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Sounds like someone has a chip on their shoulder. > "McGrattan boasts that 70% to 80% of the time, she can look at a chunk of computer code and tell if it was

Sounds like someone has a chip on their shoulder. > "McGrattan boasts that 70% to 80% of the time, she can look at a chunk of computer code and tell if it was written by a man or a woman." ... > "because only about 20% of the engineers are women, McGrattan says" Holy crap, she can tell whether code is written by a man or a woman at a slightly worse rate than random chance. I have a picture in my head of how these standards work out: int a = 0; //create an integer variable and initialize it to zero.

ssanders82 18y ago
That's the first thing that popped into my head when I read that sentence. Hey, me too! Male, male, male, male, male. 4/5 correct. I'm a genius. 70% to 80% of the time I can also guess whether a date in history was a weekday, whether the stock market will rise or fall for a calendar year, and whether your last bathroom visit was a #1 or #2. Ok, back to writing my cryptic non-commented strings of computer instructions. Also, your code should read like this for extra safeness: int a; // create an integer variable a = 0; // initialize it to zero
deleted 18y ago
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timr 18y ago
Assuming that she was being cynical, and consistently guessing "male", then you'd be right. However, if she were truly guessing randomly, you'd only expect her to be right (.5(.8) + .5(.2)) * 100 = 50% of the time. All you can conclude is that whatever strategy she's using, it's about as good as the best non-random strategy you could devise given prior knowledge of the situation.