NYTimes Obituary for Ada Lovelace

nytimes.com

35 points·heavi5ide··10 comments

Some background on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/insider/overlooked-obitua...

On the topic of NYT obits, there’s a really great episode of the Longform podcast with NTY’s senior obituary writer Margalit Fox: https://longform.org/posts/longform-podcast-43-margalit-fox

Unclear from the title, but this is a 100 plus years later obituary rather than something written at the time.

Politics on Hacker News usually gets flagged.

This is political? Please explain.

Adding new historical obituaries specifically to address the issue that those other than White men were historically ignored in that section of the paper certainly seems at least related to a currently active area of identity politics.

Not that I think the comment on politics usually getting flagged was useful or necessarily accurate.

Most people, me included, come to Hacker News for their tech-related news specifically because they don't want to see these kinds of useless, clickbaity, virtue signalling pieces.

I enjoy articles like these, personally.

It's certainly not clickbait by any convention that I know that term. It's only useless to those of us who already knew about Lovelace's contributions. But, like many reposted articles, I'm content to let them lie for the sake of other HNers who haven't seen it yet.

> Most people, me included

Looks like we’ve all hit the root issue. I enjoyed the article.

But this isn't very political, is it? An influential individual in computing gets modern recognition. Just because NYT article says that obituaries were "dominated by white men" doesn't make this political content IMO.

In any case, we don't need to be dogmatic about "rules" like the ones governing political content.

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