Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole • Hacker News Board

Re: Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole

#41

Post by abunner » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 4:24 PM UTC

kzcqt wrote: post #7

Media invents a fact, that she is responsible for everything, and make her the face of the discovery, when it was a team effort. They get tons of clicks for saying something that is clearly preposterous. Some people get upset, some even start trolling about it, and badmouth the poor woman, who's not responsible for what the media said in their quest for clicks. A loss of time for everybody involved. Media reports the…

No. The summary is that by tearing down the woman lead, women everywhere see what will happen to them if they achieve a measure of recognition on the internet.

Re: Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole

#42

Post by amanaplanacanal » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 4:29 PM UTC

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #14

EamonnMR wrote: post #5

I knew exactly which one it was in particular before clicking. There's a deep rot in the online culture.

This isn't "online" culture, it is simply culture. There has always been a horrible group of folks in culture: What we find acceptable changes over time.

This kind of horrible is limited to online culture, though. People don't troll when talking face to face. If they did, everybody would see they were assholes, and they would suddenly find that nobody wanted to hang out with them anymore.

Re: Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole

#43

Post by 13of40 » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 4:30 PM UTC

daenz wrote: post #38

matt4077 wrote: post #6

Reposting my comment from another story that didn’t get traction (edit: thar was quickly flagged off the front page, as this one is now as well): It should be noted that this community here was among the worst in this regard. This isn’t about measuring the exact contribution she may or may not have made to the project. It’s that there are limitless stories of „meet the man behind “ where that question just never cros…

>See "The Man Behind Windows PowerShell" Everything I'm finding about Jeffrey Snover indicates that he did, in fact, by himself, invent PowerShell. The idea and original implementation was developed by him, and then he picked a small team (Bruce Payette and James Truher) to bring it to maturity. So I don't see how that's a fair comparison.

There were about 30 people in dev/test/pm working on PowerShell version 1. What were their names again?

Re: Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole

#44

Post by daenz » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 4:31 PM UTC

berrynice wrote: post #34

I'm so sick of this MSM/social media fueled gender shit flinging. She herself never claimed she did all the work, the MSM did.

Exactly. This is the media setting the stage for a fight among people and then reporting on that fight for more revenue. Then acting shocked that the fight is even happening.

Re: Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole

#45

Post by davemp » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 4:31 PM UTC

matt4077 wrote: post #6

Reposting my comment from another story that didn’t get traction (edit: thar was quickly flagged off the front page, as this one is now as well): It should be noted that this community here was among the worst in this regard. This isn’t about measuring the exact contribution she may or may not have made to the project. It’s that there are limitless stories of „meet the man behind “ where that question just never cros…

Top three replies to the PS thread:

> . . . It's a miserable language, full of unexpected behaviors and badly designed features. . .

> 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. . .

> 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. . .

No one is really looking into his IC but the thread is not positive. I have no idea who contributed what, but I’m not sure anyone would want to claim part of the credit for powershell.

——

Here’s a thread for man behind AMD’s zen architecture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14989551

First comment:

> Zen is the work of a huge team of talented engineers. To single one out as "the man behind Zen" seems very wrong. . .

——

The man behind objective-c: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8422695

Second comment:

> The man behind Objective-C these days (and for the past decade plus) is this guy: http://www.sealiesoftware.com/blog/

——

For the other threads I saw, some were actually individual efforts, others were just ignoring “the man behind” and talking about the tech. Changing my search to “woman behind”, I saw no comments disparaging the level of contribution.

EDIT: I’m also by no means justifying the vitriol in the black hole thread or the harassment. Just doing some legwork.

Re: Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole

#46

Post by throwawaysea » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 4:34 PM UTC

I'm confused by all the comments here attacking those who viewed this entire story with skepticism, considering the skeptics were ultimately correct. See https://twitter.com/SaraIssaoun/status/1116304522660519936

> There are more of us. Katie's algorithm, despite the media's stance, was not used to produce this image. There were three algorithms used and combined to form the final image, and a team of 40 scientists part of that aspect of the project (including myself and more women).

Katie Bouman's algorithm was not even used in the construction of the final image. If that's not an indictment of modern journalism, I don't know what is. Even the New York Times has published a story corroborating all this, and as far as I can tell they were one of the few journalistic outlets that did not publish a prior story pushing the narrative of the single female scientist solving this problem: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/katie-bouman-blac...

> While she led the development of an algorithm to take a picture of a black hole, an effort that was the subject of a TED Talk she gave in 2016, her colleagues said that technique was not ultimately used to create this particular image.

Ultimately, this fiasco is a textbook example of news media and social media spinning up a manufactured, hyped-up story to push a certain narrative. Virtually every news outlet was publishing the same story emphasizing how a singular female scientist was behind this effort. Bouman herself was even quoted in some of these articles as saying it was a team effort, by the way, so none of this is her fault. But news media and ideologues on Twitter pushed a gender-centric narrative nonetheless, and in doing so, overtly politicized the story.

For example, take a look at the Washington Post's article on this story. Initially it was titled "Katie Bouman, #womeninstem star, created algorithm [...]". You can still see this title in Google search results (https://www.google.com/search?q=katie+bouman%2C+%23womeninst...). Now the story has been revised to "Katie Bouman helped the world see a black hole. Fans want ‘a rightful seat in history’ for her." https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/04/11/katie-boum...

Given how ubiquitous this story was for those 1-2 days, I think it makes sense that people would also examine the details critically, and also question if they were the victim of media manipulation pushing some ideological narrative. And as I stated at the very beginning, they were ultimately correct.

Re: Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole

#47

Post by ALittleLight » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

matt4077 wrote: post #6

Reposting my comment from another story that didn’t get traction (edit: thar was quickly flagged off the front page, as this one is now as well): It should be noted that this community here was among the worst in this regard. This isn’t about measuring the exact contribution she may or may not have made to the project. It’s that there are limitless stories of „meet the man behind “ where that question just never cros…

I'm far from an expert on either of these topics but just looking at your links, one main difference is that the "man behind Windows PowerShell" was the Chief Architect of the project. Katie Bouman (per a ten second Google search) seems to have been a contributor to the black hole project.

When I looked at the PowerShell thread, the top five threads were people hating on PowerShell, followed by one person who liked it. In general, I think comments tend to be biased towards people with a disagreement with the main article. If you agreed with it entirely, you'd just upvote and move on. If you're leaving a comment you probably have an objection or qualification you want to make. In the PowerShell example the qualification was how much people hate PowerShell. In the Bouman example it's arguing over the phrase "woman behind".

Here's a counter example about "The woman behind two men and a truck" [1]. None of the top level comments seem to be complaining about her not being the only one to contribute to the company etcetera. As far as I can tell with a bit of research, she really is the woman behind the company (the founder), the PowerShell guy really was the Chief Architect, and Bouman really was a contributor but not the lead or central figure behind the black hole effort. So, I'm not persuaded this is evidence of a misogynistic attitude at HackerNews. I think it can be true that women face sexist attitudes in the sciences, that mean people are being mean to Bouman online, and that Bouman can be incorrectly described as the "woman behind black hole pictures".

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16164620

Re: Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole

#48

Post by throwawaysea » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 4:40 PM UTC

matt4077 wrote: post #6

Reposting my comment from another story that didn’t get traction (edit: thar was quickly flagged off the front page, as this one is now as well): It should be noted that this community here was among the worst in this regard. This isn’t about measuring the exact contribution she may or may not have made to the project. It’s that there are limitless stories of „meet the man behind “ where that question just never cros…

Powershell was actually a one-man project. It was originally code-named Monad. See https://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/monad-manifesto-th..., which contains a link to the original "manifesto" written solely by Jeffrey Snover.

Monad was available in various early stages internally within Microsoft and externally to the world, before it eventually became a feature with a whole team behind it.

Snover, by the way, is a Microsoft Technical Fellow (their highest title for engineers): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Snover

This is a very different example than the effort behind the EHT, which includes not just those working on imaging and reconstruction, but numerous others as well. The total team has been said to be ~200 people. Furthermore, even on the imaging side, there were several papers and several different reconstruction algorithms to fill in gaps in sensor data. And those papers themselves reference numerous prior work in this space, upon which these newer algorithms are evolutionary improvements.

Re: Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole

#49

Post by fzeroracer » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

ALittleLight wrote: post #47

matt4077 wrote: post #6

Reposting my comment from another story that didn’t get traction (edit: thar was quickly flagged off the front page, as this one is now as well): It should be noted that this community here was among the worst in this regard. This isn’t about measuring the exact contribution she may or may not have made to the project. It’s that there are limitless stories of „meet the man behind “ where that question just never cros…

I'm far from an expert on either of these topics but just looking at your links, one main difference is that the "man behind Windows PowerShell" was the Chief Architect of the project. Katie Bouman (per a ten second Google search) seems to have been a contributor to the black hole project. When I looked at the PowerShell thread, the top five threads were people hating on PowerShell, followed by one person who liked i…

As a thought experiment, if you believe Bouman can't be described as 'the woman behind the black hole pictures', then can you describe for me what contributions she made?

Re: Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole

#50

Post by throwawaysea » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

13of40 wrote: post #43

daenz wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>See "The Man Behind Windows PowerShell" Everything I'm finding about Jeffrey Snover indicates that he did, in fact, by himself, invent PowerShell. The idea and original implementation was developed by him, and then he picked a small team (Bruce Payette and James Truher) to bring it to maturity. So I don't see how that's a fair comparison.

There were about 30 people in dev/test/pm working on PowerShell version 1. What were their names again?

Prior to it being a full-fledged team, it was indeed a one-man project code-named "Monad". You can find the original vision document, written by one person (Jeffrey Snover), at https://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/monad-manifesto-th...