Computer says no: Irish vet fails oral English test needed to stay in Australia
An Irish veterinarian with degrees in history and politics has been unable to convince a machine she can speak English well enough to stay in Australia. Louise Kennedy is a native English speaker, has excellent grammar and a broad vocabulary. She holds two university degrees – both obtained in English – and has been working in Australia as an equine vet on a skilled worker visa for the past two years. But she is now scrambling for other visa options after a computer-based English test – scored by a machine – essentially handed her a fail in terms of convincing immigration officers she can fluently speak her own language.
This is idiotic. Computer-based voice recognition is in no way reliable enough for this kind of job. It’s automated Kafkaesque bureaucracy — “computer says no”. Shame on Oz (via James Kelleher)(tags: via:etienneshrdlu kafkaesque bureaucracy computer-says-no voice-recognition australia immigration english voice testing)
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‘By All Means, Compare These Shitheads to the Nazis’
(tags: mike-godwin nazis shitheads funny godwins-law internet)
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produces a randomized permutation of a list, with exactly one cycle (which guarantees that we will reach every element of the list even though we’re traversing it in random order)
(tags: algorithms lists permutation random randomization cycles)
Working with multiple AWS accounts at Ticketea
AWS STS/multiple account best practice described
A general purpose counting filter
This paper introduces a new AMQ data structure, a Counting Quotient Filter, which addresses all of these shortcomings and performs extremely well in both time and space: CQF performs in-memory inserts and queries up to an order of magnitude faster than the original quotient filter structure from which it takes its inspiration, several times faster than a Bloom filter, and similarly to a cuckoo filter. The CQF structure is comparable or more space efficient than all of them too. Moreover, CQF does all of this while supporting counting, outperforming all of the other forms in both dimensions even though they do not. In short, CQF is a big deal!
(tags: cqf counting-quotient-filters data-structures via:acolyer coding approximate bloom-filters)