Paul Graham RSS: Update
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It appears that hacker-essayist-entrepreneur Paul Graham has stopped linking to my RSS feed of his essays.
Oddly enough, the "official" one by teen(?) prodigy Aaron Swartz has 109 Bloglines subscribers, nothing but titles of the entries, and is missing the two most recent essays. Aaron's other PaulGraham.com scrape has only 56 subscribers and picks up al changes to the site, such as new images of Paul's paintings.
Mine has 4,899 subscribers in Bloglines and a brief summary of, or quote from, each new essay. It's partially done by hand (heck, if you can write a Python script that can extract a summary of essays, you're probably the best hacker on earth) and so it can be updated a day or two late, at times. With that many readers, I don't think it makes sense to just shut things down.
Since the link to my feed has been ditched for Aaron's, I'll be taking more liberties with the RSS from now on.
For the time being, I'll respect Paul's wishes, and not post the essays in their entirety. I think brief excerpts and/or summaries are covered by "fair use".
But I will start posting links to discussions and rebuttals that aren't penned by Paul himself.
I'm also contemplating some unobtrusive text links to Amazon.com for Paul's books.
To Paul and Aaron: best of luck, and keep up the good work.
To the readers: let me hear some ideas.
update A week(!) later, Aaron's feed contains the most recent essay. Sheesh; I would get complaints when I was a day behind.
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This is a recent collection of Paul Graham's essays:
Thanks for keeping up the good work, Joe. Half his stuff ends up linked from /. within a few hours of publishing anyways, but failing that, I'd rather have the summaries and supplement material rather than just titles.
But then... it wouldn't be very hard to scrape the first *paragraph* out of the essay page.
Posted by: Mike Purvis on November 19, 2005 10:55 AM | permalinkGood for you! Freedom to link is important, and the more that's done to break down the notion that you need someone's permission to link to them, the better! I love your feed, and I really hope Paul is smart enough to realize that trying to shut it down or censoring it totally goes against the topic of his latest essay!
Posted by: Egarwaen on November 19, 2005 11:17 AM | permalinkMike:
I'd considered that, but the first paragraph is often not a summary. See "What You Can't Say", for an example -- http://paulgraham.com/paulgraham/say.html
Egarwaen:
I don't think Paul is trying to censor it, just changing vendors, if you will.
The only thing remotely resembling censorship is his request that I not post his essays in their entirety.
Posted by: Joe Grossberg on November 19, 2005 11:30 AM | permalinkI think that if Paul is "changing vendors", it's certainly acceptable to string in some 3rd party rebuttals and amazon text links. If this is now the "even more unofficial" feed, that seems like the only appropriate way to go.
I'm certainly not changing my feed subscription. I like this one.
Posted by: Scott Johnson on November 19, 2005 12:41 PM | permalinkFor what it's worth, I never wait for your RSS feed, since it's often a day or two late (and I'm eager). Instead, I download his index file, diff it against yesterday's index file, and when there are differences, I follow those links.
Posted by: on November 19, 2005 12:52 PM | permalinkYour feed is better, since its the only one that Bloglines updates before the essays have hit Slashdot. I'd welcome more content, since I only see the "Paul Graham (1)" about once a month, when I know that he and those who rebut him are busier than that.
If you're interested in a more intelligent text summarizer for RSS scraping purposes, that happens to be one thing that I'm working on now.
Posted by: Derik Stiller on November 19, 2005 1:43 PM | permalinkThanks for providing the feed, Joe. You've done a good job.
Posted by: Graham on November 19, 2005 2:28 PM | permalinkI vote that speed is more important than an abstract. Perhaps you could scrape for the immediate links and then add summaries when you have the chance.
I don't understand why Paul can't create his own RSS feed. Has it been too long since he programmed? Shouldn't he be able to create one with 5 lines of Lisp (or Arc)?
Posted by: Jeremy Stein on November 19, 2005 3:06 PM | permalinkJoe: Even if the first paragraph isn't a summary, it's typically a "teaser," equally appropriate for inclusion in the feed.
Jeremy: Most readers I've encountered seem to do strange things when an existing entry is changed or republished... Bloglines is notorious for this. One edited article and it'll go ahead and mark the whole slate as unread.
And yeah, I've wondered why the man can't just create his own feed. But then, he's also got a 400px site that uses tables for layout and an image map for navigation. (Of course, when your content is good enough, design becomes less important.)
Posted by: Mike Purvis on November 19, 2005 3:29 PM | permalinkMike:
No feed, because he doesn't have time and the old Lisp-based publishing system he uses isn't set up for such.
As for the 400px width, I personally find it easier to read text when it's in a column like that, rather than across the whole screen.
The tables and imagemap -- once again, I'd guess "not enough time".
Posted by: Joe Grossberg on November 19, 2005 3:37 PM | permalinkWho is this Aaron Schwartz guy, anyways? Without knowing much about him, my initial reaction is to be ticked off. He looks like a moderately talented but very very well-connected, good-fortuned teenager. What did he actually do to deserve all those opportunities that're listed on his web site?
Anon.:
A lot of it springs from how freaking young he was. If you're interested in more information, you can probably Google for some profiles and/or contact him directly.
He has a blog, but I stopped reading when he said that (I'm paraphrasing) he supports the Iraqi "resistance". You can probably find out more about him there.
Posted by: Joe Grossberg on November 19, 2005 7:46 PM | permalinkSo my question is, how does a fairly bright teenager become a teenage hacker star? His hacks aren't even that interesting.
Like I said man, I have no idea. Maybe the right guys decided to take him under their wings.
Posted by: Joe Grossberg on November 19, 2005 8:51 PM | permalinkFrom Aaron Swartz's website:
"He is currently a student at Stanford University and working on a startup building a new way to share information over the Web as part of Paul Graham's Summer Founders Program in Cambridge"
Makes sense that Paul would switch to his feed.
Posted by: Aleks on November 20, 2005 1:16 AM | permalinkas far as I care, Aaron Swartz is this guy who floods Reddit with links to every anti-war article he can find and who misuses http://paste.lisp.org/ to host those that cannot be directly linked to.
so I'd rather like to see your feed not going anywhere. and the "link to the rebuttals" idea is nice, too.
keep up the good work, and thanks,
--m
Regarding article summaries, you might want to look at Open Text Summarizer ( http://libots.sourceforge.net/ ). I haven't tried it with Paul's articles, but it works pretty good for me on everything else. :)
Posted by: Leonid Mamchenkov on November 20, 2005 7:37 AM | permalinkLeonid:
That looks interesting, but I wasn't thinking of excerpting, so much as summarizing.
Posted by: Joe Grossberg on November 20, 2005 10:20 AM | permalinkJoe:
Oh, OK. I guess then checking cpan.org for Lingua::* modules might help you find something useful. ;)
Posted by: Leonid Mamchenkov on November 21, 2005 9:48 AM | permalinkLeonid:
If it's between doing it by hand and using Perl, I'll just keep doing it by hand. ;)
I might reconsider if it becomes too burdensome.
Posted by: Joe Grossberg on November 21, 2005 9:59 AM | permalinkFair enough - as long as you do it. :)
BTW: Thanks for all the effort with the feed. I much appreciate it.
Posted by: Leonid Mamchenkov on November 22, 2005 3:20 AM | permalinkI think if you post both Paul's articles as well as rebuttals you will really make this feed much more valuable then it already was. keep up the good work.
Posted by: Stefan Hayden on November 25, 2005 7:00 PM | permalinkWhoa, I *like* that you're posting articles and entries *about* Paul Graham, in addition to his essays! Bravo!
Posted by: Lush on November 26, 2005 12:43 AM | permalinkNo more comments! Either someone has violated Godwin's Law, I'm tired of the discussion or, most likely, the ten-week window has closed. You can, however, contact me through email.