Gotta wander off on a tangent here — scribd is a beautiful site! I'm probably the last one around here to find out since this is the first time I've looked at their site since they dropped Flash (which I ignored) but wow, what a difference — if you found scribd not to your taste and haven't been back since, it's time to revisit it.
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.
How many programmers sit down and say "It's time to do some electronic data transformations"? How many painters say "Time to push some paint"?
PG is right that programming is a fundamentally creative activity, and so are the visual arts. Plenty of programmers forget that. It's not that the medium is irrelevant, but then again PG isn't claiming complete identity between programming and painting.
Is your criticism really "fatuous? no YOU'RE fatuous!"? That comes across as a little, well, petulant. The point is not about what programmers or painters or line cooks say when they get down to work - it's whether any insight-bearing parallels can be drawn between them. The important thing being insight-bearing, rather than insecurity-assuaging.
I got the real dead-tree edition of Hacker & Painters that someone left in the book exchange rack at the Green Tortiose Hostel in SF. Just another reason I love that place.
A lot of similar material appears in both the book and in his essays posted online, but there's also some unpublished stuff in the book as well.
As to the ratio, I couldn't say. But as with Hacker Monthly, I find reading a print edition to be a new experience anyway, even if I've read the online text beforehand.
All of the essays from the book are available at http://paulgraham.com/essays.html, though with some differences. (Some have different titles as well.) It's a great opportunity to use Readability,
http://www.scribd.com/doc/47180/Paul-Graham-Hackers-And-Pain...