This article fails to address the growing divide between east coast and west coast technologist and entrepreneurs. Many of us in New York are ashamed and embarrassed by the valley, and are looking to change it via negation.
Consider the blockchain. Out west they try and rebuild the world with it - consider the (thiel funded) urbit. Back east we just replace banking clearinghouses with bank built blockchain.
What makes you feel differently? Also curious what the ancestry of the people doing tech has to do with anything.
Also, if you've followed the urbit guys from the start, then you know how cultlike they are. No thanks
Source:am tween
The NYC scene I've witnessed at HOPE is not nearly as pretentious as SV people. Whenever I hear "changing" or "rebuilding" the world my bullshit meter explodes. To me the NYC scene doesn't want to change the world in grand capitalistic gestures, they want to help out people and have information be free. I'm a big fan of 2600 and that whole ethos. Not to say SV is devoid of that, it's just so much more focused on the glitz and bullshit.
The ancestry / ethnicity of people in tech has to do with everything. Algorithms can be racist - whether it's insensitive snapchat filter (the Bob Marley one comes to mind) or facial detection algos that can't detect black people because the devs only tested it on lighter-skinned people. Diversity is a beautiful thing, especially in these polarizing times, and so its meaningful to me for there to be a large amount of different folk involved in our profession and interests. Only 1% of people working in Sv are black. That's just wrong.
Algorithms failing to detect black people is not "racist." It's simply a reflection of the fact that contrast matters. Any algorithm out there will detect `5f(x) + noise` more accurately than `0.5 f(x) + noise`. Black people reflect fewer photons than white people, that's just how physics works. Why do you believe Black Americans can change this? And why can't dark skinned Tamils (probably the stereotypical data scientist) do the same thing?
I have absolutely no idea why you consider some specific demographic breakdown "just wrong". What's your underlying moral principle? The most I can come up with is some kind 1930's Italian style corporatism with certain specific ethnic groups as the corporates, but that seems uncharitable.
Actually, it is passively racist, since many of these algorithms have nothing to do with contrast and everything to do with improper tagging and insufficient and incorrect training data. It is how black people got labelled gorillas by google, and how I can name some names of how to get through a prominent AI/ML driven filter with Japanese woodblock shunga prints from the late Tokugawa period (go look it up yourself for examples)
Dark Skin Tamils can and should be part of developing tagging. I also tend to think that for things as complicated as porn or race, you may want to even do different training data in different places for different cultures. I don't honestly know how a Tamil would take an american's view on the imagery at the temple at Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh. To many Americans, the sculptures on the temple may be outside the pale for work, but for a Hindu Tamil, it may be a place of great religious significance and may not bother them in the slightest.
> But unlike most of the NY tech scene it is an attempt at replacing democracy with cryptographically secure monarchy (which I may be misrepresenting as "blockchain"). I can't imagine anyone in NY even attempting something like that - can you?
The better question is why? Even Hobbes hated monarchies, he just thought they were the best of bad options under the conditions of you magically get a benevolent ruler, and only because he lived through too many radical revolutions in england. Almost everyone else disagrees with him.
What happens when you are on the outs with your monarch/dictator. What is your counterweight in the state to have real rights? (bitcoins and the blockchain are not them, especially for a mass group)
How do you plan on dealing with that?
I think we see more and more the NYC tech culture feels like they are trying to build real things, the valley is stuck in consumerism and has lost the ability to push the needle, much of this is due to poorly considered greed and linear thinking. :(
> Very rare and extremely powerful combination: the ability to think both clearly and very non-linearly. Most people lucky to have one.
An example of nonlinear thinking by sama[1]:
> the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract.
As you might expect, Peter Thiel prefers to be a contrarian and use his own term for it: Zero to One[2].
0. https://www.twitter.com/sama/status/699330028404772864
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944
2. https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/080...
http://www.businessinsider.com/business-insider-2015-silicon...
Like Vroom - no one talks about the used car market, but they are huge. Knewton and Schoology, two other big company no one treats as huge unless you are into ed-tech Kinnek just raised a huge round, they are trying to be an amazon of suppliers
All of these things are impactful, but, well, weird. There are a LOT of those types of things in NYC
Denver and Austin. [2]
[1] http://www.inc.com/magazine/201312/boulder-colorado-fast-gro...
[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/tompost/2014/03/13/the-best-plac...
The list could go on. If you want to expand outward a bit, the University of Waterloo in Canada is also quite good.