U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians • Hacker News Board

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#351

Post by Chris2048 » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 2:18 PM UTC

statictype wrote: post #218

paulddraper wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh...me too. I don't know what you think is weird....some have a similar hiring experience to what Palantir did (depending on the truthfulness of allegations, of course).

some have a similar hiring experience to what Palantir did ... which is completely irrelevant to whether Palantir is on the right side of this issue. If a police department was reported as displaying bias against blacks or muslims, would it be reasonable to respond with "I've had issues with blacks and muslims in law enforcement too"? Now consider the fact that Palantir does a lot of work for intelligence agencies...

> If a police department was reported as displaying bias against blacks or muslims, would it be reasonable to respond with "I've had issues with blacks and muslims in law enforcement too"?

But this has no context. What kind of bias, what kind of issues. The example wrt asians has this context.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#352

Post by mattnewton » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 2:19 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #150

sib wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax dollar ROI for taxpayers (since they are the "investors").

Stop that. Stop that shit right now. You are not an investor. You are not a consumer of services. This is not a business, and we don't need a CEO. You're a CITIZEN of one of the most powerful nations on the planet, and don't you dare forget it.

Eh, I sure hope My situation is more like an investor with a vote, because I have very little ability to boycott the US government. Even if I go to the trouble of choosing a competing "product" by getting citizenship somewhere else I will still feel it's influence!

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#353

Post by Chris2048 » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 2:19 PM UTC

cup wrote: post #194

statictype wrote: post #171

Some of the comments here are laughable - "I also had to deal with clueless south asians once so I understand how it is". Seriously?

The general HN users idea of race, discrimination or anything outside the realms of general whiteness is pretty dire.

What is "general whiteness"? Some kind of disqualifier?

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#354

Post by mattnewton » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 2:25 PM UTC

thedz wrote: post #53

I think many of the comments are missing a few important points: 1. Yes, 20% Asian hiring rate is pretty decent when you compare to the general Asian population at large. However , the lawsuit specifically alleges that, in one example case, the qualified application pool was 73% Asian. In that case, it's extremely abnormal to hire 17 non-Asians and only 4 Asians. 2. Palantir is involved in government contracting, so…

I really think we need better statistics here. Palantir should definitely be making moves to make sure race isn't the dividing line, using something like more rigorous online tests and bias training for interviewers, but there are plenty of plausible explainations for this difference of Asian applicants vs Asian hires based on how they defined "Qualified".

What if the job involved frequent client contact and you needed to asses a high English ability? That would no doubt discriminate against a lot of non native speakers who might have the requisite degree, but would they be qualified? There is also the issue of degrees or other certifications being usually useless to assess real world coding ability, and certainly useless to assess interview whiteboarding questions.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#355

Post by vonmoltke » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 2:26 PM UTC

morgante wrote: post #328

vonmoltke wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you ignore the terminology, DFS is basically just recursively walking a graph, something which actually happens all the time in most dev jobs. In ten years of full-time professional development I have never needed to recursively walk a graph. Hell, the only data structures in the software I worked on for the first six (real-time signal processing code) didn't use any data structures other than lists, arrays, and…

Are you sure? Keep in mind that a graph doesn't always come up and slap you saying that it's a graph. This very comment thread is a graph which is being printed depth-first.

I'm very sure. The signal processing code had no graph structures whatsoever.

That's certainly not the case with the NLP code I have been working on for the past 4.5, but I have never personally needed to search the (usually) trees in a structured manner. Most of our code that searches for things doesn't care about the structure of the graph during the search; it just searches a node list. Once the node is found, structure matters. There are some algorithms that use calculations like shortest path and tree height, but I didn't write the code to actually do that.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#356

Post by ap22213 » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 2:34 PM UTC

probably_wrong wrote: post #266

ap22213 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the last two weeks I interviewed three candidates with masters of science C.S. None of the three knew the memory size in bytes of a double precision floating point variable. None of the three could explain scenarios in which they would use an array over a linked list.

I don't think that first question proves what you think it proves. Learning implementation details about a specific programming language is not what CS is supposed to be about (see the quote about astronomers and telescopes). In fact, if you use several programming languages at the time, I'd go as far as to call it a waste of my time - if I'm worried about overflow for a specific problem, I can get the range of data…

The particular positions that I'm hiring for require certain kinds of knowledge, unfortunately. When one is dealing with Petabytes of structured signal data, it's helpful (but not required) that someone know memory layout. But, it's not the first question I ask.

Usually, I start off with some behavioral, get-to-know-them type questions. One of these is to ask them to recall the 'best software developer' that they've ever worked with. The great majority of candidates actually say themselves which is unexpected (and a little arrogant to me - weren't we all 'junior' developers once? - didn't we all once look up to someone?). But, surely one of the best would know when to use an array and when not to or know the memory and precision impacts of the variable types that they use.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#357

Post by cwilkes » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 2:35 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #347

arghnoname wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is interview paralysis. They can't believe an interview answer is ever supposed to be O(n). I've had it happen to me where I get tripped up on relatively easy problems because the initial easy solution I came up with wasn't sufficiently clever and magically log n or some such thing.

Any suggestions for dealing with this? I try and keep things as relaxed as possible to start with and make it clear that trivia and syntax is not what I am going after. I would walk out of the room, but I am happy to walk someone though most of a problem they are not getting. The goal is going from an understood problem to actual code.

In addition to the obvious have the person walk you through what they are going to do try rewording it slightly. In this case ask for the max value.

Maybe they are nervous and focused too much on the minimum part of this that they lose sight of what they are trying to solve for. But be careful not to spoon feed it to them.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#358

Post by kelukelugames » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 2:40 PM UTC

JackFr wrote: post #214

kelukelugames wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government agencies would not take a suit unless it's a slam dunk.

That's definitely not true. In many cases, corporations realize that settling is cheaper than fighting and winning -- and government agencies bank on that.

That's definitely not true. Can you name many cases where the government filed frivolous suits? If you can't provide a list then have you thought about where that opinion came from?

Government agencies are afraid of having a reputation like this so they don't touch questionable suits. Otherwise, agencies would receive even more frivolous complaints. Agencies are political. Settling weak cases looks bad to the voters. However, agencies are required to investigate every claim no matter how stupid. The people who hope to settle are ones with failed investigations. Those have to pay for their own lawyers, eg Pao vs Klein Perkins. On the other hand, companies have more incentive to settle when government agencies are suing because the case is tight.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#359

Post by mcguire » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 2:42 PM UTC

"In 2015, Asians represented 27.2 percent of the professional workforce at Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, LinkedIn and Yahoo but were 13.9 percent of the companies' executive workforces, according to a study by pan-Asian professionals organization Ascend."

Asians are culturally inclined towards collective work and are therefore disinclined to the competitive environment of management.

Tongue in cheek comment of the day.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#360

Post by yummyfajitas » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 2:53 PM UTC

rmxt wrote: post #345

yummyfajitas wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1.0 lower on GPA (e.g. 2.5 vs 3.5) is "slightly reduced entry requirements"? http://web.archive.org/web/20080423221308/http://www.umich.e...

Surely college admissions procedures have changed significantly in the intervening 17 years, right? We're talking about the advent and removal of the 2400 point SAT, the rise of digital applications, and the rise of SAT subject tests, among other changes. Furthermore, this specific point system in question was ruled unconstitutional and is no longer in use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratz_v._Bollinger

It's possible that the same organizations which were found directly discriminating on race, and desperately resist any transparency (both before and after), have secretly reformed.

It's also possible that admissions numbers didn't change a lot because "holistic" admissions discovered previously unmeasurable mitigating factors for blacks having low SAT/grades/etc.

And in yet another major coincidence, these systems also discovered that Asians are inferior in similarly unquantifiable ways, resulting in Asians who are admitted having SAT scores 450 pts higher than blacks and 140 pts higher than whites.

I don't find this particularly likely, however. Do you?