Biden administration calls for developers to embrace memory-safe programing languages and move away from those that cause buffer overflows and other memory access vulnerabilities.

Biden administration calls for developers to embrace memory-safe programing languages and move away from those that cause buffer overflows and other memory access vulnerabilities.

  • thisfro@slrpnk.net
    2·
    10 months ago

    Average is the mean (i.e. sum of all “skill” divided by the amount of programmers)

    What they were thinking of is the median (50th percentile = 0.5 quantile), which splits the group in two equal sized groups.

    For a bell curve, they are the same values. But think of the example of average incomes: 9 people have an income of 10$, one has an income of 910$. The average income is 100$ ((10*9+910)/10). The median is basically 10 however.

    • Bademantel@feddit.de
      4·
      10 months ago

      The distribution of skill in humans, for various tasks and abilities, can often be approximated by a normal distribution. In that case, as you know, the mean is equal to the average.

      • burlemarx@lemmygrad.ml
        1·
        10 months ago

        Actually, in order to test your assumption, you’d need to quantitatively measure skill, which per se is something already problematic, but you’d also need to run a statistical test to confirm the distribution is a normal/Gaussian distribution. People always forget the latter and often produce incorrect statistical inferences.