from Hacker News

Building a better and more diverse community

by izqui on 9/25/14, 5:18 PM with 116 comments

  • by nicholasjbs on 9/25/14, 5:43 PM

    In anticipation of the comments we've gotten in the past:

    * We hold everyone to the same admissions standard, regardless of race or gender. The grants are our way to create a more diverse applicant pool.

    * Hacker School is free for everyone

    * We admit everyone who applies who we think is a good fit. No man has ever been rejected because a woman was accepted, so there's no way in which this harms men.

    * We auto-generate pseudonyms for applicants, so our initial application review focuses on people's code and what they write, not their race or gender

    (I'm one of the founders, and I'm happy to answer any questions folks have about Hacker School.)

  • by Karunamon on 9/25/14, 5:30 PM

    That's actually quite clever, wrt. generating everyone who applies a nonsense pseudonym so there's no unconscious bias happening in the pre-selection process.

  • by ntonozzi on 9/25/14, 5:40 PM

    Really impressive program! I'm glad that these guys are encouraging diversity, but focusing on keeping the bar for admission the same across all candidates.

  • by aclockheart on 9/25/14, 7:57 PM

    Any '-ISM' CANNOT be a real '-ism' if does not combine prejudice (which is the only thing people think it is) PLUS power (the social, cultural, and political heft which usually underlies the ability of prejudice to keep or enforce -isms in place)

    http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Prejudice_plus_power

    Until folks understand this primary principle, most of you arguing for this "anti-white and asian" bias will simply be tools of the status quo. Equality does NOT mean treating all people equally, WHEN ALL PEOPLE DON'T HAVE THE SAME FOOTING, and don't have the same political power (which is conferred from our social and political system).

  • by lordsheepy on 9/25/14, 6:03 PM

    I am so happy to see this program in place. We all talk about how most problems we have with diversity come from upstream, and now a school is directly addressing it. An objective solution to an objective problem.

  • by uniclaude on 9/25/14, 5:52 PM

    Diversity in our field is a hard issue to tackle, and it's great to see people trying to find solutions.

    This said, I'd like to see the results, as I would believe the diversity problem is not as much with hackerschool as it is with the pool of applicants.

  • by yummyfajitas on 9/25/14, 5:45 PM

    Their evidence for lack of bias in their process is pretty weak: "Men and women are invited to interview, advanced to a second interview, and admitted at the same rates."

    All this means is that the person doing interview #1, interview #2 and admission decision are biased at the same rate. It doesn't mean that rate is zero.

    The proper test - compare admission rates against a truly objective and unbiased measure like a final exam (particularly if students anonymize their names). If gender information does not leak to the grader, bias is impossible.

    [edit: Wow, I've clearly made a blatant failure of reasoning - apparently my knowledge of statistics is far less than I thought. I hope someone can explain my error - I'm not afraid of math, so don't skip the details.]

  • by sauere on 9/25/14, 6:21 PM

    If you are someone that buys in to all this diversity nonsense, please watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_dRt00ufp4

    I am prepared for the downvotes, keep them coming.

  • by nawitus on 9/25/14, 5:34 PM

    >The short: We now have need-based living expense grants for black and non-white Latino/a and Hispanic people, as well as people from many other groups traditionally underrepresented in programming.

    I disagree with this, it's racist.

  • by xienze on 9/25/14, 6:09 PM

    I really don't understand this obsession with diversity in tech, particularly the oft-repeated mantra of "the team as a whole improves when there's more ethnic/gender diversity", as if being black or genderqueer gives you special insight into distributed computing algorithms. This seems like a uniquely American phenomenon. I certainly don't think you hear a lot about this in India, China, Japan, etc. And yet, their companies still manage to function.