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
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      9 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
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        9 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
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          9 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.