Hacker News Reader

Comment by ejb999 | Hacker News Reader

Not surprising to me - is she actually notable? as far as I can tell she is no more (or less) notable than any of the millions of people that contributed to the war effort - so along the lines of an army grunt following orders to shoot at the enemy, or an assembly line worker in the USA putting together B27's.

She took coded messages, fed them into a device that someone else invented, and then delivered the output for someone to (possibly) act on. As far as I can tell she was a cog in the huge war machine.

Do all of the millions of people, or 100's of thousands of americans who gave their lives, get or deserve a wikipedia page as well?

Nothing against this woman, or anyone that contributed to the war effort, but millions upon millions of people did - and they are all equally worthy of remembrance.

View on HN

Between WW2 and the Korean War my grandpa was in the army. He was assigned to transcribe intercepted Soviet telegraphs on a typewriter which would then be passed on to the actual codebreakers. His work was probably useful and helpful to our efforts to oppose the USSR, but he never considered his work more important than that of the actual codebreakers, which he thought was much more difficult and required much more talent/ability. And he didn't consider himself more important than all the other guys in his unit doing the same transcription work as him.

I've noticed that for almost every example of "important historical female/minority/whatever" that gets promoted as being forgotten or overlooked there are dozens if not hundreds of straight white men with the same achievements if not greater. The ones that did standout things that actually make them memorable tend to be, y'know, remembered. The outright lies that get shared (like traffic lights being invented by a black man) just make it even more insulting.

I think that it can be easy to take these stories with a note of cynicism and I understand the place your sentiment comes from. I imagine that if you were to talk to the people from these stories, they would feel much the same as your grandfather did, that they were one amongst many.

News these days is based in clicks and the story of the “real” XXX ignored by history for their trait of YYY is tantalizing because the unrecognized underdog is such a compelling motive. I would not ascribe malice to what is in essence profiteering. Still, these stories can be interesting, in the same way your grandfather’s story is interesting, if for no other reason than to hear about the ordinary people that composed a great effort.

The most interesting detail my grandpa shared was that they all had English/Latin typewriters but the messages were all in Cyrillic, so they taped Cyrillic letters onto all the keys and used numbers and/or special characters (can't recall which) for some of the letters since Cyrillic has 7 extra letters.

Yeah I think the point is not to pretend that white men werent involved - it’s that by default when people picture that corps all they see is white men. The point is to highlight the actual diversity of the corps, rather than defaulting to “a bunch of white guys did stuff”

Sorry, but I think a lot of people see it differently. Whilst I think the most wholesome message would be one of "everyone of all types working together to advance humanity", a lot of people seem to see it as a scorecard. +1 on your side means a -1 in the "opposition's".

Hence somebody who was one of one thousand doesn't get described "one of the army of people who helped defeat evil", but have their role inflated to an individual responsible for some key aspect. That way you don't have to acknowledge the contribution of others who, in truth, did the same as they did.

I think you're supposed to say "cis straight body abled white men". The simple "white men" includes too many protected groups of victims now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com