Wired and Reddit are part of the same media conglomerate, so that explains how the wired articles get on Reddit. I think a lot of n.yc readers read reddit, so that is how they get here so fast I bet.
I'm a native. I found the weather to be boring. It is always sunny, never rains, and the plants are either evergreen or scrubby bushes. So you don't get a sense of what season it is.
If you work there then you are not outside much though - you get into your car in your covered garage, and drive to the office park. If you want lunch, then you drive from the office park to the strip mall.
It is not a walkable place at all--even in the strip malls, to get from one end to another you drive from one spot in the parking lot to another.
If you are doing a ham/spam type classification, then you won't need the alien language. I am almost a total tech novice and I was able to do well with just some bash scripts. Of course the docs will teach you about better ways to train the system, if you are interested in going from 98% correct classification to 99.5% correct.
The Cadillac of bayes classifiers is CRM114--it can use classifiers that are far more advanced than naive bayes, such as clustering, or with hidden markov modeling.
I wouldn't spend too much time deciding between the two--they are more or less functionally equivalent, so just pick one and don't look back.
Python is a little more "corporate", with a little more regimented style (e.g. significant whitespace, PEP style guide - http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/). CherryPy is super-simple to get started.
Ruby is a little more "hacker", with a more idiosyncratic cast of characters such as DHH and _Why and a little more focus on coolness and tricks. Rails is the way to go, but you can get up and running with the basics with the Camping Framework in about 10 minutes.
The marginal cost of selling software is $.00 pretty much. So MSFT operates on a what-the-market-can-bear approach, not a costco-style mark-up-everything-10-percent appraoch.
Stock prices are weird. The current value is where half the people think the price is too low and half the people think the price is too high. Of course everyone who still has Yahoo stock think that the price is too low--because everyone who thinks the price is too high has already sold their shares.
So everyone who still holds any given stock thinks that the market price is too low.
I am 28, married, and live in the Park Merced complex in the south-west corner of SF. It is about as suburbs as you get in SF, but also is right next to SF State so there is a young vibe if you want. I pay ~1300 for a 1br, parking included, lots of street parking too...walking distance to Muni and the mall, lots of green space around.
The schools in SF Unified are terrible. Your best best for public school is to send your kid to Chinatown--they will be in with the academically oriented Chinese crowd, and as a bonus learn Mandarin. Sounds weird but lots of people do it. Then for high school you send your kid to Lowell, a top public school, or maybe Washington, or else you go private.
It is more like: email is a cockroach. Sure it is ugly, but it will still be around long after the rise and fall of prettier creatures like Twitter or Facebook.
This article and Tim's are both a little long-winded. All that is happening here is a discussion about when to hold ruby conferences: on weekdays so the pros can go, or on weekends so hobbyists can go.
I am a bit put off by the zealotry of the ruby camp (i.e. The Ruby Way, why_'s midnight genius). Ruby is an interpreter. There are lots of them. When you boil it down, there are lots with similar capabilities, so it comes down to a preference on which to choose.
I want a choice between interpreters, and not a choice on which cult to join.
Answers: no, but still probably a lot. The site is not affiliated with a charity, so who knows if they actually give rice or not.
Anyway, everyone knows that solving hunger is not about quantity of food (there is plenty to be had) but rather about distribution--the places where people are starving are that way because their government is corrupt. It doesn't matter how much food is sent.
But it is a hazard for politicians--it teaches people that hiding dangers makes them go away :)