171–180 of 547 posts
I mean hard to imagine such a large project being taken up, for the benefit of public being able to see a picture of the black hole.
Would this kind of multi telescope effort be capable of producing surface images of extra solar planets for example?
Here's a HN story from a while back titled "The Man Behind Windows PowerShell"[0]. Of the 129 comments on that story, not one discussed how software development at Microsoft is always a team effort. Or checked any repositories counting LoC to quantify the value of his contribution. Meanwhile, in this thread, I see 6 of 73 comments as of now not discussing a woman's relative contribution to a team effort, and how she…
>It's a miserable language, full of unexpected behaviors and badly designed features.
I agree. That no one is tearing apart the horribly written python in the git repo is extremely sexist.
Holy shit, you're using comments as version control, the 70s called and what their code practices back.
Oh my god, did you even read the thread? It gets better with each post:
>I haven't met a single person who likes PowerShell. It's perhaps the textbook example of ugly design that looks technically consistent but utterly unfriendly and mind bogglingly verbose. [...] The designers of this thing should have been demoted, let alone making them "Distinguished Engineer".
>PowerShell is one of the few bits of software which has actually made me throw a computer in anger. The idea has potential but the implementation is just bad.
And they go on and on.
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…
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However, she may be a superstar, no pun intended, and so her getting almost all of the credit is completely warranted, but graduate student and post-doc are training roles, and a lot of the time the post-doc won't really make a name for themsleves until they establish their own lab, because it is unclear who is producing the ideas.
Katie gave a TED talk: https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs
It's a TEDx talk. In this case it's an interesting one by an expert in her field, but TEDx have a lot lower demands for participating, so try to keep the distinction clear.
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.
She really should have been at the conference given her contributions, but she wasn't. Maybe it was a scheduling conflict? Who knows.
Edit: Geez, why the downvotes? ;)
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Except in most of STEM there are already an equal number of women. As soon as the baby boomers retire itll be obvious. Women get more PhDs than men, and have been for a while.
Do you work in an office with low-level programmers and hardware designers? I do, and I'm one of a handful of women in the building. Actually at the moment, I'm the only one and I'm lobbying for our new hire of managing director to be a woman but it's likely not going to happen because I can't find someone qualified. When I teach in the field at my university, I'm the only woman. And I live in a very popular, large c…
I worked at one of the most progressive / women-friendly companies in San Francisco, and as of last year, only 34.3% of our technical roles were filled by women (company size ~1,000). I'm eager to see this year's numbers, and hope they've improved, but there's undoubtedly a lot of room to grow.
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In my experience this is common for this type of news about "prodigies" on HN. I remember the same types of reactions a few years ago about an article about a child who made the headlines (it even prompted a response by pg IIRC). Was it Malala? I can't remember. I think it's just that many people feel threatened or inadequate when they (naturally) compare themselves to these people. It's tempting to put them down so…
I would hope that isn't it. While her trajectory might be uncommon it isn't abnormal. This is the kind of thing you are supposed to do with a PhD from MIT.
Many people are intelligent enough, but are not going to work hard enough.
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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…
I don't really think she's getting special treatment because of her gender though. I think she's in the spotlight because: 1/ She led the team and was first author on the image reconstruction paper 2/ She gave a Ted talk on the topic a while back 3/ There's a brilliant photo of her initial reaction to the image that captures the excitement of scientific discovery circulating on the internet
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Is anyone knowledgeable about the project calling it a "photo" (i.e., the term you used) or are they calling it (more accurately) an "image"? My take in response to your original question is that it seems like nitpicking or armchair quarterbacking or something else related to that. I'm always wary of succumbing to the "appeal to authority" fallacy, but this does seem like a case where all the experts and leading figu…
Well, what would be a "first image"? There have been countless images depicting black holes since forever: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=black+hole&t=h_&ia=images&iax=imag...
The images in the google search link you supplied are all, without exception that i can see, artistic renderings of a black hole.
There are images of gravitational lensing [1] that show a basic distortion of light from gravity, but none of them reach the intensity of a black hole's 'event horizon'.
The body that we are seeing is at the center of the bright spot in this image [2], and is the source of the blue jet of material coming out. (I originally thought that jet was projected laterally, but in one of the two recent Veritasium videos on this topic he says it's actually heading almost straight at us and is 5000 light years long.) However, it's such an infinitessimally small part of the above image (about 1/10,000,000th the size) that we do not possess the optical resolving power to actually see it. For example, Hubble can resolve down to approximately .05 arcsecond. This image is approximately .00004 arcsecond. To get that resolving power they had to combine signals from radio telescopes all over the world using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry. The contribution of Katie and her team is to extract a useful image from the petabyates of data that came from that exercise.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens#/media/File...
[2] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/M87_jet....
