Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

Post by soVeryTired » Thu, Apr 11, 2019, 10:49 AM UTC

kakarot wrote: post #91

dalemyers wrote: post #44

I've read comments on Hacker News for many years, often finding them a useful source of additional information and insight into details from whatever the linked piece is. Sometimes these threads are full of only subtly veiled hatred and leave me with a feeling of disgust. This thread is one of those. There have been countless threads over the years where a man gets the credit for something a team has worked on and th…

Hacker News isn't some monolithic community. Each time, you're seeing different people express their opinions. There's no hypocrisy there. I think it's friggin awesome to see women in science. But even if Bouman was male I would still be cautious of attributing so much of an international collaboration to one person in the form of "Meet the _____ behind the first black hole image". That phrasing disregards too much h…

Post by bubblewrap » Thu, Apr 11, 2019, 10:51 AM UTC

telesilla wrote: post #89

nprateem wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stories like this help bring more women into STEM fields How do you know?

One of the reasons I felt isolated in STEM 20 years ago was the very lack of role models. That's changing and I know for a fact, as I interact with young women, that seeing another woman in action as a professional in STEM helps them feel there is a place for them. It definitely fosters a sense of encouragement to pursue higher dreams.

Post by kpp » Thu, Apr 11, 2019, 10:58 AM UTC

nagVenkat wrote: post #105

killjoywashere wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok, so just so everyone is clear, the point between parent and grandparent is Andrew Chael seems to have written a hell of a lot more code than Katie Bouman, for a lot longer * achael 566 commits 850,275 ++ 131,044 -- * klbouman 90 commits 2,410 ++ 1,265 -- However, at least at the level of reading the commit messages, Katie's are pretty math heavy: "fixed bug in the fake briggs weighting" "starting to fix chirp prob…

To add some more context... of the 850k lines, 500k lines are mostly models and machine generated code. Andrew is definitely smart (smarter than an average HN user) and his code is very important but I have never seen so much display of misogyny and sexism against a woman scientist. She never took any credit and clearly said that this was a team effort. Some of the top posts on reddit are trying to mischaracterize th…

Post by zarkov99 » Thu, Apr 11, 2019, 11:04 AM UTC

hjk05 wrote: post #83

romanovcode wrote: post #2

How come she is everywhere on the internet but not at the presentation panel on live conference that was yesterday? Jeez why the downvotes? It's a legitimate question I had.

The downvotes are typical in gender politics threads. There are two fronts aggressively arguing in a “you are either with us or against us fashion” For the people questioning if she’s receiving unfair attention because of her gender they view you comment as an attack on the establishment ala: “How dare they exclude her!? Is it just because she’s a woman?” And downvote you. For the people arguing that her media covera…

Post by pbhjpbhj » Thu, Apr 11, 2019, 11:06 AM UTC

black_puppydog wrote: post #42

ilarum wrote: post #6

Relevant repository - https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging

It's also in the links in that repo, but may be more interesting to some folks here: Katie's paper on VLBI reconstruction: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413 This is how I learned about the topic and I think it's well suited for computery folks, since it was published in CVPR.