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If they're using text classification, such as Bayesian, all you have to do is have a good concept of whitespace. Just break your tokens up apropriately, and compare the weightings to your corpus.

http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

You just need a good corpus for your text classification.

Wait, but I run Tiger on my iBook here and Gentoo on my box upstairs... Does that make me an impossibility? There was an article some time back, oh right, a Paul Graham article suggesting that techies might start going Mac. I've seen it happening with other people, it's definitely happening with me. I'll never have an Xserve replace my Debian server box, but Tiger does a damn good job on the laptop.

As annoying as this is, a lot of times customers change their requirements on you and you have to scrable. So even good planning isn't going to save you there.

Maybe it's an american thing, but why the hell do people buy from companies with such a horrible history of design?

They've just discovered the holy grail of inkjet industry revenue.

Yep - astroturfing on /. masquerading as an engineering piece.

/., meet Paul Graham. Paul Graham, /.

Apple is much more than just a processor. What really differentiates Apple from the Windows world is the OS. Not to get into the argument about stability, OS X is much more intuitive and overall an easier to use operating system.
I don't think that you will come into a situation where a help desk would tell a user to switch into Windows or run VirtualPC because I doubt that Macs will ever come with those pieces of software installed. Working at a helpdesk is not about telling users what they should do, it's about helping them do what they want to do
I think that now that Apple is switching to Intel they will have more flexibility in pricing and will probably continue to grow their market share. I'd say that the prospects for Mac developers will be better than ever in the future. If you need another opinion check out this article.

In many companies there exists a huge difference in compensation between the management (particularly the CEOs) and the folks that actually make and service the products. There is also an increasing tendency for executives to treat employees (particularly IT employees) as disposable assets, and you have what appears to be an increasing lack of respect for the competence of management in the industry.

Doesn't this look to similar to a Paul Graham's essay, Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas: http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html ?
Even the title is the too similar.

A Similar Essay "Why Smart People have Bad Ideas" by Paul Graham. http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html

Rather Interesting...

http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html

The essay's title is probably derived from Paul Graham's essay Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas. Recommended read by the way, that man has insight.

Yahoo Stores used to be (http://www.paulgraham.com/), but I believe it was rewritten in C or C++ and Perl after Yahoo bought Viaweb (the company which had originally developed the app in Common LISP).

I really don't need to comment, but...

I guess I just needed to share my excitement in just ordering a brand new 15" PowerBook G4 (even though I'm sure the G5 will be out in a second). The machine is just so beautiful (the most beautiful in the world, I might add), clean, and sweet. I'm a hard-core Linux user (actually typing this from Slackware/FireFox, which will remain unchanged on this desktop server), but I figure that I'll take my chances with Apple one more time (last time was in 1997). Besides, OS-X is FreeBSD, i.e. Unix.

And, besides, if Apple tries to fsck me Microsoft style, I'll load Ubuntu faster than your next heartbeat on the beautiful machine.

Another reason why I switched.

Yeah, PhysOrg is clearly a marketing front for PR releases with any sort of science-y edge to them.

See Paul Graham's already classic The Submarine for details on how this crap works.

After reading Paul Graham's article Submarine I have to ask myself who gains by this belief being believed by the mainstream.

Paul Graham has a different idea. He thinks that some kids should consider the educational advantage you'd get from starting a business instead of going to college. Especially kids with interest in technology. It sounds like Paul was making a suggestion, but I wonder if he's actually describing something that's already happening.

...
Have you ever noticed that when animals are let out of cages, they don't always realize at first that the door's open? Often they have to be poked with a stick to get them out. Something similar happened with blogs. People could have been publishing online in 1995, and yet blogging has only really taken off in the last couple years. In 1995 we thought only professional writers were entitled to publish their ideas, and that anyone else who did was a crank. Now publishing online is becoming so popular that everyone wants to do it, even print journalists. But blogging has not taken off recently because of any technical innovation; it just took eight years for everyone to realize the cage was open.

I think most undergrads don't realize yet that the economic cage is open. A lot have been told by their parents that the route to success is to get a good job. This was true when their parents were in college, but it's less true now. The route to success is to build something valuable, and you don't have to be working for an existing company to do that. Indeed, you can often do it better if you're not.

When I talk to undergrads, what surprises me most about them is how conservative they are. Not politically, of course. I mean they don't seem to want to take risks. This is a mistake, because the younger you are, the more risk you can take. ...

Actually college is where the line ends. Superficially, going to work for a company may feel like just the next in a series of institutions, but underneath, everything is different. The end of school is the fulcrum of your life, the point where you go from net consumer to net producer.

The other big change is that now, you're steering. You can go anywhere you want. So it may be worth standing back and understanding what's going on, instead of just doing the default thing.

All through college, and probably long before that, most undergrads have been thinking about what employers want. But what really matters is what customers want, because they're the ones who give employers the money to pay you.

So instead of thinking about what employers want, you're probably better off thinking directly about what users want. To the extent there's any difference between the two, you can even use that to your advantage if you start a company of your own. For example, big companies like docile conformists. But this is merely an artifact of their bigness, not something customers need. ...

A Public Service Message

I'd like to conclude with a joint message from me and your parents. Don't drop out of college to start a startup. There's no rush. There will be plenty of time to start companies after you graduate. In fact, it may be just as well to go work for an existing company for a couple years after you graduate, to learn how companies work.

And yet, when I think about it, I can't imagine telling Bill Gates at 19 that he should wait till he graduated to start a company. He'd have told me to get lost. And could I have honestly claimed that he was harming his future-- that he was learning less by working at ground zero of the microcomputer revolution than he would have if he'd been taking classes back at Harvard? No, probably not.

And yes, while it is probably true that you'll learn some valuable things by going to work for an e

...
Have you ever noticed that when animals are let out of cages, they don't always realize at first that the door's open? Often they have to be poked with a stick to get them out. Something similar happened with blogs. People could have been publishing online in 1995, and yet blogging has only really taken off in the last couple years. In 1995 we thought only professional writers were entitled to publish their ideas, and that anyone else who did was a crank. Now publishing online is becoming so popular that everyone wants to do it, even print journalists. But blogging has not taken off recently because of any technical innovation; it just took eight years for everyone to realize the cage was open.

I think most undergrads don't realize yet that the economic cage is open. A lot have been told by their parents that the route to success is to get a good job. This was true when their parents were in college, but it's less true now. The route to success is to build something valuable, and you don't have to be working for an existing company to do that. Indeed, you can often do it better if you're not.

When I talk to undergrads, what surprises me most about them is how conservative they are. Not politically, of course. I mean they don't seem to want to take risks. This is a mistake, because the younger you are, the more risk you can take. ...

Actually college is where the line ends. Superficially, going to work for a company may feel like just the next in a series of institutions, but underneath, everything is different. The end of school is the fulcrum of your life, the point where you go from net consumer to net producer.

The other big change is that now, you're steering. You can go anywhere you want. So it may be worth standing back and understanding what's going on, instead of just doing the default thing.

All through college, and probably long before that, most undergrads have been thinking about what employers want. But what really matters is what customers want, because they're the ones who give employers the money to pay you.

So instead of thinking about what employers want, you're probably better off thinking directly about what users want. To the extent there's any difference between the two, you can even use that to your advantage if you start a company of your own. For example, big companies like docile conformists. But this is merely an artifact of their bigness, not something customers need. ...

A Public Service Message

I'd like to conclude with a joint message from me and your parents. Don't drop out of college to start a startup. There's no rush. There will be plenty of time to start companies after you graduate. In fact, it may be just as well to go work for an existing company for a couple years after you graduate, to learn how companies work.

And yet, when I think about it, I can't imagine telling Bill Gates at 19 that he should wait till he graduated to start a company. He'd have told me to get lost. And could I have honestly claimed that he was harming his future-- that he was learning less by working at ground zero of the microcomputer revolution than he would have if he'd been taking classes back at Harvard? No, probably not.

And yes, while it is probably true that you'll learn some valuable things by going to work for an e

...
Have you ever noticed that when animals are let out of cages, they don't always realize at first that the door's open? Often they have to be poked with a stick to get them out. Something similar happened with blogs. People could have been publishing online in 1995, and yet blogging has only really taken off in the last couple years. In 1995 we thought only professional writers were entitled to publish their ideas, and that anyone else who did was a crank. Now publishing online is becoming so popular that everyone wants to do it, even print journalists. But blogging has not taken off recently because of any technical innovation; it just took eight years for everyone to realize the cage was open.

I think most undergrads don't realize yet that the economic cage is open. A lot have been told by their parents that the route to success is to get a good job. This was true when their parents were in college, but it's less true now. The route to success is to build something valuable, and you don't have to be working for an existing company to do that. Indeed, you can often do it better if you're not.

When I talk to undergrads, what surprises me most about them is how conservative they are. Not politically, of course. I mean they don't seem to want to take risks. This is a mistake, because the younger you are, the more risk you can take. ...

Actually college is where the line ends. Superficially, going to work for a company may feel like just the next in a series of institutions, but underneath, everything is different. The end of school is the fulcrum of your life, the point where you go from net consumer to net producer.

The other big change is that now, you're steering. You can go anywhere you want. So it may be worth standing back and understanding what's going on, instead of just doing the default thing.

All through college, and probably long before that, most undergrads have been thinking about what employers want. But what really matters is what customers want, because they're the ones who give employers the money to pay you.

So instead of thinking about what employers want, you're probably better off thinking directly about what users want. To the extent there's any difference between the two, you can even use that to your advantage if you start a company of your own. For example, big companies like docile conformists. But this is merely an artifact of their bigness, not something customers need. ...

A Public Service Message

I'd like to conclude with a joint message from me and your parents. Don't drop out of college to start a startup. There's no rush. There will be plenty of time to start companies after you graduate. In fact, it may be just as well to go work for an existing company for a couple years after you graduate, to learn how companies work.

And yet, when I think about it, I can't imagine telling Bill Gates at 19 that he should wait till he graduated to start a company. He'd have told me to get lost. And could I have honestly claimed that he was harming his future-- that he was learning less by working at ground zero of the microcomputer revolution than he would have if he'd been taking classes back at Harvard? No, probably not.

And yes, while it is probably true that you'll learn some valuable things by going to work for an e

> It's basically a modified whitelist system. Imagine this: Your inbox is set to block all mail which is not on the whitelist.

Very clever. Now go read http://www.paulgraham.com/stopspam.html and search for `fence'.

All challenge-response or auto-blacklisting systems are unscaleable and therefore defective. Period.

From a Paul Graham essay:

Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist", as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you'll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you'll find yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction.

---

Pick your fights more wisely... it's obviously that the more you know, the more you realize there is left to learn. Wasting time explaining those that know even less than you that they don't know much may be easier than going out and trying to learn even more yourself, but doing so amounts to nothing but laziness.

Our society has systems of education not to inspire the Einsteins, but to educate the masses (how well it does that is a different topic).

See the excellent article by Paul Graham on this

http://paulgraham.com/say.html

Also, it seems to me that it is inane to think you can somehow prevent evil from occurring, just by somehow preventing someone from talking publicly about it. It is this sort of ostrich mentality that has led to the widespread molestation of children within the very church that preaches most strongly about the immorality of the same. IANA psychologist, but I would think that those who speak about something are at least more approachable, more lucid (and open to arguments against) than those who keep it to themselves. Driving them underground only makes it worse.

Has SlashDot become a means of submarining PR?

I don't think he predicted that the iPod would have been big in the first place -- so I don't see why I should believe him that it's going to be small in the future.

This sounds more like "Microsoft claims X will come true, newspapers print it everywhere, maybe it becomes true".

I'm pretty sure that was Paul Graham too.

This is just as likely as his previous essay stating that bayesian filtering would end all of our spam problems.

His points over many essays are nearly always the same, but looked at from different angles:

• do hard work (and work hard)
• hang around with smart people
• don't follow trends, blaze your own trail
• start with good ideas
• spend as little as possible
• the internet leverages your investment
• your biggest investment is time
• Tech matters (as do languages and platforms)
• He did it (started a successful company and sold out). All of his essays encourage you to as well.

I, for one, thank Paul Graham for his insight into something I want to do.

Oh, and if you didn't know this nugget of wisdom: Find and listen to someone who has done what you want to do. Don't listen to the masses. Listen to someone's who's done it.

Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html ...'nuf said.

Is it just me or did that article read like a PR piece promoting the deregulation of the broadband industry?
As far as why they don't list percentages, looking at the editorials on the site, it also seems like they have an anti-China agenda.

Maybe you'd like to do some reading up on first class macros. Heck, even Arc apparently has first class macros.

Small children required to stand at attention, swearing oats they don't understand. Small children learning obidience to elders, to an organisation out of their parents control.

Scouting is entirely within their parents control, because nobody can sign up without parental permission, and the vast majority of the people running things are parents.

You comment does apply to public school however, where parents truly lack control, and children are truly taught to love and obey the State.

For me, scouting was an excellent antidote to school. I got to accomplish real things. Unlike in school.

With a dash of cronyism to boot. What else could be the reason/cause behind the info contained in the parent post?

Paul Graham describes in rather vivid detail what happens to the media when it is 'seduced' by PR firms. Imagine how threadbare Slashdot would be if you strip away all the PR-oriented news stories here....

This reporter's account proves that big business '0wns' the mass media at large. No wonder people are flocking to blogs for real news and commentary--not PR fodder....

isn't this what PR firms are doing for years. Pual Graham writes in http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
blogs are pretty much the natural evolution of the phenomena.

--
Left sigs long time ago!

Paul Graham, I'd like you to meet Paul Graham. Sorry it was too tempting not to point out that article. Check out that second link, it is "an Apple press release being printed up as a[n]" essay blog entry. Please don't take me too seriously, but I hope people don't take your post too seriously either.

Paul Murphy, I'd like you to meet Paul Graham. What we have here is an Apple press release being printed up as a trade journal article.

Good for Apple's PR firm. I guess.

Not that I have anything against Macs or PowerPC hardware, I just don't like disengenuous authors (or their articles).

Regards,
Ross

Paul Graham's site has a short piece about Orbitz's use of Lisp, called Inside Orbitz.

Actually, it's an excellent question.
3 Reasons to learn Common Lisp: (there are many others, but most of them can also be gotten by learning any modern dynamic language...not these)

1) Macros. I second the other posts...this is the most fundamental reason to learn lisp, in that this is _why_ it is chock full of other, very modern features. But you can use Common Lisp and love it without actually writing your own macros. It's a bit like the C preprocessor, but processing syntactic objects instead of a text stream of code, and the syntax is regular so its easy to read and write code. Think Perl source filters that never break. (Somebody made this analogy in a good blog entry somewhere.) Until you read Graham's On Lisp, which is on the web for free at http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html (though I like the paper version, it can be hard to find), you won't really get what macros can do. Other texts just touch on them briefly.

2) CLOS. Common Lisp Object System is far more flexible, powerful, and innovative than any other OO system I know of (including Smalltalk, Python, Ruby...and comparing Java or C++ to CLOS is just funny.) A great book to learn the real meat of CLOS (not introductory) is Object Oriented Programming: A CLOS Perspective, but first read the CLOS chapter in Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp (in print and a great intro), his On Lisp, or the book reviewed here (which I haven't read entirely, but sounds quite good). One note: it hasn't got much in the way of encapsulation. Of course, using #1 and the package system and gensyms, you could add it...but that's sort of fighting the design. So if you're an OO encapsulation nazi you might like Ruby better.

3) Lexical closures. Ruby calls these blocks (though CL's syntax is a bit simpler). It sounds unimportant, but it's essentially a way to simulate a "micro-object" without creating a class, or even an object, explicitly. This sounds wierd, but you can do things like stuff a hash table full of little objects, or pass them to other functions, and generate OO-like behavior with much simpler code. Design patterns people can think of Decorators, Commands, Adaptors, Bridges, etc easy and clean.

If you use Ruby, you'll know that blocks (#3) are essentially what makes it (IMHO) one of the best dynamic languages out there, other than lisp. (It beats CL in one regard in that it has continuations, but that's another story.) You can get #3 in a few other good dynamic languages - I think Perl has them (?). Python and Java have read-only lexical scope in anonymous inner classes, but in Java the syntax is baroque, and the read-onlyiness/final-ness of captured objects is a limitation that Ruby and CL do well without.

So #3 can be gotten a few other places. But trust me that it utterly _pales_ in power in comparison to #1 and #2, and they are afaik only available in Common Lisp (and to some degree Dylan, or Scheme if you bolt on a CLOS-like package...both of which are also Lisp dialects). All three combine to enable some amazing design patterns that are not possible in any other languages than CL.

While we wait for Arc, Paul Graham's Lisp FAQ has his Lisp recommendations:

Do you know a good, free Lisp implementation?

There are several. The Common Lisp implementation I use is Clisp, but CMUCL is also well-regarded. For Scheme hacking I use Scheme 48 and PLT Scheme.

For an excellent counterexample, see Beating the Averages by Paul Graham.

I am an ex-Lisper who strayed from the One True Language and am now in the process of regaining proficiency to rejoin the Lisp Priesthood. My motivation is that I am tired of the limitations I hit due to the deficiencies inherent in all the other supposed "modern" popular programming languages I've encountered. I also remembered really *enjoying* the whole process of rolling Lisp code, a joy I lost long ago when I strayed into the mass market of more socially acceptable programming languages.

The deficiencies of modern languages I speak of above are not necessarily those of capability (though those exist), but are primarily of language design. Most languages are designed with the goal of increasing the productivity of the average programmer. Lisp's design was entirely about elegance, simplicity and power. I can give you lots of reasons why Lisp is better than insert-your-favorite-programming-language-here, but that will just devolve the conversation into a jihad. So, let me tell you what Lisp is fantastic at.

Actually, you know what? I'm not going to reiterate that which others have stated. If you really are interested, let me just point you to a couple of sites to get you started on your journey of discovery. Read Paul Graham's essays/articles, the first two chapters of Peter Siebel's book available on-line, this essay on Lisp's prowess as a rapid prototyping language and this paper on why the future of the (semantic) Web may lie with Lisp. Then, if you appetite is whetted, Google for more info, download a flavor of Common Lisp, work thru Seibel's book, and experience it for yourself.

Or not. If you're perfectly satisfied with whatever flavor you how you do your work, there is absolutely no reason to learn ANYTHING new, is there?

Learning Lisp. It will take you back to the future.

There are some information at Paul Graham's site: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html and a more technical description: http://lib.store.yahoo.com/lib/paulgraham/bbnexcer pts.txt

VIAWEB is the company you are thinking about. They wrote software for creating online stores online. They coded in Lisp. Check out http://paulgraham.com/ for more information. Fitzghon

- C++ is more readable than assembler
- C# and Java are more readable than C++ ...
- At the end of this list are functional programming languages.

If you can read source more easily, then maintainability will be better. Most projects maintain code, they write new code less often.

This article will tell you why you should be interested in functional programming languages (this link is about Lisp). If you're smart and open minded, you will be convinced.

The best functional languages are Haskell and Erlang (click "next" at the bottom of the page). But like the review and link indicate, there's actual value to learning Lisp.

However, the book review is much too in-depth and has jargon.

A simpler example: with Java you prevent bugs by static typing variables, example:

int numberOfTries = 3;

If you later try to fill "numberOfTries" with a string, the compiler will warn you of a bug and you'll have prevented it. The Java compiler makes it a rule that you have to give a type to your variable so your code quality will be higher (fewer bugs).

With Haskell, you don't have to type int. Haskell will figure out the type for you, you get the benefit of preventing bugs with the convenience of not having to type variables. There are other good features like that in functional programming languages.

You could say that every language puts restrictions on what the programmer can do. I mean writing the source code is bottlenecked by the rules of the language (every variable should have a type. You can't do this/that etc.) so that the resulting code AUTOMATICALLY has fewer bugs. Well the amount of source "laws" in functional languages is much lower than in C++ and Java. This means that there is less to remember for a programmer and there is less chance for rules to conflict/interact with each other (in Java you can't use certain variable types in static classes = another meta rule to remember).

Besides having less rules to remember and take into consideration. The functional languages have also chosen the best "laws" to follow. I mean that if you follow the source laws of Java, it's still relatively easy to produce buggy programs, with functional languages it's harder to produce implementation bugs (thinking bugs are always possible but that's your problem).

The only problems with functional programming languages is that the rules which govern source code are very good, but also very different from the rules in traditional programming languages. It might seem like thinking upside down/backwards for people already familiar with procedural languages. Another problem is that because of humans sticking to what they know, the libraries of the functional languages aren't as extensive as those of Java for example. This means that you'll have to program more parts of your program yourself instead of just using a ready made library which fits the task. This problem is limited by the fact that you can program 10 times faster than in Java and, as I said, maintenance takes up most of the time anyway.

The reason I chose Erlang is because with functional purely functional programming languages like Erlang, you can automatically multitask your program over several CPU's (or this will take minimal effort). Nice feature to have in the future because every CPU manufacturer is going multi-core chip now. The future is in multiprocessor machines, not higher clockspeeds (unless diamond wafers become viable) (Lisp is not purely functional by the way).

Also, you can easily make a server that never goes down with Erlang because your server is automatically clustered. Just plonk down a couple networked PC's and if one dies, the server cluster will just keep on going (a bit slower) until you replaced the power supply of the broken PC.

There are tons of other advantages but, as I said,

Paul Graham's book, On Lisp, is the single best book on programming I have ever read. You can get it as a PDF from his website, for free.

You will also want to read his essay, Revenge of the Nerds, for some serious insight into why Lisp is just so darn good.

If you're just starting on Lisp, the best place to start is with GNU CLISP, although you will find yourself wanting to use Emacs with SLIME to interact with your Common Lisp environment. I use SBCL, but CMUCL and CLISP are also acceptable. On my Powerbook, I use SLIME with OpenMCL.

Paul Graham's book, On Lisp, is the single best book on programming I have ever read. You can get it as a PDF from his website, for free.

You will also want to read his essay, Revenge of the Nerds, for some serious insight into why Lisp is just so darn good.

If you're just starting on Lisp, the best place to start is with GNU CLISP, although you will find yourself wanting to use Emacs with SLIME to interact with your Common Lisp environment. I use SBCL, but CMUCL and CLISP are also acceptable. On my Powerbook, I use SLIME with OpenMCL.

Paul Graham's book, On Lisp, is the single best book on programming I have ever read. You can get it as a PDF from his website, for free.

You will also want to read his essay, Revenge of the Nerds, for some serious insight into why Lisp is just so darn good.

If you're just starting on Lisp, the best place to start is with GNU CLISP, although you will find yourself wanting to use Emacs with SLIME to interact with your Common Lisp environment. I use SBCL, but CMUCL and CLISP are also acceptable. On my Powerbook, I use SLIME with OpenMCL.

Paul Graham's book, On Lisp, is the single best book on programming I have ever read. You can get it as a PDF from his website, for free.

You will also want to read his essay, Revenge of the Nerds, for some serious insight into why Lisp is just so darn good.

If you're just starting on Lisp, the best place to start is with GNU CLISP, although you will find yourself wanting to use Emacs with SLIME to interact with your Common Lisp environment. I use SBCL, but CMUCL and CLISP are also acceptable. On my Powerbook, I use SLIME with OpenMCL.

I really didn't expect to see such a graphic proof of Paul Graham's article so quickly.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/21/195321 4

When they said "trusted sites" I was all geared up for some sort of Bayesian analysis. After all, it worked for spam.