jdp23

The comments on any HN thread about barriers to gender equity in software engineering illustrate the barriers to gender equity in software engineering.

Congrats Zassmin and Alaina, what you've accomplished so far is very impressive and looking forward to seeing how things scale!

Thanks for weighing in. Disappointing that Blekko didn't work out better ... but hey, at least you have the t-shirt!

Do you think that Duck Duck Go's (relative) success shows that there are still possibilities here?

Clearly the idea that words have meanings beyond statistics terminology is confusing you.

And no, I'm not calling standard mathematical terminology Orwellian. What I'm calling Orwellian is your describing a biased system as unbiased (by attempting to reframe the discussion around a specific statistical definition, chosen by you).

The funny thing is that the dictionary definition supports your point, not yummyfajitas.

bias: prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair.

"Oh sure, this algorithm is much more likely to have false positives on blacks, and much more likely to have false negatives on whites, and the results are that blacks are more likely to treated more harshly by the system. But it's not biased because of the definition of bias I'm using!"

Orwell would have loved "disparate impact isn't bias" :)

Parsey McParseface is a great name.

Thanks for the responses. True, that's what happens in all of those situations, but in the YC Fellowship you call out that they're for people "very early in the process". So the tradeoffs may be different.

Interesting idea, and kudos to you for kicking off the discussions to refine the approach - and for the "be nice" rule, which I think is very important here.

A question: What are the situations where you think it will benefit people more to go the open route than applying directly?

One way of thinking about it is

advantages of "Apply HN": getting significant calibration and feedback on an idea that improves it whether or not it is selected, a chance for a partial team to begin discussions with other potential co-founders, and the (small) chance of having an idea selected because of overwhelming support when it wouldn't have been chosen through the normal process

disadvantage: exposing the idea in a very early state to thousands of smart motivated people who are then have the time to come up with better variations on it

Obviously the tradeoffs are different for different teams and ideas ... and there certainly might be some advantages and disadvantages I missed. In any case, I'm curious about who you think might benefit most from this.

> I'm not using "software QA" in the very broad way you describe in the first sentence.

I took this description from your earlier comment "I call it "poor software QA" because 1) and 2)" so yes, you are using it that way at least sometimes :)

Anyhow we obviously see things differently on the root cause side (and both of us are on the outside so there's a lot we don't know). That said I certainly agree that it's a defect, and that it's an attack that could reasonably have been anticipated.

Thanks for the reply, and interesting followup with ALICE.

If you're using "software QA failure" in the very general sense of "a defect got introduced and then propagated to production", then yes that's what happened here. But then you're essentially saying "the root cause of this defect is that a defect got introduced and then propagated". This isn't useful for process improvement (it's true for every defect, so doesn't give any insight into what happened).

If you're right about them reusing ALICE, then a more useful way of looking at the root cause of the repeat-after-me bug is "component reuse without considering the attack model". That highlights other situations where there are risks of similar defects, and points to ways to prevent or detect similar defects.

Since there were other bugs as well, the requirement and/or design issues might still be a better candidate for root cause for the whole Tay-fail. One of the things you discover doing root cause analysis is that there are almost always multiple contributors, and you typically want to make process changes at multiple levels.

It doesn't sound like the author's done much root cause analysis. QA typically doesn't cause defects (it can only prevent them), so there's almost always a deeper cause. And, QA's not necessarily the best way to find bugs like this.

In this case, it sounds like to me like it was most likely a requirements problem -- a missing requirement for being 4chan-resilient, if you will. A different way to look at it is that it's a design flaw that they system is manipulable by default.

True, once you've identified the root cause of the defect, it's also important to look at why it didn't get detected. So yeah, QA missed it. Then again, so did design and code reviews, developer testing, threat modeling, and the social-manipulation equivalent of penetration testing. Of course these all complementary approaches to "quality" but typically they are not the responsibility of QA.

I wonder if the author also thinks the root causes of the errors in his original post are also QA failures?

4. > "About TL:DR ...:"

Also par for the course here :)

Like 'justinlardinois I just use "TL:DR summary" to mean a "short summary." I didn't mean it as derogatory, and it doesn't feel dissonant to me -- although given how you view it I can see why you do. And yes, I'm a native English speaker.

The blog post is a great overview as well as useful context, thanks for sharing it.

TL:DR summary: Scientific results are highly contingent on subjective decisions at the analysis stage. Different (well-founded) data analysis techniques on a fairly simple and well-defined problem can give radically different results.

It's very interesting research -- a great real-life example supporting the models Scott Page et. al. use for the value of cognitive diversity. The thrust of the blog post is about where crowdsourcing analysis can be helpful (as well as reasonable caveats about where it might not apply), which is certainly an interesting question. Obvioulsy, there are a lot of other implications to this as well.

Thanks!

I had the same reaction. Are there any newer tutorials people would recommend?

+1 Interesting! (Slashdot has had an even more nuanced reaction system since the 1990s.)

What's different now is the visual representation - reactions as emoji.

And speaking from experience (the TapestryMaker social network platform has had emoji-based reactions for a couple years) it really does change the quality of the discussion. Especially on phones, one-click responses are a lot easier; so giving people a big one-click vocabulary makes conversation much richer. And having it representable visually rather than textually changes the image/text balance which for many people really improves their overall experience -- even though people who prefer text may not see it that way.

Agreed about Caspar Bowden. He worked at Microsoft for a while. And both before and after that, he was very active with the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference in the US (he once described CPDP to me as "a European attempt to replicate CFP"), whose sponsors include Microsoft, Google, and other companies that have similar conflicts of interest.

To me it seems that there's something to be said for both approaches. Conferences with corporate sponsorship aren't going to be revolutionary; balanced against that, they do provide places to engage and ways of getting different perspectives out more broadly. [The same's true for government speakers.] Purer conferences like Aral's talking about can have a different focus and I can certainly see why some people prefer them.

So, kudos to Aral for sticking to his principles and declining the invitation. I'm still looking forward to the panel, and don't think that Marc Rotenberg or Brigitta Johansen will limit what they have to say based on the sponsorship.

Yeah, but it's not like this is new behavior or like anything, like, unprecedented or something like that....

Yeah, I was looking at the authors: Steve, Philip and Dan, David, John, Daniel, Elon, Marshall, Matt, John, P.G., ...

Wait a second, Cheryl, what's she doing here? Oh that was Jessica's choice.

And we now return you to your regularly-schedule programming: Neal, Andy, Charles, Yuval, Andrew ...

Excellent point. The whole episode is very instructive.

On Sunday the New York Times quoted "law enforcement sources" as saying that she had made postings on her stream. The story got a huge amount of coverage and even came up during Tuesday's Republican debate.

On Wednesday, FBI Director Comey described the reporting as "grabled" and clarified that no, it was just private messages -- and the Times (and others) rewrote their stories to reflect it. But you can't unring a bell; most people's opinion, and even more importantly their emotional responses, are based on the original story.

Erik Wemple covers this well in the Washington Post [1]

Times' "public editor" Margeret Sullivan's looks at it as well [2], noting that two of the reporters also incorrectly reported that Hillary Clinton was the target of a criminal investigation.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2015/12/...

[2] http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/new-york-ti...

Kudos to you for the public admission. And yeah, I have to admit that when I saw this I thought of the Marshall McLuhan scene from Annie Hall with you in the role of the NYU professor.

Cool, good call.

They're not actually changing the policy: "On Facebook, we require people to use the name their friends and family know them by.... We’re firmly committed to this policy, and it is not changing."

They're just changing the enforcement mechanisms. So while the changes seem positive (Lil Miss Hot Mess says some good things about them), they're just around the edges, not getting rid of the actual harmful policy.

And writing the algorithms. And setting policies. And employing the moderator. And ...

Whether this privileged position leads to different treatment for YC companies is a different question -- as Dan says, they try not to be biased and potentially even overcompensate. Still, the privileged position is certainly there.

I thought you struck a good tone while pointing out the insider advantage and how everybody seems to take its existence for granted in their descriptions of how to succeed. It certainly didn't come across to me as haterating.

New York schools received the same threat, but viewed it as a hoax.

You mean, I seem to you to be moving the goalposts a lot. Earlier in the thread you mentioned that you have a hard time understanding philosophy that isn't presented formally, so maybe some of what's going on here. So, get outside your comfort zone, and try taking a step back and rereading the discussion with the goal of trying to understand, rather than win a debate.

No worries! But, to reassure you on one point: I'm not a relativist :)