouldn't keep using it because he was so used to vi. Now I'm wondering if there's a length limit to vim macros...
- amelius 4y agoGPT-3 will probably soon fix this. Write once -> auto rewrite -> proof read -> done.
- FerociousTimes 4y agoThanks for the self-esteem boost in this early morning, PG. I totally needed it. I always beat myself up that I am not a quick, efficient and articulate enough as a writer and I always to take some time to organize and reorganize my thoughts and sentences but when I see I am not alone in this and there are even native speakers who struggle with this aspect of communications despite being domain experts, I feel good about myself.
- pugshrug 4y ago
- rroot 4y agoOne could say similar things (albeit stronger) about your comment. Nowhere does it say it's outstanding. It's definitely intriguing to watch, according to me and the HN people who voted it to the front page. Why do you title him His Lord Majesty?
- spoiler 4y agoI agree with the "don't just upvote cause they're famous" sentiment, just because PG is well known here. Ignoring that, he is a good essayist (regardless of whether people do or don't agree with his opinions). I think it's good that people can see how "messy" and human his process is, though. It's also a humbling reminder that if you don't get it right the first time, you shouldn't get discouraged and try again!
- Ensorceled 4y ago> There's nothing particularly outstanding or intriguing about this. Most people will rewrite and rewrite while working on an essay. I found it fascinating and insightful, I probably also edit my own writing as much as this author does but this is the first real visualization of that process I've seen that drives home just how MUCH editing goes on. > Just because it's His Lord Majesty Paul Graham doing something mundane, doesn't mean you have to post it here. Or upvote it. Conversely, just because Graham is the subject doesn't make it unworthy of discussion and also doesn't require derision directed at the people who found it interesting.
- quickthrower2 4y agoImpressed by the "blocky" typing style, it is as if he has keyboard shortcuts for common words or syllables.
- ryanianian 4y agoI don't know what software this is using, but that could be the history software considering entire edits as single deltas. Editors using CRDT or OT will commonly compress deltas like this.
- lantry 4y agocould be a byproduct of the algo that's recording what he types. Instead of saving the timestamp of each keystroke, it does "every 500ms, save all the characters that have been typed in the last 500ms" or something like that. To be clear, this is speculation. I haven't actually looked at the code that creates the recording. Just pointing out that the process of recording often alters the recording itself.
- rpastuszak 4y agoI built a tool for separating writing from editing: https://enso.sonnet.io https://enso.sonnet.io It's the complete opposite of the site shared in the post, but people seem to like it.
- kieckerjan 4y agoExcellent idea! I will give it a try.
- khobragade 4y agoThis is excellent. Thank you so much!
- debesyla 4y agoGreat idea, will try it out later today, but I have to share a cheap version hack of the same principle: I write with font size setting of 8pt. It's too small to read comfortably (thus I don't edit), but it still lets me see the overall structure and what I wrote.
- rpastuszak 4y agoHehe, love it, let me know if you liked it. I remember a blogger who used to dim her screen as much as possible when writing, which was one of the ideas that inspired me to build this thing. This helps with maintaining flow, but doesn't really touch the overall structure of the text.
- OhHiMarkos 4y agoGood idea! Will definitely try out Enso. Also, I was almost tempted to reach out for a quick talk and say hi! Maybe some other time I will schedule a 1-on-1! Kudos for being easily approachable. You seem like a fun and interesting person
- Reflecticon 4y agoHey, I'm a hobby writer and like your idea a lot! I love that you also make the text downloadable in a txt file. I always feel overwhelmed seeing the text I have written, being aware of what will await me when editing. I would love to have a program on my computer like yours (I'm using windows). Nothing special just an IDE that works exactly the way your website works (I'm not a programmer and love HN for content and comments like yours) I would even happily pay for it. Let me know if you're planning on doing an app and need a beta tester.
- 6stringmerc 4y agoWait, so he doesn’t print a draft, go outside with a pen and have a smoke or vape and read through it that way for flow and coherence? Hmm, okay. If people wonder what I’m referring to, think about it in music terms: you don’t listen to a song in just one environment usually. There are speakers, headphones, your car, etc. so it’s a good idea to mix a track and test it on a couple. It is my perspective that coming up in a print culture the best way to slow down and be critical of self produced work is to change the medium slightly. Thus the print out. It’s the same content but you are digesting it a different way. In this regard I would consider my approach superior to Paul’s and suggest you give it a try for your next important email, letter, or essay.
- samatman 4y agoI used to edit books with fanfold printouts and WordPerfect, so I'm familiar with the act. I find it quite sufficient to compile the text to HTML and read it in the browser, while editing the source. It gives the same shift of context from writing to editing, and it's more closely equivalent to hand-proofing galley prints, since it's in the form the audience ultimately sees. I would love an iPad app designed around the old-fashioned proof editing flow, using the stylus. I've never seen one and don't know if there's a market for it, but I'd use it every week.
- twobitshifter 4y agoA similar trick is to use the read aloud feature, to read you what you wrote back. Hearing it out loud changes the medium and makes spotting mistakes really easy.
- kieckerjan 4y agoI am a little surprised by the crazy amount of editing going on during writing. It is obvious that this way of writing is not possible (or at least practical) if the medium is pen and paper. Is that a good thing or not? I personally try to resist the urge to rewrite during the writing proper and postpone editing until after I am done putting down the main ideas. At least on a paragraph by paragraph basis. But each to his own. PG is obviously a prolific and successful writer, so for him this works.
- splatzone 4y agoLearning to separate the writer from the editor is the single best piece of writing advice I ever got. For me, if I edit while I'm writing, self doubt gets in the way and I can't get a draft finished.
- mattmaroon 4y agoWhen I wrote frequently, I was the exact opposite. I couldn’t make myself keep going down a road once I knew it wasn’t leading where I wanted to end up. It was like I’d get halfway to where I wanted to go and then realize I wanted to go somewhere better. If I tried to just write it all and edit it after, it would feel like I forced myself to a conclusion. I wrote not just to express what I thought but to figure out what I thought. Putting the words on the page just has this way of clarifying my thinking, and I never end up where I thought I was going to when I started.
- breck 4y ago> When I wrote frequently Why'd you stop? I always enjoyed your thinking.
- mattmaroon 4y agoThank you! Honestly when blogs died it felt like there was no point. I do miss it.
- breck 4y ago
- bumblebritches5 4y ago
- SMAAART 4y agoThe making of the sausage is long, messy, and a lot of hard work.
- darkerside 4y agoIt would be really interesting to have this slowed down and annotated, like DVD commentary. I saw a few things that were like little flashes of insight into PG's mind, and it would be really cool to hear them elaborated. Simple example: changing a word to "claiming" instead of just "saying". I think he rightly assumed that people would feel he was less invested in what he was saying with the original term. Multiply insights like that by every edit he makes, and assume most edits are significantly less obvious, and you end up with some seriously interesting content. Reminds me a bit of Hunter S Thompson famously typing out a The Great Gatsby in full, just so he could feel what it was like to write a masterpiece.
- motohagiography 4y agoWriting is also souding ideas out, so typically the first thing a reader of mine reads was the last thing I wrote, since part of the service of writing is having done that work for them. The addition I would make to this process is that I sometimes let comments sit, go do something else, and if I don't feel awesome about reading them when I've forgotten them, I delete them. Usually on controversial topics that I know I've been provoked into responding to, but also on other things. The key is to write something I don't cringe at reading after. Write in the voice of the person you would like to become, and then read it to reflect on whether you aimed high enough.
- BurningFrog 4y agoThe thing that has improved my writing the most, both code and text, is training my "Inner Rubber Duck". While writing, I constantly let my IRD read what I have, as if it's a stranger reading for the first time. Then I adjust until it's out of complaints. I don't know if this is a common technique, but it's really worked for me.
- jalino23 4y agocould you tell us more about this ird
- ryanianian 4y agoDebug aloud like you're explaining the situation to an engineer sitting right next to you. Replace that engineer with a rubber duck. Write as though you're talking to your reader sitting right next to you. Replace that reader with a rubber duck.
- whiddershins 4y agoThe only bummer about this is it is such an atypical essay for Paul Graham. He rarely writes lists, and is pretty outspoken about why outlines can be harmful. I would love to see a playback of him writing a more exploratory essay, where perhaps the information wasn’t as concrete in his mind before hand.
- m_ke 4y agoI prefer the bullet point list that he started with to the long form essay that buries the message.
- itsmemattchung 4y ago2 minutes in, Paul types out [xfs] and then later [xtc] — what do you think these symbols are for? My best guess from watching the video is that they are temporary place holders, breadcrumbs he leaves himself to return to, allowing him not to break his flow/train of thought. If that's the case, then the technique reminds me of Neil Strauss's "Power of the TK": When you get suck on a word, or cant’ think of the right fact, what shouldn’t you do? Don’t stop. Just type, TK.
- svnpenn 4y agoI find the UL is actually better for this use case
- kosievdmerwe 4y agoFinding `tk` is much easier than `ul`, since the latter is very often part of words, whereas the former very rarely is.
- alaaalawi 4y agoSometimes FORTH shines here. Space is the delimiter. and consequently you can mumble the name on the keyboard without stopping at the moment. you have mix of all digits alphabet and symbols into one token. |alpha| x^y ~x #items [a-b] however YMMV
- jhchen 4y agoIIRC they were random letters that do not occur naturally in English words, in order to serve as easily searchable annotation/footnote identifiers. He somewhat already knew they were extra details that would not make it to the main body. Later these get changed [1], [2], etc but you don't want to use these at the outset due to possible reordering/deleting. Source: I was one of the founders of Stypi and we asked him when porting the data from Etherpad to Stypi. https://techcrunch.com/2011/08/09/yc-funded-stypi-is-etherpad-reborn/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/08/09/yc-funded-stypi-is-etherpa...
- deckard1 4y agoI've always found it odd that people want to share this sort of thing. Such as live coding videos or live editing. People change behavior when they are being watched. Even when I know I'm being recorded and no one is watching, I feel a bit of the spotlight effect going on. I don't know that I could actually record my honest self without being performative. I wouldn't be free to do anything that might be embarrassing. Even in pair programming or coding interviews. It's an incredibly intimate thing, to watch someone take their brain noise and broadcast it, raw.
- babyshake 4y agoEspecially for someone you've never met before, right after getting through a 30 second "getting to know you" introduction where you don't say anything of substance.
- seizethecheese 4y agoI don’t find it odd at all. I think it’s illuminating. Sure there’s an observation effect, but this is 1000x more informational than if Paul were to write an essay: “how I write essays”.
- solarmist 4y agoWhich he’s done, if I'm remembering correctly.
- whateveracct 4y agoIt's Sartre's "The Look"
- stronglikedan 4y ago> people want to share this sort of thing > People change behavior when they are being watched Maybe they want to share this sort of thing, so they can practice not changing behavior while they're watched.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- _emacsomancer_ 4y agoSeeing the demo (and the vi(m) comments) made me wonder if someone had implemented this sort of editing playback functionality in Emacs. It's not clear that anyone has exactly, but it's certainly something that's been talked about [1], [2], including on HN itself 13 years ago when pg's etherpad writing session was discussed [3]. (Though I can't find any evidence of the threatened minor mode.) [1]: https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/47495/how-to-play-back-an-edit-session-in-emacs https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/47495/how-to-play-... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/tnhvs7/replay_macro_with_realtime_delays/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/tnhvs7/replay_macro_... [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495751
- dcchambers 4y agoFirst - I LOVE this. Very few people outside of prolific writers understand just how much "writing" is actually "editing" and "re-writing" over and over again. It's awesome to see the process of a prolific tech writer like Paul Graham. Second - I have used asciinema to record various writing and/or coding sessions in Vim, but does anyone know if there's a native vim plugin for recording "replays"/playback sessions like this? Closest I found is https://github.com/chrisbra/Replay https://github.com/chrisbra/Replay but it hasn't been updated in some time.
- cobaltoxide 4y ago> offer surprisingly good customer service many of today's tech giants seem to thrive with the opposite approach: offer no customer service at all.
- mikewarot 4y agoI found interesting, and wondered what the highlighting was all about, making various assumptions that never turned out to be right. It turns out it was the "doomed" feature, showing text that wouldn't survive, I thought it might be the opposite. When I was done watching.... a wave of nausea hit me in the face. Did this happen to anyone else?