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Comment by abrax3141 | Hacker News Reader

Just report 38.8 years, the median age for us population as reported by the census. Mary won’t notice, it’s scalar in time and space, and in the limit you’ll be correct.

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These are personnel records - people who are working at least (16-64 years) so not the total population. Will be similar though. Depends on demographics.

Additionally, one can assume that there's more younger people working in a company than older and make a little bit more accurate guess.

Aha! Let’s build a DNN model, train it on all the occupation data we can scrape from the web, then run it forward to deliver Mary’s result. Once the training is completed, say a year (or, with advances in gpu tech, two years), the forward model can be run in scalar time to confabulate a very convincing wrong answer to any demographic question Mary might have! That way we can fire the whole engineering team because the model will comphabulate answers to any future question Mary might have. (“. . . in the style of a software engineer.”)

It’s actually currently 42 For what it’s worth (went up 2 years in the last decade).

Oh. And it can be engineered at minimal cost (although all the test writing will require 2FTEs for 6months). UnleSS you write it in Haskell, in which case tests are unnecessary, but it’ll be 3FTEx2yrs to send the engineering team to a monastery to learn how to tie themselves into the appropriate monadic knot.

42!

The median of life, the universe, and everything.

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