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Comment by s_q_b | Hacker News Reader

She's also worked for NASA, in additional to being a wet work astrobiologist. Meaning she has a high level of intelligence, experience working with technology, and the ability to improvise tools. Those all sound like great credentials.

Honestly Computer Science used to be so open to outsiders, now it's "If you don't have a degree we don't believe you."

That's really bad. Especially considering the alternative theory involves her pulling the wool over the eyes of both AH and Marissa Mayer for ten million dollars.

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So what if she worked for NASA? I can probaly find NASA ex-employees who believe in homeopathy.

What's she's doing has nothing to do with computer science.

You're right that people shouldn't be dismissing her work because of her qualifications and previous work experience but that works both ways - she doesn't magically gain credibillity just because she used to work at someplace or other.

She's worked on hard problems before. No matter the type of problem, I impute an advantage to that person in other hard activities, even if they're unrelated. E.g. I believe that someone who earned a Harvard mathematics PhD to be more likely than the average person to be able to earn a Yale Microbiology degree.

As for working at NASA, she was doing hard science research on a type of spectrography, for which she was given multiple awards by NASA Ames Rearch Center. So yes, I do consider the multitude of indications of her intelligence to be directly relevant.

This negativity reeks of "she's not part of our West Coast club" and people with no knowledge of the technology are making blanket assertions that its impossible. That's wrong.

If this company had a valley pedigree and a male founder, I'm sure I'd be reading all about the amazing self-charging forthcoming revolution.

If anything people are holding back because she's female.

This thread would be far more insulting if she were male.

The problem has nothing to do with her being UPenn (I have no fucking clue about US geography or state rivalries) or not being in some club (which she clearly is part of - look at where she's raised $10 million from).

It's to do with people being sceptical of the physics. This device is implausible at best.

The Marissa Mayer who turned around Yahoo by... waiting for Alibaba stock holdings to grow in value to cover the negative value of Yahoo's own projects?

The Marissa Mayer who... turned Yahoo around financially, increased employee job seekers by over five hundred percent, cleaned up the companies' brand, and competently managed an enterprise neither you nor I would have the first clue how to run? That Marissa Mayer? Yeah, her.

What does an astrobiologist do for a living?

Her resume's online, along with a lot of other astrobiologists'. Mostly study primitive earth microorganisms, the conditions that may have led them to form, and how those conditions might come about in extraterrestrial cases. Of course they also design tests and methods, many of which are computerized.

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