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Products that do what PG Number – I scraped 100k pages to find proximity to Paul Graham does
Erdős Number is an individual's "collaborative distance" to Paul Erdős. I calculated the "PG number" for everybody Paul Graham thanks in his essays. I then recursively found their blogs, and extracted the people that they thank in their essays. This is still a work in progress. The data is open-source and I'm continuing to add edges on Github (linked on the website).
- 1US
Author here. This site lets you put in a username and get the users with the most similar writing style to that user. It confirmed several users who I suspected were alts and after informally asking around has identified abandoned accounts of people I know from many years ago. I made this site mostly to show how easy this is and how it can erode online privacy. If some guy with a little bit of Python, and $8 to rent a decent dedicated server for a day can make this, imagine what a company with millions of dollars and a couple dozen PhD linguists could do. Here's Paul Graham:…
2022 · stylometry.net
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5MO
2017 · mathcha.io
- 6IW
The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…
Feb 2026 · berksoft.ca
- 7IM
I've been studying interval arithmetic for the past few weeks and it's a really interesting field because while there is a ton of super interesting research published over the past decades, it has never really gotten the recognition that it deserves, IMO. One reason for this is that standard interval arithmetic has really poor handling of division by intervals containing zero. If you compute 1 / [-1, 2] in regular interval arithmetic, you get either [-∞, +∞], or you have to say that the operation is undefined. Both solutions are virtually useless. The real answer of course is [-∞, -1] U…
Apr 2026 · victorpoughon.github.io
- 8
- 9FA
Hi all, just posting an update to my previous Show HN, where I announced a side-project I worked on which was a (web version) of a multi-user, notepad style calculator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31817997 After a couple of user requests (and having a good think about it) I decided to migrate the web UI to create a Mac and Windows desktop app. After using it a little bit, I feel this is a much better experience than the webapp, and reduces a lot of the friction if I wanted to run a few small calculations. You can find the download links below:…
2022 · figr.app
- 10PG
Start a tweet with @letpgfinish, and it will be finished as if by Paul Graham himself. This was a weekend project I undertook with a couple of friends just for fun. The original one was @letkanyefinish, so you might like to try that out too... in fact, it seems to work much better (funnily enough, there's a definite inverse relationship between literacy of bot and literacy of its human counterpart). Anyway, the output is based on pg's essays and various tweets/quotes. Having used HN silently for a while, we thought we'd share this - so hope you enjoy :)
2014
- 11AM
2015 · github.com
- 12IM
https://github.com/siraben/ti84-forth Hi HN! For the past year I've been getting into programming in Z80 assembly (especially for the TI-84+). More recently I've been learning about the Forth programming language and after a lot of searching online (in vain) for a Forth interpreter for the TI-84, I decided to write one myself. It's been fun demoing this to others, because it's a very unexpected use of a calculator. It's my largest project to date, and I'm interested to know what the HN community thinks, please feel free to critique my code! -- Ben
2018
- 13IM
This is another one of my automate-my-life projects - I'm constantly asking the same question to different AIs since there's always the hope of getting a better answer somewhere else. Maybe ChatGPT's answer is too short, so I ask Perplexity. But I realize that's hallucinated, so I try Gemini. That answer sounds right, but I cross-reference with Claude just to make sure. This doesn't really apply to math/coding (where o1 or Gemini can probably one-shot an excellent response), but more to online search, where information is more fluid and there's no "right" search engine + text…
2024 · ithy.com
- 14MN
2017 · foreignnumbers.com
- 15IW
Hi folks, I wrote a blog post about the two's complement. I always scratched my head about some details: - "Take the ones' complement and add one" - "Half of the range are negative numbers" - etc. Now I think I understand these details, but had to piece it together from some sources. I'd love to get your feedback on this post. Looking forward. BR, Pedram
2023 · hadjian.com
- 16AP
2020 · github.com
- 17IS
Everything that would be here is in the README. I hope this gets big, it has tons of potential.
2013 · github.com
- 18A
2022 · askpaulgraham.cyclic.app
- 19IM
Recently moved to Egypt, and in dire need to get the numbers down. Great excuse to explore learning software some more. Possibly very niche, but maybe it is useful for someone else out there. Feedback is always welcome.
2023 · arabic-numbers.koljapluemer.com
- 20TM
2017 · github.com
- 21AA
As a programmer and entrepreneur, Paul Graham's essays have inspired many in the tech community. I grew up reading his essays frequently. Previously, I would use Google and perform a site search with keywords to find Paul Graham's thoughts on a topic. With the launch of GPT-3 and vector search capabilities, I have created an app that makes it easier to find specific insights and perspectives from Paul Graham's essays. The app indexes and categorizes each essay, providing a streamlined way for users to access and understand Graham's thoughts on programming, startups, and innovation. Do try it…
2023 · cookup.ai
- 22IB
Hey, just wanted to share with you guys and app that I built and deployed in a day with Lovable. So, as a founder I always wanted to have an advisor but my budget would always be less, then on the other hand hand I had Paul's essays on Startup Advice, which I never read because I was busy building stuff. Hence, I built this product which comes into a sweet spot of both at the same time being more reasonable and capable than the alternative. ps: it's running on a reasoning model and tbh I've been able to gather pretty good insights from it. Note to PG: If you're seeing this. I'm your big fan.…
2025 · paulgraham.resurrect.space
- 23BA
2020 · andrewsun.com
- 24TA
Built this as a quickie to help me apply the method outlined in PG's Startup = Growth essay.
2012 · the6pct.com
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