You can't take HN threads into gender war, or any ideological flamewar, like this. The way you crossed into personal attack is particularly ugly. We ban accounts that post like this, so please don't post like this again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> I know several extremely competent women in technical roles - like, better than 99% of others in their field regardless of gender. None of them EVER self-refer as "women in tech", or "women who code".

FWIW, I know some excellent engineers, technologists, professors, etc. who are women, and who also participate in programs to address sexism.

We have a long history of really stupid and unjust sexism, and that's a lot to dig out of. Different people tackle that different ways.

Sometimes I hear of approaches that I don't understand. If I tried to make snap judgments of them, I'd hope I'd usually be right, but I suspect I'd often be wrong.

In general, I think I'm best off focusing on support of things that seem positive.

The man who "wrote" the code disagrees with your take on Katie Bouman:

"While I wrote much of the code for one of these pipelines, Katie was a huge contributor to the software; it would have never worked without her contributions and the work of many others who wrote code, debugged, and figured out how to use the code on challenging EHT data."

Btw lines of code != amount of contribution, sad to see this kind of take on a supposedly programmer focused site.

https://www.foxnews.com/science/internet-trolls-discredit-ka... https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/438617-white-m...

Except this was an actual real accomplishment, whose out of patent idea was used later by the Navy: https://physicsworld.com/a/a-tale-of-two-lives/. The application was indeed original, as evidenced by the receipt of a patent for it. You can argue with how the work is described here, but trying to claim it wasn’t a real accomplishment or is somehow comparable to someone adding a bunch of consts is absurd.

> I know several extremely competent women in technical roles - like, better than 99% of others in their field regardless of gender. None of them EVER self-refer as "women in tech", or "women who code".

One such person’s explanation why: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14702676>

Another thing I find uncomfortable about this kind of "pinkwashing" is that it papers over the actual reality of history, which is that (with a very small number of exceptions) women simply didn't get get the opportunity to be "pioneers" in technology, because of the incredibly unfair nature of society at the time. In a fairer society, someone like Lamarr, who was clearly extremely intelligent and curious, might well have gone on to be a pioneer. But that wasn't the reality at the time - and we should acknowledge that.

This isn't the latest example of anything. Hedy Lamarr's interests were the subject of podcasts over a decade ago, and books long before that.

This isn't a good example of pinkwashing. There's no harm in recognizing the efforts of the underdog. We valorize Nikola Tesla despite him living and dying as a failure.

Terry Davis too. Nobody needed TempleOS, but we're proud for him for trying.

I agree that to put someone on a pedestal simply by dint of their gender, race or sexuality does a disservice to that group. Would love to see a version of this story in which her "just happening to be a fabulously beautiful film star" is a marginal remark.

But isn't it the same when we lionise sociopathic, charismatic men [0] who "never cared about norms" but end up enshitifying the world with their reckless engineering and cocaine addled moral ambivalence?

As a "man in tech who eschews the norms" I'm a little uncomfortable that my fellow computer scientists might hold up Hank Asher as an example of anything but a criminal whose mindset is the exemplar of everything we should seek not to be as ethical hackers.

Is there a double standard when a woman with talent, charm and beauty is seen to succeed _despite_ those qualities, whereas a man who is a "lovable rogue" is claimed to succeed because of them?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37612750

You see the same thing with inventions falsely attributed to African Americans, like peanut butter and the traffic light, while actual awesome inventions by African Americans (like the super soaker) often get ignored. Or the video game cartridge is a good example. Jerry Lawson didn't invent it, but his other impressive engineering work gets ignored and instead a lie gets spread.

“Pinkwashing” is garden variety bigoted myth making.

And it hurts both men and women — as bigotry tends to do.