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U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

reuters.com

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

#401

Post by skybrian »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #386
microcolonel wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a lousy excuse to me. As a web developer, my entire job revolves around computing trees; and that is (as of now) the most common development environment in the world. My side projects (graphics demos/toys, a multiprocess text editor, various twilio SMS utilities, a high-performance pastebin server) end up using stacks, trees, hashmaps, and bloom hashes as logical responses to the problem descriptions.…

Are you not aware that most languages provide that for free? Note that the question was about implementing, not using. People use them all the time, but they don't reinvent the wheel to do so when it is in the standard library and has nice abstractions already. Why is a web developer implementing a DFS by hand every day? I would not hire that person.

I'm not sure what you mean. I don't know any languages where you don't have to define your own node if you want to implement a new kind of tree, and write a bit of code to recurse over it. (In JavaScript the most common tree is the DOM, but you should still be able to build another one if you need it.)

Also, in an interview it's perfectly fine to say you'd use a library, if you know one that applies. (They might ask you next how you'd do it without a library, but you still get points for knowing about it.)

The other thing to remember is that everyone is effectively grading on a curve, and with practice you get better at interviews.

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

#402

Post by skybrian »

ivanhoe wrote: post #323
microcolonel wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a lousy excuse to me. As a web developer, my entire job revolves around computing trees; and that is (as of now) the most common development environment in the world. My side projects (graphics demos/toys, a multiprocess text editor, various twilio SMS utilities, a high-performance pastebin server) end up using stacks, trees, hashmaps, and bloom hashes as logical responses to the problem descriptions.…

Not sure what do you mean by computing trees in this context, but I personally as a web dev for 15+ years have never-ever had to e.g balance a binary tree or do any other low level operation of that kind. It's important to learn it at some point to be able to understand how it all works, but afterwords you just don't write the low level stuff yourself, ever. If given enough time I'm pretty sure I could come up with s…

I've never had to balance a tree either. But typically it's because the tree represents something essentially tree-shaped and preserving the structure is important. (For example, what would it mean to balance a DOM tree? Nobody would do that.)

On the other hand, I hope you're not saying that the DOM is the only tree you ever use and in 15 years you've never needed to build your own. If so, consider that companies might be interviewing people for programming jobs that aren't like that.

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

#403

Post by thaumasiotes »

burkaman wrote: post #399
thaumasiotes wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't have to pretend there's a secret conspiracy, affirmative action colleges are openly trying to correct for the effects of structural racism that they have no control over. This is an interesting case. In fact, you do have to admit there's a secret conspiracy, for the simple reason that "correcting for the effects of structural racism" is illegal for public colleges, and they therefore never formally admit…

It is not illegal in most of the country: https://tcf.org/content/commentary/what-can-we-learn-from-st... And minority enrollment tends to decline in states where affirmative action is banned, so I don't think there are any conspiracies involved: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/06/24/us/affirmative...

It is illegal in the entire country. That is the general idea of the Supreme Court; it has national scope.

Specifically, the motivation "correct the effects of structural racism" is illegal when a public school is engaging in affirmative action. Affirmative action is generally legal, as long as you have a legal motive.

It turns out, though, that it's really easy for people to lie about their motives.

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

#404

Post by hackuser »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #396
hackuser wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know otherwise? If we are talking about the U.S.: Jews were widely excluded from society. I know an American man who is Jewish and went to college in the 1950s. His whole family changed their last name so he could get in; many colleges barred or put quotas on Jewish applicants. Jewish lawyers couldn't work in many leading 'white shoe' firms. Jewish people couldn't join the country clubs and other social organi…

Well, you'll have to work with what I could find in about a minute of searching the internet, which is only suggestive: > As elsewhere in the United States, the Jews of postwar Los Angles made their most spectacular fortunes in property development. S. Mark Taper, an English Jew with experience in London home construction, arrived in Los Angles in 1939 to lay the basis for one of California’s great real estate empire…

> Being "excluded from society" doesn't mean you get shut out of good jobs. It means you get shut out of certain good jobs

That may be true, but I'm not sure what your point is. Certainly it's prejudiced against, and harmful and oppressive to people, even if not everything is bad or someone else has it worse.

> Jews weren't exactly popular in Europe from the Middle Ages forward, but everyone acknowledged that they nevertheless had good jobs

I'm not sure that's the case, about "good" jobs being common. But certainly Jewish people were victims of widespread, brutal, and sometimes horrific discrimination and oppression in Europe. At one point, in the lifetimes of many people still living, 6 million were murdered over the course of a few years, including almost the entire populations of Jewish people in Poland and other countries. And that well-known event was the worst of a long history of brutal oppression. Did some have good jobs at some times? I don't see the point.

> Disraeli

Disraeli converted; he was no longer Jewish. It's nothing like the people of many religions who still claim to be part of their religion but don't observe its rituals or share its core beliefs.

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

#405

Post by praneshp »

erastuscravath wrote: post #335
paulddraper wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't go there, but I thought the same. "Techs" seem to always be private...MIT, Cal Tech, Florida Tech, etc. (Oh, by the way, Florida Tech definitely fits the aforementioned stereotype.)

Understandable misconception, but he went there. Not being able to recognize cluelessness in other people might just be an understatement.

Except for reading up on the school's history (which I wasn't too keen to), is there another indication that a school is public?

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

#406

Post by solidsnack9000 »

I'm not sure how the stuff about executive positions is relevant for internships.

> 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.

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

#407

Post by nolok »

basseq wrote: post #337
nolok wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like what a tree is or fizzbuzz? Hopefully it isn't that terrible...how someone can make it through any amount of CS related schooling and not know the basics? Ah! You're in for some surprise down the line. Fizzbuzz almost always clear out large amount of applicants.

I was a CS major, but my career took a different direction, and I haven't programmed "professionally" for 8+ years. I looked up the FizzBuzz question and wrote some psuedocode in about 5m. It's sad that FizzBuzz is such a "weeding out" tool, but I guess good to know that I can still pass the first round of an entry-level technical interview!

FizzBuzz (from the point of view of me as an interviewer) is not so much about knowing how to code, but understanding the thought process about basic problem solving. Read the instruction, provide a solution, don't over engineer. It also provides the basics, loop and conditional.

Once you're set on that, you at least know you have a person in front of you who, on the basic level, thinks like a programmer.

So I would say 8+ years doesn't matter so much and you shouldn't worry about that, as long as your mind can still "tick" the right way.

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

#408

Post by solipsism »

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.

Stop that. Stop that shit right now. This is not a business, and we don't you acting like a jerk CEO and yelling at people.

I guess you didn't get downvoted because people agree with you. I agree with you also. And yet, being right is not an excuse for the overly antagonistic way you made your point.

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

#409

Post by dnautics »

palunon wrote: post #349
dnautics wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A acyclic graph is isomorphic to a tree, but the way you access the vertices and edges is completely different.

Depends on your memory representation of the graph. If you simply use the obvious one (a node have a list of pointers to its successors), I don't see the difference except for successors[]/children[]

You're right. I mentioned acyclic graph and my mind slipped to general graphs. Although often graphs are represented as say a sparse matrix.

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

#410

Post by StreamBright »

throwaway8976 wrote: post #96
ones_and_zeros wrote: post #49

Palantir gets some of my sympathy. My organization has a large internship program and I've been first contact for many applicants. I found that a similar number of applicants had to be dropped either due to communication skills or an overall technical skills gap and they tended to be asian/southeast asian. Interestingly most of them fit the same profile of a bachelor's from India, 1 or 2 years at a consulting firm in…

I worked at Palantir in the covered period and did a ton of interviews, 5-10 a week. I experienced exactly this dynamic - very large numbers of applicants who had a bachelor's degree from a South or East Asian university, a year or two of work experience, and a Masters from a mid-tier US University. The large majority washed out on the FizzBuzz-level technical questions on phone screens (or asked in person at job fai…

We introduced homework to filter out candidates who could not complete FizzBuzz level tasks. 70% of applications can be filtered by simple home work.
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