107
votes
Accepted
Does WordPress power 27% of the Internet?
This number comes from W3Techs - World Wide Web Technology Surveys.
According to that survey, as of December 2016,
WordPress is used by 27.2% of all the websites
that they monitor. (Source.)
However,...
- 10.2k
82
votes
Accepted
Is this a photo of Margaret Hamilton standing next to Apollo Project code that she wrote?
The photo depicts Margaret Hamilton
Yes, this is an official NASA picture of her:
Margaret Hamilton was the lead software engineer of the Apollo Project
Indeed, from the same source:
Margaret ...
- 78.6k
63
votes
Is the source of the phrase "smoke test" electronic hardware testing?
The Oxford English Dictionary (subscription requried) has this definition:
smoke test n. a method of testing the state of drains and pipes by means of smoke.
Their example is from the Encyclopaedia ...
- 1,547
62
votes
Is this a photo of Margaret Hamilton standing next to Apollo Project code that she wrote?
I've known Margaret for 20 years and when my son pointed this question out to me I emailed her and Ron Hackler (who I've also known for 20 years) to clarify some of this. They replied as follows:
"...
- 721
32
votes
Is the source of the phrase "smoke test" electronic hardware testing?
While the earliest examples of "smoke tests" in Google Books are plumbing-related (with some other assorted usages like smoke tests that determine how air circulates in machines), there are ...
- 30.8k
30
votes
Accepted
Do any ATS companies advertise entirely automated resume rejection?
I only looked at the first ATS system I found when I searched (Freshteam). It seems to have the features you're asking about:
Automate tasks for screening better
Now that the incoming candidate ...
- 30.8k
21
votes
Accepted
Does talking to a rubber duck improve programmer performance when debugging?
You're not going to find studies that do something like compare the effectiveness of a rubber duck vs a stuffed parrot specifically for programmers working on debugging tasks, nor can we really ...
- 3,849
21
votes
Accepted
AI can guess whether you're gay or straight – how do they get 91% success rate?
Is it true or fake?
The research paper in question has passed peer review, suggesting that the methodology was deemed to be sound by other experts in the field. It is conceivable that the results ...
- 931
15
votes
Is this a photo of Margaret Hamilton standing next to Apollo Project code that she wrote?
This question has been asked on Quora - here is Christopher Burke's answer:
I downloaded the source code this afternoon and ran some simple metrics on it, looking only at the ".agc" files ...
- 7,260
15
votes
AI can guess whether you're gay or straight – how do they get 91% success rate?
Summary: This paper is a real scientific paper that has passed peer review. The real judge of whether their findings are true or not is whether they can be replicated. There simply has not been enough ...
- 12k
14
votes
Accepted
Is the MacKeeper software service a scam?
Yes.
Firstly, let's define "scam": my dictionary says a dishonest scheme, while my thesaurus suggests confidence trick which "…exploits characteristics of the human psyche, such as ...
- 316
14
votes
Accepted
Are piracy rates for PC games often 85-90 percent in 2016?
Issue: Whether Personal computer games are being pirated between 85 to 90%?
Evidence:
Global Personal software piracy rate is measured at 38% in 2007, 41% in 2008, 43% in 2009 and 42% in 2011 by ...
- 22.7k
8
votes
Do professional software developers write an average of 10 lines of code per day?
The 2nd edition of Code Complete cites Cusumano et al. (2003) for the best-known (till then) industry figure(s). The paper is based on a survey of 104 projects in four regions of the globe. The ...
- 59.8k
7
votes
Is the source of the phrase "smoke test" electronic hardware testing?
Software/electronics smoke testing is a term which appeared independently from plumbing smoke testing. Instead, it seems to originate from the joke about the magic smoke, an imaginary substance which ...
- 2,447
7
votes
Do any ATS companies advertise entirely automated resume rejection?
Filtering suitable candidates vs not-likely-suitable candidates (which can be in effect auto-rejection) was among the first feature releases of the in-house ATS we use where I work.
It's not ...
7
votes
Accepted
Has Telegram decrypted user messages and provided them to a gov agency?
As far as we know, the police did not go to Telegram and ask them for the data.
Vice (Germany) states - based on non-public papers by the LKA - that the police got the data directly from the phone ...
tim♦
- 51.9k
6
votes
Do software patents stifle creativity?
The accepted answer is a good one. Here I'd like to illustrate it by giving concrete examples from the field of data compression.
LZW, the "GIF Patents"
In the late 1970s, two fundamental ...
- 316
4
votes
Does a webpage with a black background save energy?
On amoled (active-matrix organic light-emitting diode) screen types, such as the Galaxy s5, each pixel is individually lit when powered, so using pitch black backgrounds theoretically reduces power ...
- 140
4
votes
Did the Windows XP CD include Microsoft Bob?
This is very likely to be true
This story is verified by the programmer, Dave Plummer, who included the encrypted copy of Bob on the XP installer. He talks about it in a video on his YouTube channel ...
- 2,533
3
votes
Accepted
Does having a specification result in better code?
After reading this question I wondered if there be statement about this on the free book Evidence-based Software Engineering.
After a quick review I was able to find a statement on chapter 6 "...
- 434
2
votes
Does WordPress power 27% of the Internet?
While the number is real it means (as per other answer) something different in W3Techs report (source for it) — share in top 10 million sites by traffic sample.
But that doesn't say if the number is ...
- 151
2
votes
Are there more open jobs than available developers?
I think there's a very large variation in estimates. Even from BLS itself. Compare the accepted answer with the more recent BLS data from a 2017 NYT article which show near parity for the 2014-2024 ...
- 59.8k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible