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Paul Graham on Fighting Spam

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the near-and-dear-to-my-heart dept.

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."

3 of 675 comments (clear)

  1. spam is a necessary evil by Pink+Hamster · · Score: 0, Troll

    I think that spam is a necassary evil that can be easily controlled. If we make a law to simply ban spam then we might be banning other things like mail lists. I personally recieve NO SPAM in my main account and less than one piece a day in my "junk mail account." That's inluding things that the spam filter catches. All people have to do is to be careful with their e-mail addresses. Spam is not a problem for people who use a modicum of common sense

  2. Re:Ok, that is hot.... by Vengie · · Score: 1, Troll

    1) the usefulness of one particular language that you happen to dislike? That's a bit hypocritical. Not when you consider that: a) the language was invented as an exercise in programming, b) its entire purpose was to stroke the ego of the professor who wrote it, c) said professor _required_ its useage in his intro programming class to the detriment of his students. IMHO, "language family x" sucks and "language x sucks" are a world apart.

    --
    When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
  3. Rationality by Baldrson · · Score: 1, Troll
    I don't know why I avoided trying the statistical approach for so long. I think it was because I got addicted to trying to identify spam features myself, as if I were playing some kind of competitive game with the spammers. (Nonhackers don't often realize this, but most hackers are very competitive.) When I did try statistical analysis, I found immediately that it was much cleverer than I had been.

    For the same reason artificial intelligence has been held back by reliance on "symbolist" languages such as LISP:

    Everyone wants to believe they are smart enough to tell the computer the rules of behavior rather than realizing they should be teaching the computer to think statistically which is to say rationally.

    Of course since the primary religion pushed by both government and media is the moral virtue of ignoring statistics (to the point that actuaries are now thought of as reactionaries) there should be no surprise that the high priesthood of "AI" has failed not only to produce artificially intelligent software but has done so through the theological bias of rules as commandments for the faithful computer.

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    Seastead this.