Links between Paul Graham's essays - revisited

Re:Links between Paul Graham's essays - revisited by kylec on Sunday December 14, 2008 @02:08PM (#397555)

I wonder if someone can use the PageRank algorithm or something similar to determine which essays are the most prominent. It's hard to tell with this graph which is the most connected essay - is it "Taste for Makers", "What You Can't Say", "Great Hackers", or something else? It would also be interesting to correlate this with the Google PageRank for these pages, and traffic data (if it's available).

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Re:Links between Paul Graham's essays - revisited by pg on Sunday December 14, 2008 @05:21PM (#397711)

Here are the ones that get the most traffic, with daily page views:

     1760 Stuff
      770 What You'll Wish You'd Known
      403 How to Start a Startup
      365 Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
      349 Why Nerds are Unpopular
      294 How to Do what You Love
      274 Web 2.0
      247 Great Hackers
      207 How to Make Wealth
      187 Lies We Tell Kids

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Re:Links between Paul Graham's essays - revisited by ph0rque on Monday December 15, 2008 @10:12AM (#398384)

"Stuff" is my sending the given link to my female relatives to dissuade them from, or to reduce their practice of, being packrats. I'm pretty sure there are other users out there that do the same...

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Re:Links between Paul Graham's essays - revisited by pg on Monday December 15, 2008 @03:41PM (#398780)

You're right. There are rarely referring urls for it, which implies that it spreads primarily by email.

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Re:Links between Paul Graham's essays - revisited by RiderOfGiraffes on Sunday December 14, 2008 @03:38PM (#397625)

OK - done that ...

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/PaulGrahamEssaysRanking.html?Y...

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Re:Links between Paul Graham's essays - revisited by michael_nielsen on Sunday December 14, 2008 @03:45PM (#397635)

URLs are malformed. Otherwise, nice. When you say it's "similar" to PageRank on your webpage, what do you mean?

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Re:Links between Paul Graham's essays - revisited by RiderOfGiraffes on Sunday December 14, 2008 @04:06PM (#397653)

Re malformed - fixed.

I've just pulled the description from WikiPedia, implemented pretty much that, and that's what I did.

In essence, each page gets set to 1.0. Then distribute 80% of that down each outgoing link, and 20% to everyone equally. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I think that's pretty much the algorithm. Pages pointed to by pages with lots of juice get lots of juice. Pages pointed to by no one, or only pages with little juice, get little juice. It's linear algebra thought of as network flow.

Well, that's what I did.

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Re:Links between Paul Graham's essays - revisited by DougBTX on Monday December 15, 2008 @06:58AM (#398259)

In PageRank order: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3awww.paulgraham.com

Google has a good PageRank implementation, though it isn't open source.

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Re:Links between Paul Graham's essays - revisited by RiderOfGiraffes on Monday December 15, 2008 @05:26PM (#398926)

> In PageRank order: > http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3awww.paulgraham.com > Google has a good PageRank implementation, though it > isn't open source.

Yes, but doing what you've done here gives the entire site, whereas implementing it from the definition allows you to compute the actual values, as I did.

Of course, Google have twoke their algorithm so it's no longer exactly as they originally published, and they're not telling anyone what it actually does. Using the "clean" version is at least transparent.

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