paul graham essays epub

was a Christ-like figure.

Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one.

The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Certainly schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens.

With the result that writing is made to seem boring and pointless. Who cares about symbolism in Dickens? Dickens himself would be more interested in an essay about color or baseball.

How did things get this way? To answer that we have to go back almost a thousand years. Around 1100, Europe at last began to catch its breath after centuries of chaos, and once they had the luxury of curiosity they rediscovered what we call "the classics." The effect was rather as if we were visited by beings from another solar system. These earlier civilizations were so much more sophisticated that for the next several centuries the main work of European scholars, in almost every field, was to assimilate what they knew.

During this period the study of ancient texts acquired great prestige. It seemed the essence of what scholars did. As European scholarship gained momentum it became less and less important; by 1350 someone who wanted to learn about science could find better teachers than Aristotle in his own era. [1] But schools change slower than scholarship. In the 19th century the study of ancient texts was still the backbone of the curriculum.

The time was then ripe for the question: if the study of ancient texts is a valid field for scholarship, why not modern texts? The answer, of course, is that the original raison d'etre of classical scholarship was a kind of intellectual archaeology that does not need to be done in the case of contemporary authors. But for obvious reasons no one wanted to give that answer. The archaeological work being mostly done, it implied that those studying the classics were, if not wasting their time, at least working on problems of minor importance.

And so began the study of modern literature. There was a good deal of resistance at first. The first courses in English literature seem to have been offered by the newer colleges, particularly American ones. Dartmouth, the University of Vermont, Amherst, and University College, London taught English literature in the 1820s.

The other big difference between a real essay and the things they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it. That principle, like the idea that we ought to be writing about literature, turns out to be another intellectual hangover of long forgotten origins.

It's often mistakenly believed that medieval universities were mostly seminaries. In fact they were more law schools. And at least in our tradition lawyers are advocates, trained to take either side of an argument and make as good a case for it as they can. Whether cause or effect, this spirit pervaded early universities. The study of rhetoric, the art of arguing persuasively, was a third of the undergraduate curriculum. [5] And after the lecture the most common form of discussion was the disputation. This is at least nominally preserved in our present-day thesis defense: most people treat the words thesis and dissertation as interchangeable, but originally, at least, a thesis was a position one took and the dissertation was the argument by which one defended it.

Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth, as I think lawyers would be the first to admit. It's not just that you miss subtleties this way. The real problem is that you can't change the question.

And yet this principle is built into the very structure of the things they teach you to write in high school. The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the conclusion-- uh, what is the conclusion? I was never sure about that in high school. It seemed as if we were just supposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph, but in different enough words that no one could tell. Why bother? But when you understand the origins of this sort of "essay," you can see where the conclusion comes from. It's the concluding remarks to the jury.

Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing. When I give a draft of an essay to friends, there are two things I want to know: which parts bore them, and which seem unconvincing. The boring bits can usually be fixed by cutting. But I don't try to fix the unconvincing bits by arguing more cleverly. I need to talk the matter over.

At the very least I must have explained something badly. In that case, in the course of the conversation I'll be forced to come up a with a clearer explanation, which I can just incorporate in the essay. More often than not I have to change what I was saying as well. But the aim is never to be convincing per se. As the reader gets smarter, convincing and true become identical, so if I can convince smart readers I must be near the truth.

The sort of writing that attempts to persuade may be a valid (or at least inevitable) form, but it's historically inaccurate to call it an essay. An essay is something else.

To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called "essais." He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. is the French verb meaning "to try" and an is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.

Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.

If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.

In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you're writing for yourself. You're thinking out loud.

But not quite. Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well. So it does matter to have an audience. The things I've written just for myself are no good. They tend to peter out. When I run into difficulties, I find I conclude with a few vague questions and then drift off to get a cup of tea.

Many published essays peter out in the same way. Particularly the sort written by the staff writers of newsmagazines. Outside writers tend to supply editorials of the defend-a-position variety, which make a beeline toward a rousing (and foreordained) conclusion. But the staff writers feel obliged to write something "balanced." Since they're writing for a popular magazine, they start with the most radioactively controversial questions, from which-- because they're writing for a popular magazine-- they then proceed to recoil in terror. Abortion, for or against? This group says one thing. That group says another. One thing is certain: the question is a complex one. (But don't get mad at us. We didn't draw any conclusions.)

Questions aren't enough. An essay has to come up with answers. They don't always, of course. Sometimes you start with a promising question and get nowhere. But those you don't publish. Those are like experiments that get inconclusive results. An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn't already know.

But you tell him doesn't matter, so long as it's interesting. I'm sometimes accused of meandering. In defend-a-position writing that would be a flaw. There you're not concerned with truth. You already know where you're going, and you want to go straight there, blustering through obstacles, and hand-waving your way across swampy ground. But that's not what you're trying to do in an essay. An essay is supposed to be a search for truth. It would be suspicious if it didn't meander.

The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn't do this out of frivolity. The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea. [6]

The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting. One can't have quite as little foresight as a river. I always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course.

This doesn't always work. Sometimes, like a river, one runs up against a wall. Then I do the same thing the river does: backtrack. At one point in this essay I found that after following a certain thread I ran out of ideas. I had to go back seven paragraphs and start over in another direction.

Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought-- but a cleaned-up train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation. Real thought, like real conversation, is full of false starts. It would be exhausting to read. You need to cut and fill to emphasize the central thread, like an illustrator inking over a pencil drawing. But don't change so much that you lose the spontaneity of the original.

Err on the side of the river. An essay is not a reference work. It's not something you read looking for a specific answer, and feel cheated if you don't find it. I'd much rather read an essay that went off in an unexpected but interesting direction than one that plodded dutifully along a prescribed course.

So what's interesting? For me, interesting means surprise. Interfaces, as Geoffrey James has said, should follow the principle of least astonishment. A button that looks like it will make a machine stop should make it stop, not speed up. Essays should do the opposite. Essays should aim for maximum surprise.

I was afraid of flying for a long time and could only travel vicariously. When friends came back from faraway places, it wasn't just out of politeness that I asked what they saw. I really wanted to know. And I found the best way to get information out of them was to ask what surprised them. How was the place different from what they expected? This is an extremely useful question. You can ask it of the most unobservant people, and it will extract information they didn't even know they were recording.

Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get. They're like a food that's not merely healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things you've already eaten.

How do you find surprises? Well, therein lies half the work of essay writing. (The other half is expressing yourself well.) The trick is to use yourself as a proxy for the reader. You should only write about things you've thought about a lot. And anything you come across that surprises you, who've thought about the topic a lot, will probably surprise most readers.

For example, in a recent I pointed out that because you can only judge computer programmers by working with them, no one knows who the best programmers are overall. I didn't realize this when I began that essay, and even now I find it kind of weird. That's what you're looking for.

So if you want to write essays, you need two ingredients: a few topics you've thought about a lot, and some ability to ferret out the unexpected.

What should you think about? My guess is that it doesn't matter-- that anything can be interesting if you get deeply enough into it. One possible exception might be things that have deliberately had all the variation sucked out of them, like working in fast food. In retrospect, was there anything interesting about working at Baskin-Robbins? Well, it was interesting how important color was to the customers. Kids a certain age would point into the case and say that they wanted yellow. Did they want French Vanilla or Lemon? They would just look at you blankly. They wanted yellow. And then there was the mystery of why the perennial favorite Pralines 'n' Cream was so appealing. (I think now it was the salt.)

So the ability to ferret out the unexpected must not merely be an inborn one. It must be something you can learn. How do you learn it?

To some extent it's like learning history. When you first read history, it's just a whirl of names and dates. Nothing seems to stick. But the more you learn, the more hooks you have for new facts to stick onto-- which means you accumulate knowledge at an exponential rate. Once you remember that Normans conquered England in 1066, it will catch your attention when you hear that other Normans conquered southern Italy at about the same time. Which will make you wonder about Normandy, and take note when a third book mentions that Normans were not, like most of what is now called France, tribes that flowed in as the Roman empire collapsed, but Vikings (norman = north man) who arrived four centuries later in 911. Which makes it easier to remember that Dublin was also established by Vikings in the 840s. Etc, etc squared.

Collecting surprises is a similar process. The more anomalies you've seen, the more easily you'll notice new ones. Which means, oddly enough, that as you grow older, life should become more and more surprising. When I was a kid, I used to think adults had it all figured out. I had it backwards. Kids are the ones who have it all figured out. They're just mistaken.

When it comes to surprises, the rich get richer. But (as with wealth) there may be habits of mind that will help the process along. It's good to have a habit of asking questions, especially questions beginning with Why. But not in the random way that three year olds ask why. There are an infinite number of questions. How do you find the fruitful ones?

I find it especially useful to ask why about things that seem wrong. For example, why should there be a connection between humor and misfortune? Why do we find it funny when a character, even one we like, slips on a banana peel? There's a whole essay's worth of surprises there for sure.

If you want to notice things that seem wrong, you'll find a degree of skepticism helpful. I take it as an axiom that we're only achieving 1% of what we could. This helps counteract the rule that gets beaten into our heads as children: that things are the way they are because that is how things have to be. For example, everyone I've talked to while writing this essay felt the same about English classes-- that the whole process seemed pointless. But none of us had the balls at the time to hypothesize that it was, in fact, all a mistake. We all thought there was just something we weren't getting.

I have a hunch you want to pay attention not just to things that seem wrong, but things that seem wrong in a humorous way. I'm always pleased when I see someone laugh as they read a draft of an essay. But why should I be? I'm aiming for good ideas. Why should good ideas be funny? The connection may be surprise. Surprises make us laugh, and surprises are what one wants to deliver.

I write down things that surprise me in notebooks. I never actually get around to reading them and using what I've written, but I do tend to reproduce the same thoughts later. So the main value of notebooks may be what writing things down leaves in your head.

People trying to be cool will find themselves at a disadvantage when collecting surprises. To be surprised is to be mistaken. And the essence of cool, as any fourteen year old could tell you, is When you're mistaken, don't dwell on it; just act like nothing's wrong and maybe no one will notice.

One of the keys to coolness is to avoid situations where inexperience may make you look foolish. If you want to find surprises you should do the opposite. Study lots of different things, because some of the most interesting surprises are unexpected connections between different fields. For example, jam, bacon, pickles, and cheese, which are among the most pleasing of foods, were all originally intended as methods of preservation. And so were books and paintings.

Whatever you study, include history-- but social and economic history, not political history. History seems to me so important that it's misleading to treat it as a mere field of study. Another way to describe it is

Among other things, studying history gives one confidence that there are good ideas waiting to be discovered right under our noses. Swords evolved during the Bronze Age out of daggers, which (like their flint predecessors) had a hilt separate from the blade. Because swords are longer the hilts kept breaking off. But it took five hundred years before someone thought of casting hilt and blade as one piece.

Above all, make a habit of paying attention to things you're not supposed to, either because they're " ," or not important, or not what you're supposed to be working on. If you're curious about something, trust your instincts. Follow the threads that attract your attention. If there's something you're really interested in, you'll find they have an uncanny way of leading back to it anyway, just as the conversation of people who are especially proud of something always tends to lead back to it.

For example, I've always been fascinated by comb-overs, especially the extreme sort that make a man look as if he's wearing a beret made of his own hair. Surely this is a lowly sort of thing to be interested in-- the sort of superficial quizzing best left to teenage girls. And yet there is something underneath. The key question, I realized, is how does the comber-over not see how odd he looks? And the answer is that he got to look that way What began as combing his hair a little carefully over a thin patch has gradually, over 20 years, grown into a monstrosity. Gradualness is very powerful. And that power can be used for constructive purposes too: just as you can trick yourself into looking like a freak, you can trick yourself into creating something so grand that you would never have dared to such a thing. Indeed, this is just how most good software gets created. You start by writing a stripped-down kernel (how hard can it be?) and gradually it grows into a complete operating system. Hence the next leap: could you do the same thing in painting, or in a novel?

See what you can extract from a frivolous question? If there's one piece of advice I would give about writing essays, it would be: don't do as you're told. Don't believe what you're supposed to. Don't write the essay readers expect; one learns nothing from what one expects. And don't write the way they taught you to in school.

The most important sort of disobedience is to write essays at all. Fortunately, this sort of disobedience shows signs of becoming . It used to be that only a tiny number of officially approved writers were allowed to write essays. Magazines published few of them, and judged them less by what they said than who wrote them; a magazine might publish a story by an unknown writer if it was good enough, but if they published an essay on x it had to be by someone who was at least forty and whose job title had x in it. Which is a problem, because there are a lot of things insiders can't say precisely because they're insiders.

The Internet is changing that. Anyone can publish an essay on the Web, and it gets judged, as any writing should, by what it says, not who wrote it. Who are you to write about x? You are whatever you wrote.

Popular magazines made the period between the spread of literacy and the arrival of TV the golden age of the short story. The Web may well make this the golden age of the essay. And that's certainly not something I realized when I started writing this.

[1] I'm thinking of Oresme (c. 1323-82). But it's hard to pick a date, because there was a sudden drop-off in scholarship just as Europeans finished assimilating classical science. The cause may have been the plague of 1347; the trend in scientific progress matches the population curve.

[2] Parker, William R. "Where Do College English Departments Come From?" 28 (1966-67), pp. 339-351. Reprinted in Gray, Donald J. (ed). Indiana University Publications.

Daniels, Robert V. University of Vermont, 1991.

Mueller, Friedrich M. Letter to the 1886/87. Reprinted in Bacon, Alan (ed). Ashgate, 1998.

[3] I'm compressing the story a bit. At first literature took a back seat to philology, which (a) seemed more serious and (b) was popular in Germany, where many of the leading scholars of that generation had been trained.

In some cases the writing teachers were transformed into English professors. Francis James Child, who had been Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard since 1851, became in 1876 the university's first professor of English.

[4] Parker, , p. 25.

[5] The undergraduate curriculum or (whence "trivial") consisted of Latin grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Candidates for masters' degrees went on to study the of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Together these were the seven liberal arts.

The study of rhetoric was inherited directly from Rome, where it was considered the most important subject. It would not be far from the truth to say that education in the classical world meant training landowners' sons to speak well enough to defend their interests in political and legal disputes.

[6] Trevor Blackwell points out that this isn't strictly true, because the outside edges of curves erode faster.

to Ken Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.

Summaries of Paul Graham's essays

See the originals here .

After The Ladder
An Alternative Theory of Unions
Cities and Ambition
How to Do What You Love
How to Get Startup Ideas
How to Make Wealth
How to Start a Startup
Inequality and Risk
Is It Worth Being Wise?
It's Charisma, Stupid
Schlep Blindness
Startup = Growth
Taste for Makers
The Age of the Essay
The Python Paradox
Two Kinds of Judgement
Undergraduation
What You Can't Say
What You'll Wish You'd Known
Why Nerds are Unpopular
Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
Why Startup Hubs Work
Writing and Speaking

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Dabblers And Blowhards

I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before. This sort of thing happens to a lot of people, and I would *really* like to avoid it - Paul Graham, posting on lemonodor.com

About two years ago, the Lisp programmer and dot-com millionaire Paul Graham wrote an essay entitled Hackers and Painters , in which he argues that his approach to computer programming is better described by analogies to the visual arts than by the phrase "computer science".

When this essay came out, I was working as a computer programmer, and since I had also spent a few years as a full-time oil painter , everybody who read the article and knew me sent along the hyperlink. I didn't particularly enjoy the essay â€” I thought the overall tone was glib, and I found the parallel to painting unconvincing â€” but it didn't seem like anything worth getting worked up about. Just another programmer writing about what made him tick.

But the emailed links continued, and over the next two years Paul Graham steadily ramped up his output while moving definitively away from subjects he had expertise in (like Lisp) to topics like education, essay writing, history, and of course painting. Sometime last year I noticed he had started making bank from an actual print book of collected essays, titled (of course) "Hackers and Painters". I felt it was time for me to step up.

So let me say it simply - hackers are nothing like painters.

It's surprisingly hard to pin Paul Graham down on the nature of the special bond he thinks hobbyist programmers and painters share. In his essays he tends to flit from metaphor to metaphor like a butterfly, never pausing long enough to for a suspicious reader to catch up with his chloroform jar. The closest he comes to a clear thesis statement is at the beginning "Hackers and Painters":

"[O]f all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike. What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers."

To which I'd add, what hackers and painters don't have in common is everything else. The fatuousness of the parallel becomes obvious if you think for five seconds about what computer programmers and painters actually do.

Computer programmers cause a machine to perform a sequence of transformations on electronically stored data.
Painters apply colored goo to cloth using animal hairs tied to a stick.

It is true that both painters and programmers make things, just like a pastry chef makes a wedding cake, or a chicken makes an egg. But nothing about what they make, the purposes it serves, or how they go about doing it is in any way similar.

Start with purpose. With the exception of art software projects (which I don't believe Graham has in mind here) all computer programs are designed to accomplish some kind of task. Even the most elegant of computer programs, in order to be considered a program, has to compile and run [ 1 ]. So just like mechanical engineers and architects, computer programmers create artifacts that have to stand up to an objective reality. No one cares how pretty the code is if the program won't work.

The only objective constraint a painter has is making sure the paint physically stays on the canvas (something that has proven surprisingly challenging ). Everything beyond that is aesthetics - arranging colored blobs in a way that best tickles the mind of the viewer.

This difference is what makes programming so similar to engineering, which also tries to create beautiful things in the face of objective constraints, but it's a parallel that really rankles Graham. He interprets it as implying that there should be limits on the creative control programmers exercise over their work: [ 2 ]

Doug Kaye : In what ways do you think to program is more like painting than it is like some of our more common metaphors such as engineering? Paul Graham : [...] in buildings, for example there is this distinction between architects and engineers. Architects decide what the building is going to look like basically and then they say to an engineer, "Can I do this? And then how?" And the engineer figures out how. So architects figure out "what," engineers figure out "how." Well painters do both. Painters decide what to paint and then have to paint it. And hackers in the best case also do both[ 3 ].

You can safely replace "painters" in this response with "poets", "composers", "pastry chefs" or "auto mechanics" with no loss of meaning or insight. There's nothing whatsoever distinctive about the analogy to painters, except that Paul Graham likes to paint, and would like to feel that his programming allows him a similar level of self-expression. The reason Graham's essay isn't entitled "Hackers and Pastry Chefs" is not because there is something that unites painters and programmers into a secret brotherhood, but because Paul Graham likes to cultivate the arty aura that comes from working in the visual arts. Having been both a painter and a programmer, I can certainly sympathize with him.

Great paintings, for example, get you laid in a way that great computer programs never do. Even not-so-great paintings - in fact, any slapdash attempt at splashing paint onto a surface - will get you laid more than writing software, especially if you have the slightest hint of being a tortured, brooding soul about you. For evidence of this I would point to my college classmate Henning, who was a Swedish double art/theatre major and on most days could barely walk.

Also remark that in painting, many of the women whose pants you are trying to get into aren't even wearing pants to begin with. Your job as a painter consists of staring at naked women, for as long as you wish, and this day in and day out through the course of a many-decades-long career. Not even rock musicians have been as successful in reducing the process to its fundamental, exhilirating essence.

It's no surprise, then, that a computer programmer would want to bask in some of the peripheral coolness that comes with painting, especially when he has an axe to grind about his own work being 'mere engineering'. Yet while this might be charming or quirky in the abstract, it gets seriously annoying when real facts start getting butchered:

""When oil paint replaced tempera in the fifteenth century, it helped painters to deal with difficult subjects like the human figure because, unlike tempera, oil can be blended and overpainted." [ 4 ] "The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed." "Compositional symmetry yields some of the most memorable paintings" " It is not merely an accident of history that the great paintings of the Renaissance are all full of people. If they hadn't been, painting as a medium wouldn't have the prestige that it does." "Worse is Better is found throughout the arts. In drawing, for example, the idea was discovered during the Renaissance." "What made oil paint so exciting, when it first became popular in the fifteenth century, was that you could actually make the finished work from the prototype." "Most painters start with a blurry sketch and gradually refine it." "Line drawings are in fact the most difficult visual medium [ 5 ]" " The point of painting from life is that it gives your mind something to chew on: when your eyes are looking at something, your hand will do more interesting work." "Hackers need to understand the theory of computation about as much as painters need to understand paint chemistry. You need to know how to calculate time and space complexity and about Turing completeness. You might also want to remember at least the concept of a state machine, in case you have to write a parser or a regular expression library. Painters in fact have to remember a good deal more about paint chemistry than that." [ 6 ]

All of these statements are wrong, or dumb, or both, and yet they are sprinkled through various essays like raisins in a fruitcake, with no further justification, and the reader is expected to enjoy the chewy burst of flavor and move on to the next tidbit.

I am not qualified to call bullshit on Paul Graham when he writes about programming, history, starting a business, or even growing up as a social pariah, but I do know enough about art to see when someone is just making shit up.

In Paul Graham's world, as soon as oil paint was invented, painting techniques made a discontinuous jump from the fifteenth to the twentienth century, fortuitously allowing Renaissance painters to paint a lot like Paul Graham. And the difficult problems the new medium supposedly helped painters solve just happened to resemble the painting problems that confront an enthusiastic but not particularly talented art student. I hope I am not the only to find this highly suspicious.

I blame Eric Raymond and to a lesser extent Dave Winer for bringing this kind of schlock writing onto the Internet. Raymond is the original perpetrator of the " what is a hacker? " essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond. Dave Winer has recently and mercifully moved his essays off to audio, but you can still hear him snorfling cashew nuts and talking at length about what it means to be a blogger[ 7 ] . These essays and this writing style are tempting to people outside the subculture at hand because of their engaging personal tone and idiosyncratic, insider's view. But after a while, you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism.

The whole genre reminds me of the the wooly business books one comes across at airports ("Management secrets of Gengis Khan", the "Lexus and the Olive Tree") that milk a bad analogy for two hundred pages to arrive at the conclusion that people just like the author are pretty great.

Any of these books will give you more in a page than Paul Graham can offer across the whole broad and aggressively expanding corpus of his online essays, and none of them will leave you with that dissatisfied, preached-at-in-the-corner-by-your-uncle feeling that has become a hallmark of Graham's less technical writing.

As for the mystical connection between painters and programmers, the famous Lloyd Bentsen put-down keeps coming to mind. Unless you are actually making art with computers - something that can be perfectly wonderful - being a hobbyist programmer is not going to let you in to art club. You can look up to the guys who made the Boeing 747, the original Macintosh, the Verazzano Narrows bridge, and other beautiful artifacts of engineering and design. And you can aspire to walk in the footsteps of Faraday, Edison, Telford, Benjamin Franklin, and any other number of inspired tinkerers and builders.

But you, sir, are no painter. And while you hack away at your terminal, or ride your homemade Segway, we painters and musicians are going to be right over here with all the wine, hash, and hot chicks.

[ 1 ] Some Arc hackers may disagree with this.

[ 2 ] Paul Graham is a weenis.

[ 3 ] Yes, these notes are a parody .

[ 4 ] It's hard to understand how fatuous this statement is unless you've tried your hand at painting, which is one reason Graham gets away with this stuff. The allusion here is to a sketchy, iterative style of painting that used to be called "alla prima", where you block shapes in in oil paint and then swoosh them around the composition as the painting progresses, perhaps repainting entire sections of the picture. This is the way Graham and I were taught to paint, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with painting in the fifteenth century, where you had a superprecise underdrawing and underpainting that were covered with thin glazes of color.

And it has equally little do with the difficulty of your subject matter. Being able to blend and overpaint has as much to do with being a skilled draughtsman as having an eraser on your pencil has to do with being a good writer.

The Greeks did pretty well with the human form despite having to work in stone.

[ 5 ] Dipshit.

[ 6 ] All painters really have to remember about chemistry is fat over lean and don't ash in the turpentine.

[ 7 ] Winer, at least, has yet to publish a HOWTO on proper oral sex technique , but if he ever touches a woman I expect the worst.

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Paul Graham all essays in ePub, PDF and more

I decided to read through all the essays Paul Graham has written. The only issue is the format of the essays, which is web-based . I figured it will take me a while, and I prefer to read in ePub format since it is neatly laid out on my phone and remembers where I left off. Fortunately, I found a GitHub project where you can get Paul’s up-to-date essays in different formats and even find the code for a DIY solution.

olasitarska / pgessays.py

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	# -- coding: utf-8 --
	"""
	Builds epub book out of Paul Graham's essays: http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

	Author: Ola Sitarska <[email protected]>
	Copyright: Licensed under the GPL-3 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html)

	This script requires python-epub-library: http://code.google.com/p/python-epub-builder/
	"""

	import re, ez_epub, urllib2, genshi
	from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

	def addSection(link, title):
	if not 'http' in link:
	page = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.paulgraham.com/'+link).read()
	soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
	soup.prettify()
	else:
	page = urllib2.urlopen(link).read()

	section = ez_epub.Section()
	try:
	section.title = title
	print section.title

	if not 'http' in link:
	font = str(soup.findAll('table', {'width':'455'})[0].findAll('font')[0])
	if not 'Get funded by' in font and not 'Watch how this essay was' in font and not 'Like to build things?' in font and not len(font)<100:
	content = font
	else:
	content = ''
	for par in soup.findAll('table', {'width':'455'})[0].findAll('p'):
	content += str(par)

	for p in content.split("<br /><br />"):
	section.text.append(genshi.core.Markup(p))

	#exception for Subject: Airbnb
	for pre in soup.findAll('pre'):
	section.text.append(genshi.core.Markup(pre))
	else:
	for p in str(page).replace("\n","<br />").split("<br /><br />"):
	section.text.append(genshi.core.Markup(p))
	except:
	pass

	return section


	book = ez_epub.Book()
	book.title = "Paul Graham's Essays"
	book.authors = ['Paul Graham']

	page = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html').read()
	soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
	soup.prettify()

	links = soup.findAll('table', {'width': '455'})[1].findAll('a')
	sections = []
	for link in links:
	sections.append(addSection(link['href'], link.text))

	book.sections = sections
	book.make(book.title)

dwinston commented Nov 23, 2012

I'm getting an error about an invalid java call, I suppose the "subprocess.call(['java', '-jar', checkerPath, epubPath], shell = True)" in epub.py. I have java installed. Details: java version "1.6.0_24" OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.11.5) (6b24-1.11.5-0ubuntu1~10.04.2) OpenJDK Client VM (build 20.0-b12, mixed mode, sharing)

Sorry, something went wrong.

sarp commented Nov 23, 2012

On iPhone 5, I get "This page contains the following errors: error on line 13 at column 7: Opening and ending tag mismatch: font line 0 and p" this error when I open the generated epub file in iBooks

c10b10 commented Feb 16, 2013

What deps does this have?

gsdatta commented Aug 27, 2015

Quick fix - it should be width 435 now.

SergeAx commented May 30, 2016

One should change '455' to '435' at lines 28, 33 and 59 for this code to work.

malthejorgensen commented Apr 12, 2017

In order to get valid HTML (which is what .epub contains) you also need to remove the <font> tags (beyond just changing the table width to 435 as @gsdatta and @SergeAx said).

As of today April 12th, 2017 only 4 forks of this gist actually changed the code:

Forks that fix the table width and removes <font> tags:

@james-ingold https://gist.github.com/james-ingold/16c64f94e212f88068ab3d55c53831a7

Forks that fix the table width (but doesn't remove <font> tags):

@monoself https://gist.github.com/monoself/ce550b6567e557224429
@aacook https://gist.github.com/aacook/06803e592e8fa6114e74

Very interesting fork – very large script that does a lot of stuff and is basically a rewrite:

@goc9000 https://gist.github.com/goc9000/4287475

alexshevchuk commented Jan 6, 2021

Added a fork with the

new modern libs urllib3 and bs4
minor syntax changes

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Krasnodar Krai, Russia

The capital city of Krasnodar krai: Krasnodar .

Krasnodar Krai - Overview

Krasnodar Krai is a federal subject of Russia located in the south-west of the country, part of the Southern Federal District. Krasnodar is the capital city of the region.

The population of Krasnodar Krai is about 5,687,400 (2022), the area - 75,485 sq. km.

Krasnodar krai flag

Krasnodar krai coat of arms.

Krasnodar krai map, Russia

Krasnodar krai latest news and posts from our blog:.

13 September, 2021 / Park "Krasnodar" - one of the best parks in Russia .

4 April, 2019 / Cities of Russia at Night - the Views from Space .

14 April, 2018 / Parus (Sail) Rock - a natural monument near Gelendzhik .

21 December, 2016 / Flying over diverse Russia .

29 October, 2016 / Krasnodar - the view from above .

News, notes and thoughts:

8 July, 2012 / Unexpected flooding that occurred on July 6-7 in Krasnodar krai killed at least 150 people mostly in small town of Krymsk. The water level in Krymsk region rose to 7 meters, entire villages were washed away. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that the flood occurred at night, when most people were asleep in their homes.

History of Krasnodar Krai

The territory of today’s Krasnodar Krai was inhabited as early as the Paleolithic, about 2 million years ago. It was inhabited by various tribes and peoples since ancient times. There were several Greek colonies on the Black Sea coast, which later became part of the Kingdom of the Bosporus. In 631, the Great Bulgaria state was founded in Kuban. In the 8th-10th centuries, the territory was part of Khazaria.

In 965, the Kievan Prince Svyatoslav defeated the Khazar Khanate and this region came under the power of Kievan Rus, Tmutarakan principality was formed. At the end of the 11th century, in connection with the strengthening of the Polovtsy and claims of Byzantium, Tmutarakan principality came under the authority of the Byzantine emperors (until 1204).

In 1243-1438, this land was part of the Golden Horde. After its collapse, Kuban was divided between the Crimean Khanate, Circassia, and the Ottoman Empire, which dominated in the region. Russia began to challenge the protectorate over the territory during the Russian-Turkish wars.

More historical facts…

In 1783, by decree of Catherine II, the right-bank Kuban and Taman Peninsula became part of the Russian Empire after the liquidation of the Crimean Khanate. In 1792-1793, Zaporozhye (Black Sea) Cossacks resettled here to protect new borders of the country along the Kuban River. During the military campaign to establish control over the North Caucasus (Caucasian War of 1763-1864), in the 1830s, the Ottoman Empire for forced out of the region and Russia gained access to the Black Sea coast.

Prior to the revolutionary events of 1917, most of the territory of present Krasnodar krai was occupied by the Kuban region, founded in 1860. In 1900, the population of the region was about 2 million people. In 1913, it ranked 2nd by gross harvest of grain, 1st place for the production of bread in the Russian Empire.

Kuban was one of the centers of resistance after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. In 1918-1920, there was a non-Bolshevik Kuban People’s Republic. In 1924, North-Caucasian Krai was founded with the center in Rostov-on-Don. In 1934, it was divided into Azov-Black Sea Krai (Rostov-on-Don) and North Caucasus Krai (Stavropol).

On September 13, 1937, the Azov-Black Sea region was divided into Rostov Oblast and Krasnodar Krai that included Adygei Autonomous Oblast. During the Second World War, the region was captured by the Germans. After the battle for the Caucasus, it was liberated. There are about 1,500 monuments and memorials commemorating heroes of the war on the territory of Krasnodar Krai.

In 1991, the Adygei Autonomous Oblast withdrew from Krasnodar Krai and became the Republic of Adygea.

Beautiful nature of Krasnodar Krai

Sunflower field in Krasnodar Krai

Author: Alexander Egorov

Krasnodar Krai landscape

Author: Vladislav Shutyy

On the coast in the Krasnodar region

Author: Sotnikov

Krasnodar Krai - Features

Krasnodar Krai is located in the south-western part of the North Caucasus. The territory is washed by the Azov and Black Seas. The length of the region from north to south - 327 km, from west to east - 360 km. The Republic of Adygea, another federal subject of Russia, is located entirely within the Krasnodar region.

The Kuban River divides Krasnodar Krai into two parts: the northern - lowland (2/3 of the territory), located on the Kuban-Azov plain, and the southern - foothills and mountains (1/3 of the territory), located in the western highlands of the Greater Caucasus. The highest point is Mount Tsakhvoa (3,345 m).

The population is concentrated in the basin of the Kuban (also known as the Cossack land). The main cities and towns of Krasnodar Krai are Krasnodar (974,000), Sochi (433,500), Novorossyisk (277,000), Armavir (186,000), Anapa (95,900), Eisk (83,200), Kropotkin (76,300), Gelendzhik (75,100), Slavyansk-na-Kubani (67,200), Tuapse (60,400).

Krasnodar Krai is the warmest region of Russia. The climate is mostly temperate continental, on the Black Sea coast from Anapa to Tuapse - semi-arid Mediterranean climate, south of Tuapse - humid subtropical. Winters are mild and summers are hot. The average temperature in January in the plains is minus 3-5 degrees Celsius, on the Black Sea coast - 0-6 degrees Celsius, in July - plus 22-24 degrees Celsius.

Krasnodar Krai - Economy and Tourism

There are reserves of oil, natural gas, iodine-bromine water, marble, limestone, sandstone, gravel, silica sand, iron ore, rock salt, mercury, gypsum, gold. Krasnodar krai is Russia’s oldest oil producing region (since 1865).

The local economy is based on the industrial, construction, fuel and energy, agriculture, transport, resort and recreational, tourist sectors.

The seaports of the Krasnodar region provide direct access, through the Azov and the Black Seas, to international trade routes and handle more than 35% of foreign trade and transit cargoes of all Russian seaports. The air gateway of the region is Krasnodar International Airport (Pashkovsky Airport) - one of the largest airports in Russia.

Tourism is an important sector of the economy of Krasnodar krai. It is actively developing on the coast of the Black and Azov Seas, as well as in mountain and steppe districts of the region. The main centers of tourism are the resorts of federal significance (Sochi, Gelendzhik and Anapa) and the resorts of regional significance (Yeisk, Goryachiy Klyuch and Tuapse district).

Due to a combination of favorable climatic conditions, availability of mineral waters and curative mud, Krasnodar krai is the most popular resort and tourist region of Russia and in fact the only one in Russia seaside spa and recreational center.

Krasnodar krai of Russia photos

Krasnodar krai scenery.

Cretaceous rocks in Krasnodar Krai

Steep cliffs on the coast in the Krasnodar region

Author: Aleksey Kleymenov

Country road in Krasnodar Krai

Author: Nikola Mitinskiy

Pictures of Krasnodar Krai

Memorial Field of Cossack glory in Kushchevskaya village in Krasnodar Krai

Author: Sergey Timofeev

Jet fighter monument in the Krasnodar region

Author: Konstantin Seryshev

Village in Krasnodar Krai

Author: Alena Amplieva

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IMAGES

Paul Graham's best essays
GitHub
Top Must-Read Paul Graham Essays
Paul Graham Essays
Top Must-Read Paul Graham Essays
I read and summarized all of Paul Graham's 200+ essays

VIDEO

Conversations About Art
Superlinear Returns (Compound Growth Mindset)
You should know who Paul Graham is
How Paul Graham's essays helped this HS dropout build & exit a startup then become a VC
Paul Graham
Paul Graham's Startup Success Advice

COMMENTS

GitHub
Check out the releases page for the latest build, updated daily.. Download the complete collection of +200 essays from Paul Graham website and export them in EPUB, and Markdown for easy AFK reading. It turned out to be a whooping +500k words. I used the RSS originally made by Aaron Swartz shared by PG himself, feedparser, html2text, htmldate and Unidecode libraries for data cleaning and ...
Essays
The Age of the Essay: The Python Paradox: Great Hackers: Mind the Gap: How to Make Wealth: The Word "Hacker" What You Can't Say: Filters that Fight Back: Hackers and Painters: If Lisp is So Great: The Hundred-Year Language: Why Nerds are Unpopular: Better Bayesian Filtering: Design and Research: A Plan for Spam: Revenge of the Nerds ...
Essays by Paul Graham
A student's guide to startups. Paul Graham. The pros and cons of starting a startup in (or soon after) college. Pros: stamina, poverty, rootlessness, colleagues, ignorance. Cons: building stuff that looks like class projects.
My Favorites List of Paul Graham's Essays. : r/ycombinator
Hey Everyone, Hope you're doing well. I wanted to share my favorite essays of Paul Graham. I believe listening and reading advice from experienced people is a way of encoding success into your brain. In a sense, our brains let us code almost anything. Counterintuitively, reading does not seem like a part of this encoding because we forgot ...
The Age of the Essay
Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in Moby Dick was a Christ-like figure. Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one. Mods
I read and summarized all of Paul Graham's 200+ essays
P.S Been spending the last few hours reading through Paul Graham 101 and loving it! My favourite insights so far are: See startups as a path to wealth over a small period of time. E.g 4x years, so need to work hard in 4 years, rather than work slowly in a 40 year job.
Paul-Graham-s-Essays-Epub/paulgraham.epub at master
File metadata and controls. Code. Blame. 872 KB. Raw. View raw. An epub of Paul Graham's Essays. Contribute to davidyang/Paul-Graham-s-Essays-Epub development by creating an account on GitHub.
Paul Graham Essays
Novelty and Heresy. 43. The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius. 44. General and Surprising. 45. Charisma / Power. 46. The Risk of Discovery.
chsasank/paul-graham-essays-ebook
E-book made from Paul Graham's essays. Contribute to chsasank/paul-graham-essays-ebook development by creating an account on GitHub.
The Need to Read
You have to be good at reading, and read good things. [ 2] People who just want information may find other ways to get it. But people who want to have ideas can't afford to. [ 1 ] Audiobooks can give you examples of good writing, but having them read to you doesn't teach you as much about writing as reading them yourself.
Paul Graham Essay Summaries
Summaries of Paul Graham's essays. See the originals here.. Summaries. After The Ladder; An Alternative Theory of Unions; Cities and Ambition
Download Paul Graham essays in ePub format
Download Paul Graham essays in ePub format | Hacker News ... Search:
Builds epub book out of Paul Graham's essays. · GitHub
Builds epub book out of Paul Graham's essays. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.
GitHub
Paul Graham's Essays, Kindle version, set several sections for easy navigation - evmn/Paul-Graham. Paul Graham's Essays, Kindle version, set several sections for easy navigation - evmn/Paul-Graham ... ebook-convert calibre.recipe .mobi --test -vv --debug-pipeline debug. 3. Generate Your E-Book. You can choose from Calibre and command line.
Dabblers And Blowhards
The reason Graham's essay isn't entitled "Hackers and Pastry Chefs" is not because there is something that unites painters and programmers into a secret brotherhood, but because Paul Graham likes to cultivate the arty aura that comes from working in the visual arts. Having been both a painter and a programmer, I can certainly sympathize with him.
Paul Graham all essays in ePub, PDF and more
The only issue is the format of the essays, which is web-based. I figured it will take me a while, and I prefer to read in ePub format since it is neatly laid out on my phone and remembers where I left off. Fortunately, I found a GitHub project where you can get Paul's up-to-date essays in different formats and even find the code for a DIY ...
Builds epub book out of Paul Graham's essays. · GitHub
Builds epub book out of Paul Graham's essays. Raw. pgessays.py This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters. Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters ...
Krasnodar Krai
Krasnodar Krai is located in the southwestern part of the North Caucasus and borders Rostov Oblast in the northeast, Stavropol Krai and Karachay-Cherkessia in the east, and with the Abkhazia region (internationally recognized as part of Georgia) in the south. [14] The Republic of Adygea is completely encircled by the krai territory. The krai's Taman Peninsula is situated between the Sea of ...
Krasnodar Krai, Russia guide
Krasnodar Krai is the warmest region of Russia. The climate is mostly temperate continental, on the Black Sea coast from Anapa to Tuapse - semi-arid Mediterranean climate, south of Tuapse - humid subtropical. Winters are mild and summers are hot. The average temperature in January in the plains is minus 3-5 degrees Celsius, on the Black Sea ...
GitHub
Fetch and build Paul Graham's essays as a Kindle book for offline reading. - razius/paul-graham-essays-ebook
Possible introduction of electronic visas in Krasnodar Krai
According to the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov, the possibility of introducing electronic visas for foreign visitors of Krasnodar Krai, similar to those existing in the Kaliningrad region and on the territory of the Free Port of Vladivostok, is being considered now.
davidyang/Paul-Graham-s-Essays-Epub
An epub of Paul Graham's Essays. Contribute to davidyang/Paul-Graham-s-Essays-Epub development by creating an account on GitHub.
Krasnodar Map
Krasnodar. Krasnodar is the capital of Krasnodar Krai in southern Russia, with a popolulation in 2018 of just under 900,000. Its main industries are based on agriculture and food. Ukraine is facing shortages in its brave fight to survive. Please support Ukraine, because Ukraine defends a peaceful, free and democratic world.