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.
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 can not over-recommend crm114. I've been using it to classify some database entries and its accuracy is second-to-none, and its custom language makes working with strangely-stored data (like database entries) easy (after you learn the strange language)
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.
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.
It's designed for a mouse, where there are normally actions taken after moving the pointer. If there's no continuous UI presence on the playing field it's kind of... erm... pointless.
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.
A simpler explanation is that everyone holding a stock wants it to go up so they can profit. When it goes up to a point where they don't think it's too low, they sell it, and hence no longer own it. So everyone that owns a stock thinks it's too low.
>So everyone who still holds any given stock thinks that the market price is too low.
Only true in a limited sense. For instance, a majority holding the stock up until today might have just thought that the market price was way too high for how the company is performing, but that the presence of one or more misguided, irrational, drowing-in-money, potential aquirers out there meant that there was a large chance they might get a large upside off one of the fools--turns out they were right =).
But it is a hazard for politicians--it teaches people that hiding dangers makes them go away :)