I think the physicists were jealous of the social sciences. In parts of it, you can really just write anything, and in other parts, just a minor experiment that has an outcome that could possibly be seen as an affirmation is enough. And then you can publish all the clickbait you want, and without all that studying and math. It's a brave, new world!

Come on!

$ grep -riH "back ?door" .

So a few people can spend a bit of time looking through hundreds of millions of lines of code? How is that useful?

The implicit bias test used is controversial, to say the least. According to mainstream cognitive psychology, it measures temporary perceptual associations via priming. These do not have a causal relation with higher level opinions. The effect can be caused by something as uninteresting as the local way of referring to science and scientists.

Methods? They had a large number of factors to correlate with their data: 25 (possibly a few more, depending on what you read), and ran a multiple regression over it, and are reporting an effect for every p .05. That's bad science at multiple levels.

It's just another fishing expedition.

I see. Printf is a bit of a weird function: perhaps they need a better macro syntax. Expanding at compile time is safe, so a good language for that might overcome (part of) these problems.

> it will actually become common and necessary to "do ugly things" in order to get stuff done in real-world applications.

Quite likely. But if that can be kept to a minimum, possibly shielded behind macros and the likes, and the rest of the code can achieve good performance, then we might have won something.

> A simple printf function has to be a macro

I don't see anything wrong with that. Actually, it sounds quite sensible: it gets rid of some ugly variable arguments handling code, but still keeps the source readable. For the rest: Rust is an interesting idea, but doesn't look ideal. Apparently, it does not interface well with C++, only C, but mixing with C++ could be a good start. Rewrite some buggy code in Rust where it makes sense while keeping the rest in C++.

Come on. This kind of front page publicity is very, very rare. Two days, no less. And this research has been done before. And in general, one or two experiments are not going to reveal the ultimate truth, so why the sudden interest in this?

> Because this research is interesting for humans who reproduce and attempt to teach their offspring to act like adult human beings in 18 years or so.

So because the staff is interested in it personally? Then just write so upfront. "I'm personally interested in this."

Why is Slashdot posting this run-of-the-mill type of research that cannot get normal funding on its front page, two days in a row? Cui bono? To whose benefit?

Don't crowdfund research. It's bad for publicly funded research. As soon as the government, the universities and the grant organizations find out that crowdfunding works, they'll cut budgets or make their funding dependent on privately acquired money. That means only public darlings will get funded, or projects with corporate backing, and that the research results can end up in a drawer if there are larger backers that have made such provisions. In short, by funding research, you're killing it. Instead, write your congressman or member of parliament.

You're right. Number of files? Comment language? Size? History length? Just a few parameters that seem to influence the likelihood with which "Ugly hack" appears. Nope, first a good model, then the analysis.

Of course, that hadn't crossed my mind. My enemy's enemy, that sort of stuff.

I don't understand it either, but people seem to be voluntarily sucking up to Über, probably blinded by the thought that anything big must be good. They are just a taxi service, dammit. Oh yeah, they have an app. That must be it.

Closer to 300,000, I think.

> as far as valuation.

Ah, you a worthy of front page attention by being the visionless CEO of some unimportant and technologically totally uninteresting company as long as enough drool comes from the mouth of Goldman-Sachs analysts?

At least you're honest, I suppose.

I'm an Apple fan (well, 80%), and I would mod it up. It's important information. It's at +5 now, but I can't understand why anyone would want to mod it down, except for a malicious hacker.