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LOL as DST bug uncovers spurious automated noise complaints:
In January last year the airport unearthed a scheme whereby campaigners were using automated software to generate complaints against the airport. Officials caught out the set-up when the two anti-Heathrow enthusiasts forgot to take into account the hour going back in October, and began complaining about flights that had not yet taken off or arrived.
(tags: bugs dst daylight-savings-time funny heathrow complaints automation noise)
Facebook scuppers Admiral Insurance plan to base premiums on your posts
Well, this is amazingly awful:
The Guardian claims to have further details of the kind of tell-tale signs that Admiral’s algorithmic analysis would have looked out for in Facebook posts. Good traits include “writing in short concrete sentences, using lists, and arranging to meet friends at a set time and place, rather than just ‘tonight’.” On the other hand, “evidence that the Facebook user might be overconfident—such as the use of exclamation marks and the frequent use of ‘always’ or ‘never’ rather than ‘maybe’—will count against them.”
The future is shitty.(tags: insurance facebook scoring computer-says-no algorithms text-analysis awful future)
MemC3: Compact and concurrent Memcache with dumber caching and smarter hashing
An improved hashing algorithm called optimistic cuckoo hashing, and a CLOCK-based eviction algorithm that works in tandem with it. They are evaluated in the context of Memcached, where combined they give up to a 30% memory usage reduction and up to a 3x improvement in queries per second as compared to the default Memcached implementation on read-heavy workloads with small objects (as is typified by Facebook workloads).
(tags: memcached performance key-value-stores storage databases cuckoo-hashing algorithms concurrency caching cache-eviction memory throughput)