Hacker News Reader

Comment by killjoywashere | Hacker News Reader

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 problems with polrep"

"made it possible to do a min uv cut on closure phase when adding it a..."

While Andrew's lean frequently toward code maintenance:

"updated some docstrings in imager_utils"

"moved imgsum to plotting.summary_plots"

"modified README"

That said, Andrew and others seem to have pretty good insight too.

View on HN

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 the work that Dr.Katie has done and the comments are so vile.

> so much display of misogyny and sexism against a woman scientist

There are no woman scientists, science has no gender.

The article is sexiest not people who are curious what Dr. Bouman actually did to be honored to mention in BBC article.

We don’t exist in a purely meritocratic and egalitarian society. Maybe you have never been told that you are not good enough for some work but growing up in deeply paternalistic society, I constantly heard “women are too stupid for hard sciences and they should just stick to kitchens”. If celebrating her achievements in this way changes minds of a few people and inspires a few girls to believe in themselves, I think it is worth the “biased” coverage that she is getting for her work.

> I grew up hearing women are too stupid for hard sciences

Bad for you.

Thanks God I grew up in a society where every person no matter of gender and age can do hard science.

Nobody is saying that only some societies have both genders doing hard sciences. It’s the matter of opportunity.

People don’t surrender their outside identity when they become a scientist.

People don't surrender their outside political views, their lineage, sexual orientation and other background either. See how stupid the article would sound if titled: "Jane Doe: The divorced homosexual black democratic woman with three children behind the first black hole image". Science matters.

It's fallacious to presume that — because gender, sex, race, etc. shouldn't impact peoples' opportunities — that we should treat is as though it doesn't impact them.

This is a good article on the concept: https://everydayfeminism.com/2013/09/dont-see-race/

[Edit:] Or this, as a complementary one: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-dont-see-race

One of the few redeeming features of the HN conventions of civility and seriousness is that we don't have Reddit's problems and we don't need to talk about Reddit.

But what could possibly qualify you to say that "Andrew is definitely smart (smarter than an average HN user) and his code is very important"?

Since when was software development about who wrote the most code or did the most commits.

Do people like Linus deserve less credit now that he isn't the leader on the commit scoreboard ?

Linus wrote the most code to start the project though, that doesn't seem a good example.

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 process to write complex code, simply because their focus has been on other things.

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.

she could have written 0 lines and be "the woman behind the picture".

Writing code is easy, figuring out complex algorithms is something very different, and does not require coding knowledge

https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/commit/886b07b8a00d142...

one commit with 524,306 additions. adding a model.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com