>Pinterest has a Head of Diversity [1]. Her name is Candice and she's great.
I think the question is: What does the role actually do? The cynic in me says it exists to signal that your company cares about diversity. Okay, but after the hiring decision is made, based on whatever criteria make the company properly diverse, what happens? Does this person act as a recruiter for underrepresented people?
Pinterest's policy is to hire people on what they can do, not who they are. Hire the best person for the position not a specific gender or other trait. My understanding is that Candice's role is to help ensure that we're avoiding biases in the our hiring process, trying to ensure that that we have a diverse pool of candidates to begin with and work on longer term programs that help to generate well qualified diverse candidates. I wouldn't believe anyone who says they know how to make the tech industry population similar to the overall US population distribution but I think it is still good to have people thinking about it and working on it.
>Calling a company with a head of diversity bloated for instance is telling of your politics.
Calling a company with a head of diversity-- and that loses tons of money-- bloated, is sensible business acumen. Unless you blame earnings woes on diversity issues.
>But we will also see a huge proportion of sites that could use it continue to ignore it for years to come. There are big business opportunities in finding ways of making a dent in that portion of the market
I agree with this wholeheartedly. I think there are pockets of HN that are out of touch with the reality in SMBs across the country (and planet). Often these businesses are struggling to track data, let alone utilize it for decision making or analyze it any sophisticated manner. "Out-of-the-box" ML will be another tool in the toolbelt in these instances.
So, sure, if you are trying to build Massive ML Tech Co., you won't be able to hire a few devs who watched a ML series on Coursera to achieve that goal. But there's ample opportunity to apply that knowledge elsewhere.
Given that (paid) journalists covering the event have been charged as protesters, implying that at least law enforcement lumps the journalists in with the protesters -- there is no doubt a way to support the claim that "at least one 'protester' is paid".
The suggestion that a significant number of the 10s of thousands are being paid is just propaganda though and deserves to be challenged.
Sure, but don't we hear the same "propaganda" every time any group gathers anywhere? If it's not Soros, it's the Kochs; if it's not unions, it's the Russians: whatever boogieman gets you going. In future, can't we just take it as read that some percentage of any group is paid to be there and some higher percentage is accused by someone else of being paid to be there? Is it something we have to worry about?
Unfortunately yes we do have to worry about propaganda.
An example: In Colorado where I live a large number of people contacted their republican senator Cory Gardner to express their disapproval of Betsy Davos for Secretary of Education.
Gardner publicly ignored these voices with the claim that they were "paid protesters". Widespread claims that protesters can be ignored because of a claimed "paid protester" taint should be challenged when false because these claims spread and make it easier to normalize this kind of democracy eroding response from representatives.
Frankly I would have expected most R's to vote for the confirmation of R cabinet nominations. One needn't invoke complicated rhetorical scenarios to explain such an action.
Some reportage of confirmation hearings might have left the impression that this particular nominee is some unhappy amalgamation of Satan, Brandine Spuckler, and Richie Rich as interpreted by Robot Chicken. That seems pretty unlikely! Probably this is a simple political disagreement, filtered through whatever media process maximizes those clicks and eyeballs.
I brought up this situation because it's an example of a "paid protesters" claim being falsely used in other contexts as a reason to ignore actual human interactions.
I think you are trying to invalidate the notion that there can be a reason for people to disagree other than media manipulation.
I disagree with that argument and I will not attempt to engage with you on the basis of fact until and unless you walk it back.
Uhhh... I'm not sure how to proceed here. I don't intend to upset anyone. My point was that R's will vote for R's. If that weren't the intention of the electorate, they would have elected a D. (Isn't the "two-party system" fun!) I don't why we'd need to invoke a conspiracy theory, even one offered up by the R in question, to understand why an R would vote for an R. That is, don't believe everything that politicians tell you, even (especially?) about their motivations for the actions they take.
Perhaps mistakenly, I anticipated an objection to this simple scenario along the lines of "this person is really extra super bad, so normal Congress-critters even from the same party would never have voted for her without being fooled by evil memes, and that's why we should believe that this Congress-critter really does believe in the evil meme of the Soros Army". If you wouldn't have objected thus, I apologize for making an uncharitable assumption.
I definitely will agree with you about the existence of horrible flaws in the "two-party system" - I don't want to put words in your mouth but if you have it, then I share the belief that large improvements to our voting processes are possible. For my part, I'd like to see innovations like instant run-off voting, mathematically fair drawing procedures for the regional boundaries that determine the shape of geographic voting precincts, strict campaign finance regulations, and deployment of an automatic methodology to turn certain flavors of congressional deadlock into public referendum rather than the baroque set of tie-breaker rules/conventions dominating the strategy behind congressional procedures (in my opinion, the possibility of injecting a little bit of stochastic noise from the electorate into the law-making process would provide a much better incentive structure for how congress critters should think about their differences than the overly deterministic incentives currently in place).
But back to the point - I brought it up not to argue that this particular appointee was any better or worse than some standard, but to support the notion that it is correct to object to propaganda that attempts to discredit voices due to false accusations that those voices are only the voices of paid protesters with a corrupt financial agenda rather than the opinions of actual people who formed those opinions based on their real-life experiences. Deploying this strategy falsely to discredit legitimate opposition groups is inherently anti-democratic, corrupt, polarizing, and very dangerous (in my opinion).
You responded to this expression with a claim that I interpreted as expressing that the only possible disagreement about a particular appointee is a product of partisan media manipulation and therefore its fair game to insinuate that any opposition voices are entirely partisan in nature. Within the context of the thread, I understand you attempted to establish that point in order to suggest that it is 'OK' to spread false caricatures of the opposition voices to the portion of the electorate that is prepared to receive that message regardless of veracity.
I understand the desire to be jaded about politics -- I typically try to ignore as much of politics as I can and tend to think that's the best possible strategy for me. It appears to me though that you take your cynicism further by asserting that there is basically no role in the political process for decision making beyond the level of team sports. All disagreement between members of A and members of B is inherently only about media manipulation rather than the possibility that such disagreement could express something rational about the real world.
I think that world-view (as understood by me) is inherently anti-rational-discourse and is worth disagreeing with.
Your "team sports" caricature isn't completely inaccurate, if only because my perception of D-vs-R is that of two ants contending furiously over a postage stamp, while a whole continent of political possibility languishes unnoticed. Sure, if we look close enough, there's probably a difference between one SecEd and another. She'll open a few more charter schools, so a few hundred kids will get a slightly better education and a few dozen teachers will be replaced by their essentially indistinguishable equivalents. That's probably an improvement, on balance, but not one to celebrate in the context of all the rest of the crap that rolls downhill from our rulers.
The paid protestor story is bait and switch as if to imply no, it's not the for profit corporation doing the pipeline that's in it for the money, it's the protestors - they are the ones in it for the money here!
One side is trying to make billions and someone is falsely claiming the other side is trying to make hundreds and That becomes the story. What immoral, outrageous, reprehensible nonsense.
Good thing the vast majority of businesses won't need "serious" ML, but instead will require only simple implementations to help solve business problems.
How valuable is this without any of the discussion context surrounding these books? It seems unlikely that I'm going to purchase a book based on a metric like "mentions", when much of the discussion could be negative. I mean, I get it from the perspective of scraping/development practice, but it doesn't feel overly useful. And I'm a book hunter.
I don't think either method worked.