Keith Devens .com

Neat stuff for the day

Paul Graham: Better Bayesian Filtering

If people had been onto Bayesian filtering four years ago, why wasn't everyone using it? When I read the papers I found out why. Pantel and Lin's filter was the more effective of the two, but it only caught 92% of spam, with 1.16% false positives.

When I tried writing a Bayesian spam filter, it caught 99.5% of spam with less than .03% false positives.

So why did we get such different numbers? I haven't tried to reproduce Pantel and Lin's results, but from reading the paper I see five things that probably account for the difference.

John Udell: Shipping the Prototype "Let's promote scripting languages to the status they deserve"

Check out this neat interview with Dennis Richie.

Permalink | Comments? | id 3421

21:13 (utc-5)
edited: 22:37 (utc-5)