Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 547 posts

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

#81

Post by vonseel »

threeseed wrote: post #50
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…

It's the same on Reddit. The sheer toxicity of many of the comments is something I haven't seen for a long time. They really hate that a women is getting credit and that others aren't getting the same level of attention. I wonder how those same people think about Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs etc. They had huge teams behind them as well.

Dumb attitude.

For every extraordinarily recognized academic/professional person, there’s always going to be many times more people who are never publicly recognized for their achievements.

Maybe they fly under the radar, maybe they picked the wrong subject to focus on or industry for career, maybe their timing is bad, maybe there’s nothing wrong with them.

I’m proud of this (stranger to me) girl for accomplishing something so large at this age. Being about the same age, I’m not jealous - but it is one more reminder that somewhere along the line my record-player skipped a few years. My 20s disappeared too quickly, or maybe I was focused on the wrong things (work) instead of passion.

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

#82

Post by dagw »

govg wrote: post #72
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…

True, but that need not be of high importance when assigning credit. Especially in projects that involve a lot of implementation, the high level algorithms and techniques are developed by someone who might be far removed from actually writing code, and that aspect is outsourced to someone much more competent at programming. A lot of PhD students / professors do not have the talent or have not developed the thought pr…

Exactly. One project I worked on a while back involved me taking a big pile of very clever and complicated Matlab code and rewriting it in python in a way that made it easy to use from other projects and able to read a couple of additional input file formats. If you just look at the commits on that project it would look like I was responsible for 90+% of the entire thing, while in truth I was basically just doing transcribing and cleaning and had basically nothing to do with any of the difficult parts.

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

#83

Post by hjk05 »

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 coverage is being unfairly criticized because she’s a woman they view your question as an attack on the assertion that she deserves the attention so they downvote you.

In either case I think it’s interesting to ask why the proclaimed “woman behind the image” wasn’t there for the unvailing of the image.

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

#84

Post by telesilla »

darkpuma wrote: post #16
ilarum wrote: post #6

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

> https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/graphs/contributors Huh, I wonder how accurate this is. All the code is beyond me in any case, I'm in no position to judge the relative value of any of it.

This is deeply offensive. I'm the owner and founder of my company and I haven't written any meaningful code for our core products in 10 years. Our github repo has barely a scratch from me in it. Does this make my work, my hard long hours in managing my team and designing the product, worthless?

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

#85

Post by matt4077 »

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 does or does not deserve praise.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15250349

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

#86

Post by mhsabbagh »

thecatspaw wrote: post #77
mhsabbagh wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I am not, in order to create the image they observed the black hole for years, which is coming from the work of the people I linked to in my source, 200 people from 40 countries and all the other astronomers, being the team who just produced the image from the data is relatively smaller effort comparing to the overall work of all the people involved for years. I am not blaming her, I didn't say she's the one pushi…

Yes, the same way that people credit elon musk for tesla, or credit elon musk for spaceX. He didnt build those rockets himself either. > This is not about celebrating those people, it's giving the main chunk of the credit to this person alone. Because leading a large team of researches working on highly complicated work is respectfull work as well. Another team leader might have botched it and we wouldnt have the pic…

Those are his companies, he founded them with his money. He's the CEO of all those companies, unlike the situation here. She wasn't the leader of the entire project. And she didn't even put her hands on the other aspects other than processing the image from the data.

> Another team leader might have botched it and we wouldnt have the picture.

How do you know that? The "might" means nothing here. There were many other teams working too and each of them have their talented leader doing complicated things. Choosing this one specifically from all others to take the credit is meaningless.

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

#87

Post by mansoor_ »

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…

I agree with your general sentiment but two comments:

1) Look back at any physic journal for similar stories of experimental success (example gravitational waves), you won't find news stories of focus pieces on a single team member because it is a COLLABORATIVE effort. The only cases were single people get recognition is for theorists like Prof Higgs, Hawkings etc, but not for the individual experimentalists at the LHC or other astronomical projects.

2) The idea of focussing on a single team member is a technique for creating a clear narrative that readers can follow. The story would get less interest if you were told about the live and works of all of the team members.

It's not all hate :)

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

#89

Post by telesilla »

nprateem wrote: post #68
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…

> 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.

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

#90

Post by shaki-dora »

mansoor_ wrote: post #87
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…

I agree with your general sentiment but two comments: 1) Look back at any physic journal for similar stories of experimental success (example gravitational waves), you won't find news stories of focus pieces on a single team member because it is a COLLABORATIVE effort. The only cases were single people get recognition is for theorists like Prof Higgs, Hawkings etc, but not for the individual experimentalists at the L…

Craig Venter
Post reply on HN