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

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

#301

Post by daemin » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 9:18 AM UTC

kirab wrote: post #292

scatters wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sizeof(double) is not specific to any one programming language or architecture; it's determined by IEEE 754, an international, cross-language, cross-platform standard. Non-IEEE floating-point implementations are exceedingly rare nowadays (although they do exist). You're right about it being engineering, not computer science, but IMO it's reasonable to expect someone applying to a programming job (assuming this is wha…

Well.. C and C++ offer a wide variety of arithmetic types. Double precision is not required by the standards (except by the optional annex F of C99, covering IEEE 754 arithmetic), but on most systems, the double type corresponds to double precision. However, on 32-bit x86 with extended precision by default, some compilers may not conform to the C standard and/or the arithmetic may suffer from double-rounding issues.

So a reasonable answer could say - usually 8 bytes - but sometimes with extended precision it could be 10 bytes, etc...

I am actually kind of sick of the people that say these details are not important to being a good programmer. They absolutely are, knowing fundamentals of the machine, language, and environment that you are developing in is essential.

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

#302

Post by DavidHm » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 9:24 AM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #182

chaosphere2112 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My alma mater has a great undergrad program, but an absolutely awful masters. I've been told that they don't have the resources to teach it, and that the college keeps sending recruiters throughout Asia to pick up as many foreign students as possible for the extra tuition money, though that might have just been a bitter professor.

Masters programs are run as a cash cows for many universities to be filled will anyone who can fog a mirror. As a former academic I can tell you that there are literally different marking criteria for overseas masters students than local undergraduates.

That is fascinating.

Anecdotally, in European universities, bachelors are the "get in as many people as we can for the tuition fees", while masters are the "let's be as selective as we can get away with".

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

#303

Post by daemin » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 9:26 AM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #182

chaosphere2112 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My alma mater has a great undergrad program, but an absolutely awful masters. I've been told that they don't have the resources to teach it, and that the college keeps sending recruiters throughout Asia to pick up as many foreign students as possible for the extra tuition money, though that might have just been a bitter professor.

Masters programs are run as a cash cows for many universities to be filled will anyone who can fog a mirror. As a former academic I can tell you that there are literally different marking criteria for overseas masters students than local undergraduates.

Yep, that's how I remember it in Australia. The honours students had more respect and were more skilled than the masters students.

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

#304

Post by microcolonel » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 9:30 AM UTC

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #299

skybrian wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for example, I have an interview question where it's not just about knowing what a stack or a tree is, but rather realizing that a stack or a tree might be useful to solve a particular problem. (You could use either one.) And then writing out code to do it. So, no esoteric data structures, but you really do have to know how to use the standard ones. It tends to trip up people who might have some book knowledge…

It could also be that you only ever have to do this between 0 and 0.00001% of the time in the real world, and many people who could do it just fine if they are given space to think about it or refresh their memory, which usually results in freezing up during a stressful interview. They probably haven't exercised that knowledge because they have been too busy building real things.

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.

Only somebody who doesn't write software for a living would claim that "between 0 and 0.00001% of the time in the real world" should these techniques be readily accessible in working memory.

As for "freezing up during a stressful interview": is that not some indication of what normal workplace stresses will do to your ability to complete technical work? I certainly wouldn't want to work with somebody who is knowledgeable but will wimp out the moment you ask them a tough question on the spot.

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

#305

Post by xiaoma » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 9:41 AM UTC

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #299

skybrian wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for example, I have an interview question where it's not just about knowing what a stack or a tree is, but rather realizing that a stack or a tree might be useful to solve a particular problem. (You could use either one.) And then writing out code to do it. So, no esoteric data structures, but you really do have to know how to use the standard ones. It tends to trip up people who might have some book knowledge…

It could also be that you only ever have to do this between 0 and 0.00001% of the time in the real world, and many people who could do it just fine if they are given space to think about it or refresh their memory, which usually results in freezing up during a stressful interview. They probably haven't exercised that knowledge because they have been too busy building real things.

How would you filter those "many people who could do it just fine if they are given space to think about it or refresh their memory" down to the number you need to hire?

This is a serious question. I hate the way interviewing works at tech companies. Though I've generally done well and it helped me break into the industry as an outsider, it's a really time-consuming and wasteful process on both sides. So far, I'm leaning strongly towards Reid Hoffman's suggestion of weighting references much more strongly than interviews but it's hard to say how far one can safely go with that approach.

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

#306

Post by daemin » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 9:41 AM UTC

vacri wrote: post #295

vietdung2910 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait. Based on my knowledge, India is not in southeast Asia. Source: I'm from southeast Asia.

In the UK, 'asian' tends to refer to people from India or Pakistan. In other primarily-English-speaking countries, it tends to mean people from eastern Asia. (yes, technically anyone from Asia is Asian, but when someone says 'asian', it doesn't evoke the mental image of a caucasian Russian who lives in Novosibirsk.)

Yeah, in some cases "Asia" extends far into the Middle East - Football / Soccer, there is an Asian club championship with teams from the *stan's and Australia.

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

#307

Post by conjectures » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 9:55 AM UTC

arcanus wrote: post #161

noobermin wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who might apply once I get my PhD, what does basic CS knowledge mean for you? 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? Somewhat related anecdote, I do computational physics. I once attended "training seminar[0]" put on by the funders for using DOD supercomputers, and there was this soon-to…

Weird. No one else would want a scheduler to be FIFO, either. Rather, the actual optimization that is performed by slurm, pbs, etc. under the hood is pretty interesting. The point of schedulers is much more complicated than a straightforward queue, as they seek to project how best to utilize system resources into the future. Strange he would be so pedantic. Everyone in HPC certainly does call it a queue, as you noted…

Yeah, because it is a queue in the ordinary English sense.

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

#308

Post by chii » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 9:59 AM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #159

chii wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect that the project they work on to utilize the knowledge in the courses. With 4 projects a year at 4 years, there's got to be something learned!

I got a BS in CS, graduated in 2006. What 4 projects? We had one project that lasted an entire semester, in one class; the rest was mostly one-off homework assignments that were very much topic-of-the-week. And most of them didn't really require coding.

If this is really as common as you imply, then no wonder many grads are lacking in exp. I thought 4 projects was on the low end...

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

#309

Post by DanielBMarkham » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 10:08 AM UTC

guelo wrote: post #12

Here's the actual government complaint, the allegations are listed in sections 10 and 11, https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsrelease... My concerns, 1) why is the qualified candidate pool, whatever that is, so overwhelmingly Asian, 73-85%? Isn't the candidate selection process biased towards Asians? 2) The complaint is concerned about the use of employee referrals. Studies have shown that building t…

Yes. This has all kinds of alarm bells going off.

I don't care who you are or what you look like. I don't care how old you are, your gender, sexual preferences, citizenship status, and so forth. I'm certain that having a large mix of these will make my work environment more productive and interesting, but for each candidate I have much more important things to think about.

The job is to make technology do stuff for people. This means you must have technology skills and people skills. Folks can argue about the ratio, but as a first approximation, for the vast majority of commercial software development work, it's about 10 percent tech and 90 percent people skills. We aren't building the next Google. We're going down the hall to talk to the CSRs about why the IVR system is acting up.

I have interviewed devs. I found them almost universally atrocious both in tech and people skills. I found no correlation between certifications and actual ability to perform (except a positive correlation between advanced degrees and feelings of self-entitlement.)

Do whatever tech tests you want, and for sure capture a ton of metrics. But the only process that has made any sense to me over the years is the team audition process. It's a play. We have try-outs. For a few folks we pick some candidates and backups. Everybody shows up for a sprint or two and the rest of the team sees how it works out.

I don't see that universe as being anything close to the universe the government allegation seems to assume, where ratios of one category of candidate should translate into the same ratios of successful applicants.

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

#310

Post by isolli » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 10:16 AM UTC

coredog64 wrote: post #189

Spooky23 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's alot of cheating and other shady nonsense. Bodyshop contractors will do anything. I've seen cases where those companies send shill candidates to interview, claim that candidates have more experience in reality (in one case a 22 year old with a decade of Oracle Financials experience) and submitting fake resumes.

Three times I have been in the situation where the interview candidate was not the one answering questions. Twice we hired someone based on the phone interview and it was someone else who showed up. The third time it was someone reading interview answers off a chat client window. I'm mostly annoyed because it reduces the value of the phone screen and requires more face to face interviews.

How did you know it was someone else on the phone? Did you remember the voice? Just curious...