Comment by svec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by svec | Hacker News Reader

From the abstract, it sounds like the actual paper makes less bombastic claims than the news sites talking about the paper:

"In a field study with ten professional developers over a two-week period we investigated the use of biometrics to determine code quality concerns. Our results show that bio- metrics are indeed able to predict quality concerns of parts of the code while a developer is working on, improving upon a naive classifier by more than 26% and outperforming clas- sifiers based on more traditional metrics. In a second study with five professional developers from a different country and company, we found evidence that some of our findings from our initial study can be replicated. Overall, the results from the presented studies suggest that biometrics have the potential to predict code quality concerns online and thus lower development and evolution costs."

Unfortunately, Boing Boing has gotten increasingly clickbaity in the past few years, and Cory Doctorow in particular has a strong tendency to write about the story he would have enjoyed reading instead of the one that was actually published, up to and including lying outright if it makes a more exciting article. (E.G., the 2014 article "Small Town Sheriff Buys Tank," which opens "Rural counties across Indiana have been purchasing Afghanistan-surplus tanks with gunner turrets..." It turns out he's talking about armored trucks with no weapons.)

I'm not sure if he's doing it on purpose or if he's having genuine issues distinguishing boring facts from exciting fiction, but either way Boing Boing shouldn't be trusted at all. Shame, as they used to be quite good.

Gunner turrets do not necessarily include permanently mounted weapons. See: B-17 waist-gun turrets. All weapons in the plane were removable. Nobody wants to leave automatic weapons lying around where they would be easy to steal.

Your link includes an armored vehicle in which an automatic belt-fed weapon could be mounted (and which are commonly possessed by SWAT teams). It's a military-grade APC, there is no honestly viable quarrel with his title.

The quarrel, I think, is that APCs are not tanks. Completely different vehicles, designed for completely different missions.

Yes, it's a very common practice for news/buzz sites, broadcasts or anything else relying on content written by a person paid per view (let's say everywhere, it's easier).

Thanks for posting the abstract.

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