Show HN: What would Paul Graham do?

pg would probably use logic, experience and a little bit of gut feel to figure out the best way to solve an issue, not refer to a single source of someone else's writings.

Stop worshiping the man like he is a god. His essays are not bible scripture, and in many areas they would actually be the completely wrong course of action to take.

pg's thoughts are only one segment of knowledge that a person should be receiving and performing their own analysis on. If you agree with everything pg says, you have set him up as your personal demi-god and are dangerously ignorant. I suggest reading something other than him for a while.

(Note: replace pg with any particular author or method if you choose.)

EDIT: You can usually tell when you've hit on an uncomfortable truth when the reaction is fiercest. Irony: pump in "Trouble" to the tool under discussion.

Re: Show HN: What would Paul Graham do?

#5

Post by mikkel » Mon, Oct 15, 2012, 6:57 PM UTC

I've just spent about 15 minutes reading an article by Paul Graham written in 1993.

This site is terrible for my productivity - very well done you evil person you.

Re: Show HN: What would Paul Graham do?

#6

Post by manaskarekar » Mon, Oct 15, 2012, 6:58 PM UTC

run4yourlives wrote: post #4

pg would probably use logic, experience and a little bit of gut feel to figure out the best way to solve an issue, not refer to a single source of someone else's writings. Stop worshiping the man like he is a god. His essays are not bible scripture, and in many areas they would actually be the completely wrong course of action to take. pg's thoughts are only one segment of knowledge that a person should be receiving…

Although your advice regarding 'worshipping' a single author/person is good advice, that site is just a tool for anyone wanting a slice of the pg pie.

It's rather well done.

Re: Show HN: What would Paul Graham do?

#7

Post by kevinwuhoo » Mon, Oct 15, 2012, 6:59 PM UTC

theotherone wrote: post #2

What's it built with?

Everything was done in python. I wrote scripts to query the HN api for the last 1000 comments by PG as well as scrape his site for his essays. Indexed the documents using helpers from nltk.

The front end is flask which queries a mongo store with a little memcached sprinkled in.

Shout out to heroku for all their awesome free addons!

Re: Show HN: What would Paul Graham do?

#8

Post by munyukim » Mon, Oct 15, 2012, 7:01 PM UTC

Cool!I just wonder how you came up with such a brilliant idea.

Re: Show HN: What would Paul Graham do?

#9

Post by freejack » Mon, Oct 15, 2012, 7:02 PM UTC

Props for putting a compelling spin ("WWPGD") on a rather mundane function (searching a back catalog). Marketing FTW! :-)

Re: Show HN: What would Paul Graham do?

#10

Post by aakil » Mon, Oct 15, 2012, 7:03 PM UTC

run4yourlives wrote: post #4

pg would probably use logic, experience and a little bit of gut feel to figure out the best way to solve an issue, not refer to a single source of someone else's writings. Stop worshiping the man like he is a god. His essays are not bible scripture, and in many areas they would actually be the completely wrong course of action to take. pg's thoughts are only one segment of knowledge that a person should be receiving…

It's really just a tool we built for ourselves to get information from a specific trusted source. It helps that he has a huge catalog of work to draw from. We thought the ability to tap into that through a search dynamic would be interesting, it's been very useful for us. We hope it can be useful for you.