Smarter testing Java code with Spock Framework
hmm, looks quite nice as a potential next-gen JUnit replacement for unit tests
(tags: java testing bdd tests junit unit-tests spock via:trishagee)
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‘Baby Friendly Holidays | Child, Toddler & Family Villas | France | Spain | Portugal | Italy’. Joe swears by it, will give it a go next year
(tags: holidays vacation travel europe kids children via:joe)
How the NSA Converts Spoken Words Into Searchable Text – The Intercept
This hits the nail on the head, IMO:
To Phillip Rogaway, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, keyword-search is probably the “least of our problems.” In an email to The Intercept, Rogaway warned that “When the NSA identifies someone as ‘interesting’ based on contemporary NLP methods, it might be that there is no human-understandable explanation as to why beyond: ‘his corpus of discourse resembles those of others whom we thought interesting’; or the conceptual opposite: ‘his discourse looks or sounds different from most people’s.’ If the algorithms NSA computers use to identify threats are too complex for humans to understand, it will be impossible to understand the contours of the surveillance apparatus by which one is judged. All that people will be able to do is to try your best to behave just like everyone else.”
(tags: privacy security gchq nsa surveillance machine-learning liberty future speech nlp pattern-analysis cs)
awslabs/aws-lambda-redshift-loader
Load data into Redshift from S3 buckets using a pre-canned Lambda function. Looks like it may be a good example of production-quality Lambda
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‘Aerospike offers phenomenal latencies and throughput — but in terms of data safety, its strongest guarantees are similar to Cassandra or Riak in Last-Write-Wins mode. It may be a safe store for immutable data, but updates to a record can be silently discarded in the event of network disruption. Because Aerospike’s timeouts are so aggressive–on the order of milliseconds — even small network hiccups are sufficient to trigger data loss. If you are an Aerospike user, you should not expect “immediate”, “read-committed”, or “ACID consistency”; their marketing material quietly assumes you have a magical network, and I assure you this is not the case. It’s certainly not true in cloud environments, and even well-managed physical datacenters can experience horrible network failures.’
(tags: aerospike outages cap testing jepsen aphyr databases storage reliability)