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Paul Graham on Fighting Spam
Ramakrishnan M writes "Paul Graham, the Lisp Guru is back with a great technique to fight spam. It is based on trust matric, and he claims, only 5 out of 1000 spams got leaked out of this system with 0 false positives. Worth looking at."
How does this compare to spamassasin. Anybody know any figures?
Fleur de Sel
Spam is good....I ate some for breakfast.
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foobar
Ah, if I had some mod points for you....
Very true, very true.
Taco whacking off to the girls volleyball team?
You're new here, aren't you.
However, like much of the lisp community, Paul Graham lives in a mentally constricted little academic world that warps his interactions with other people. Lisper's have a tendancy to assert that their methods and language are the only solutions for lots of things, and then to evade when confronted. The argument invariably devolves into a claim by the lisp that since the opposition is not really experienced or smart enough to have ever programmed big enough, sophisticated enough, or complex enough systems, the opposition can't really even understand the pro-lisp arguments. They usually accompany this with the assertion that if you were smart you would take their advice blindly.
I write this as someone who loves to write lisp and uses it whenever possible. However I cannot work with the typical lisper. I advise my manager not to hire people with that tell-tale evidence on their resume -- the overly long stay in academia followed by stints at other suffocating and inbred organizations such as BBN or Xerox Parc or large telecom companies or NASA or large defense companies (do any of these fucks ever work for a place where they could be fired for not preforming ?), and the classic list of a dozen lisp variations and Haskell and other weird shit in the skills area.
For an example, look at this long thread and semi-flame war on comp.lang.lisp. An admittedly trolly post raises a serious question about a claim made on page 2 of Paul Graham's book; a piece of C code is offered to invalidate that claim. Classic lisp jihad boy Erik Naggum later jumps in with an even better counter-example, because he can't stop himself from proving he can write C better than the C proponents, but still maintains Paul Graham's assertion even while he proves it wrong -- just because Paul Graham is on the lisp side against the infidels.
I would not trust Paul Graham or his book to educate a new programmer in lisp, or in programming generally. To be a good teacher or mentor, in addition to all the other qualities, you have to maintain a certain trust of your student or protege -- you are asking them to invest a lot of time and effort into learning a way of doing things that isn't popular, doesn't have clear undeniable advantages, and requires years of study. They have to be able to believe you, so you can't start spewing trite claims that will be discovered to be just marketing before they have fully grasped lisp. Lisp community members will destroy that trust in new people very quickly, because of their fanaticism. When I show new guys at my work my favorite little lisp tricks and tools, and gradually introduce them to the bigger more integrated stuff while empahsizing the ease of modifying even huge programms like that, I very carefully watch all of what I say so that I never lie or exagerate even with the good motive of leading the new guy to the right path. If he says "I think I can whip this up faster in python" you have to say, "Ok, let's do this one in python. Maybe later we can compare it to something similar in scheme or elisp" and wait a few weeks.Hopefully Paul's email filter will do great things. Most likely it will end up where all the Baseian tools to recoginize vehicles in military images, to recogizin movements in the stock market, to recognize pre-hurricane patterns in the weather, to recognize pre-earthquake vibrations, etc, etc, ended up -- as wastes of other people's time and energy. It's a sign of Paul Graham's closeted and inbred little world that he's still pumping the Baseian bigot shpiel in 2002.
what kind of modding is this?
(4 - Informative) ???
it's just a paragraph from the original article. You modders would already be informed if you'd read the article.
oktay
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Founder of the The Free Linux CD Project