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Comment by DyslexicAtheist | Hacker News Reader

The event has also been compared to a dumpster fire[0] due to "sexualized events & speeches", is this guy exaggerating or is it safe to go there for women? Pretty off-putting tbh

[0] https://twitter.com/haldaume3/status/939910697911066624

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Smitha Milli gave a bit more of context about what happened. Link to her thread:

- https://twitter.com/SmithaMilli/status/940012716797739008

thanks, rather unspectacular then.

This seems like a pretty harmless joke to me. I have difficulty imagining why anyone would be offended by this, unless there's more to the story

Well, according to the notes there was an entire talk about bias where the example of a Turkish sentence that didn't contain gendered pronouns "X is a nurse, X is a doctor" gets translated to "She is a nurse, he is a doctor" by Google Translate. And apparently that's a problem that needs fixing rather than a reasonable translation, although we all know that Google Translate is trained on the work of human translators, where it presumably learned this (demographically correct) bias from. So I guess they need fixing too.

Seems like NIPS might have a systematic issue with hyper-sensitivity to perceived slights. But it's the intersection of academia and SV companies so is it really a surprise?

Also, this? https://twitter.com/SamiraEKahou/status/940085885101412352

I don't get why anyone but the wife herself should be offended by this.

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