5 ms·

> However, I think to call her "the woman behind the first black hole image" is a hyperbole. It makes it sound as if she was _the one person_ responsible that a

by njepa 8y ago

> However, I think to call her "the woman behind the first black hole image" is a hyperbole. It makes it sound as if she was _the one person_ responsible that all this came about. It doesn't say that though. It says she was behind the image. And as I understand she lead one of the teams responsible for creating the image from the data. So I don't think that is particularly inaccurate as far as headlines go.

sodafountan 8y ago
Well luckily we can verify just how much code she actually committed to the project. The Event Horizon Telescope Analysis Toolkit is a publicly available repository on Github: https://github.com/sao-eht/eat https://github.com/sao-eht/eat according to Katie's profile klbouman, she was responsible for a subset of that toolkit known as hopstools - which is described in the readme as "tools to convert data from the HOPS format": https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools Of the 259 commits to that project, klbouman is responsible for exactly 2. An initial commit - and a merge into the final toolkit: https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits/master https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits/master Leaving sex out of it, is this a classic case of a project manager getting all of the credit for a development team's hard work? Because by the looks of it it certainly looks like she didn't commit very much code unless I'm missing something. I'd say at the very least giving Andrew Chael, Mareki Honma and the rest of the development team just as much credit as she got for such an historic accomplishment would be fair to say the least.
- alukima 8y ago
  Lines of code is not, and will never be a metric for gauging project contribution. Most of that 850,000 lines of code is likely boilerplate setup code.
  - sodafountan 8y ago
    850,000 loc vs what looks to be an initial commit and a merge: https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits?author=klbouman https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits?author=klbouma... if I'm wrong here please point it out
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - jachee 8y ago
      "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." —Bill Gates
    - throc3 8y ago
      https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413 https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413 You're an idiot. She's been at this almost longer than you've had a job.
    - danso 8y ago
      Incredible, that a purported programmer/software engineer in 2019 thinks that someone's Github commit history is the sum total of all their work. Not only that, you seem to be completely ignorant of how to find someone's Github commits to repos that aren't owned by their account. https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/graphs/contributors https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/graphs/contributors
      - sodafountan 8y ago
        You're right, I had assumed that the project that she was the owner of on her github portfolio was her primary contribution - I jumped to conclusions without digging any deeper and I'd delete the comment if Hacker News would let me.
        mst 8y ago
        I fear people are down voting you for having been wrong originally rather than for this comment. Which is a shame, because we all do things this stupid sometimes and your frank admission of having done so is laudable. Nil desperandum carborundum illegitimi.
    - raydev 8y ago
      Okay, how about tweets from Andrew Chael himself? https://twitter.com/thisgreyspirit/status/1116518547327475712 https://twitter.com/thisgreyspirit/status/111651854732747571...
- bitwised 8y ago
  To call her a project manager is telling. The number of lines of code submitted is not the sole measure of contributing. She led the effort of creating the CHIRP (Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction) algorithm used to achieve this historic event.
- kissgyorgy 8y ago
  It's really short-sighted to say something like this. Committing code is actually the smallest impact you can make in a big project like this. There are way harder, more meaningful ways you can contribute to the project's success.
- rmc256 8y ago
  I think you're looking in the wrong place. I don't see anywhere in the eat github repository where there is code similar to the CHIRP algorithm (correct me if I'm wrong). I'd be interested in seeing the actual code used to generate the image (certainly the eat repo was used, but it doesn't look to be the main algorithm?) It looks more plausible that the algorithm is in eht-imaging (https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging), but I haven't looked deeply enough yet. She contributed a lot more to that repo. And having said all that, # lines/commits isn't as important as the algorithm
- ihnorton 8y ago
  I'm reluctant to even dignify this kind of low-effort drivel with a response. There's a bunch of other commits linked from that very same user profile, related to -- and this will blow your mind -- image reconstruction: https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/commits?author=klbouman https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/commits?author=klbouma... Even if that were not true, scientific code often does not end up public, let alone on github. Not to mention that Dr. Bouman is the first author of a closely-related paper at CVPR, which is one of the most prestigious meetings in a field of study called "computer vision": https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413 https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413 Obviously this was a massive team effort, but PR frenzies happen to good people all the time and I don't see anyone scrutinizing public commit counts when it's a man in a similar context.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - tropo 8y ago
    You're right that we "don't see anyone scrutinizing public commit counts when it's a man in a similar context". Well of course! The media never promotes an inflated story of a man's accomplishments due to him being a man, so it would be silly to suspect it. Nobody is doubting that it is possible for a woman to do impressive science. It's just the ordinary problem of trying to promote/advance/assist a particular group of people. Any time that happens, it casts suspicion on the whole group. Both the deserving and the undeserving are suspected of having what isn't earned. Everybody in the group is thus hurt.
    - throc3 8y ago
      cough James Watson cough
    - danso 8y ago
      > The media never promotes an inflated story of a man's accomplishments due to him being a man, so it would be silly to suspect it. Stories about men aren't thought of as being inflated "due to him being a man" because the default perspective is that men make history. Now that more awareness is being given to the contributions of overlooked women and members of other disenfranchised groups, people seem more eager to think that someone is being celebrated because of their identity. > Nobody is doubting that it is possible for a woman to do impressive science. Women's contributions to science and engineering have long been overlooked, if not outright doubted. Fran Allen's (the first woman to win the Turing Award) chapter in "Coders at Work" [0] is a good example. > Seibel: So when you won the Turing, did you think to yourself, "Gee, there's another woman who should have won this a long time ago?" > Allen: Well, the very first thing I thought about was how wonderful it was. And then I started to think about all the many other women who were never recognized at all for their work. In many cases, their work was stolen. I thought about the women who had done some very amazing things that have not been recognized, even by their peers. When I approach them and say, "You need to join some professional organizations-I'll write some recommendations for you," they kind of shy away from that. > Seibel: So you think that part of the problem is they don't get recognized because they're not putting themselves in a place to be recognized as easily. > Allen: Right. > Seibel: Are there any particular folks that you would like to name-to give a little recognition now? > Allen: Well, there's Edith Schonberg, who is a great computer scientist. In terms of technical work, it's just one first after another on some of her papers. She's had work stolen-absolutely brutally stolen. She wrote a paper on debugging of parallel code, which is a very hard problem. It was not accepted at a conference and somebody who had been on the program committee made three papers out of it. That kind of thing. It happens in our field and we don't have good ways of dealing with it. > Seibel: And it happens more to women? > Allen: Yes, I think it does. They were often viewed as not going to put up a fight-that they were more isolated and don't have the advocates who will deal with a famous thief. He was a famous thief, known but nobody dared touch it. And there are plenty of others way back from the Stretch days. There was a woman who essentially was the inventor of multiprogramming and credit was taken by somebody who eventually became a Turing Award winner.* Peter Seibel. Coders at Work: Reflections of the Craft of Programming (Kindle Locations 6413-6419). Kindle Edition. [0] http://www.codersatwork.com/fran-allen.html http://www.codersatwork.com/fran-allen.html
- throc3 8y ago
  I created an account to let you know you should probably apologize and delete this comment. Unless you like this sort of low-effort assholery to be linked to your real name, which took me way too little time to establish.
  - sodafountan 8y ago
    You can't delete comments from hacker news after a certain period of time has passed and that's ok, I was wrong about the amount of work she committed and in all honesty, I didn't doubt her in any way. I looked up what she had contributed because I was curious and initially I didn't find much. I do apologize for not digger a bit deeper. I still stand by the fact that all people's work of this magnitude should be reviewed and analyzed - it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman.
    - throc3 8y ago
      There are probably a dozen papers of this magnitude published each month across the sciences with multiple authors and github repos. Which of them have you dug into before? Any of them?
      - sodafountan 8y ago
        Considering how few I was aware of the answer is zero. Let me ask you something though, why was I made aware of this discovery and not the others? Was it because a woman participated?
        araneae 8y ago
        Maybe because it's the first ever photo of a black hole, was widely anticipated, and was published by pretty much every news organisation and was on the cover of many of them, before any interviews with her came out?
        throc3 8y ago
- Jasper_ 8y ago
  Regardless of all the other problems with this comment, your statement of "she doesn't have any commits" is wrong. Simply not all of her commits are linked to her GitHub account. https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits/master?after=20d1ec6a6f7e3432d748bd6c7eb7ebfb47081dc0+174 https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits/master?after=2...

by njepa 8y ago

sodafountan 8y ago

Well luckily we can verify just how much code she actually committed to the project. The Event Horizon Telescope Analysis Toolkit is a publicly available repository on Github: https://github.com/sao-eht/eat https://github.com/sao-eht/eat according to Katie's profile klbouman, she was responsible for a subset of that toolkit known as hopstools - which is described in the readme as "tools to convert data from the HOPS format": https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools Of the 259 commits to that project, klbouman is responsible for exactly 2. An initial commit - and a merge into the final toolkit: https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits/master https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits/master Leaving sex out of it, is this a classic case of a project manager getting all of the credit for a development team's hard work? Because by the looks of it it certainly looks like she didn't commit very much code unless I'm missing something. I'd say at the very least giving Andrew Chael, Mareki Honma and the rest of the development team just as much credit as she got for such an historic accomplishment would be fair to say the least.

alukima 8y ago
Lines of code is not, and will never be a metric for gauging project contribution. Most of that 850,000 lines of code is likely boilerplate setup code.
- sodafountan 8y ago
  850,000 loc vs what looks to be an initial commit and a merge: https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits?author=klbouman https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits?author=klbouma... if I'm wrong here please point it out
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jachee 8y ago
    "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." —Bill Gates
  - throc3 8y ago
    https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413 https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413 You're an idiot. She's been at this almost longer than you've had a job.
  - danso 8y ago
    Incredible, that a purported programmer/software engineer in 2019 thinks that someone's Github commit history is the sum total of all their work. Not only that, you seem to be completely ignorant of how to find someone's Github commits to repos that aren't owned by their account. https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/graphs/contributors https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/graphs/contributors
    - sodafountan 8y ago
      You're right, I had assumed that the project that she was the owner of on her github portfolio was her primary contribution - I jumped to conclusions without digging any deeper and I'd delete the comment if Hacker News would let me.
      - mst 8y ago
        I fear people are down voting you for having been wrong originally rather than for this comment. Which is a shame, because we all do things this stupid sometimes and your frank admission of having done so is laudable. Nil desperandum carborundum illegitimi.
  - raydev 8y ago
    Okay, how about tweets from Andrew Chael himself? https://twitter.com/thisgreyspirit/status/1116518547327475712 https://twitter.com/thisgreyspirit/status/111651854732747571...
bitwised 8y ago
To call her a project manager is telling. The number of lines of code submitted is not the sole measure of contributing. She led the effort of creating the CHIRP (Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction) algorithm used to achieve this historic event.
kissgyorgy 8y ago
It's really short-sighted to say something like this. Committing code is actually the smallest impact you can make in a big project like this. There are way harder, more meaningful ways you can contribute to the project's success.
rmc256 8y ago
I think you're looking in the wrong place. I don't see anywhere in the eat github repository where there is code similar to the CHIRP algorithm (correct me if I'm wrong). I'd be interested in seeing the actual code used to generate the image (certainly the eat repo was used, but it doesn't look to be the main algorithm?) It looks more plausible that the algorithm is in eht-imaging (https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging), but I haven't looked deeply enough yet. She contributed a lot more to that repo. And having said all that, # lines/commits isn't as important as the algorithm
ihnorton 8y ago
I'm reluctant to even dignify this kind of low-effort drivel with a response. There's a bunch of other commits linked from that very same user profile, related to -- and this will blow your mind -- image reconstruction: https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/commits?author=klbouman https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/commits?author=klbouma... Even if that were not true, scientific code often does not end up public, let alone on github. Not to mention that Dr. Bouman is the first author of a closely-related paper at CVPR, which is one of the most prestigious meetings in a field of study called "computer vision": https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413 https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413 Obviously this was a massive team effort, but PR frenzies happen to good people all the time and I don't see anyone scrutinizing public commit counts when it's a man in a similar context.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- tropo 8y ago
  You're right that we "don't see anyone scrutinizing public commit counts when it's a man in a similar context". Well of course! The media never promotes an inflated story of a man's accomplishments due to him being a man, so it would be silly to suspect it. Nobody is doubting that it is possible for a woman to do impressive science. It's just the ordinary problem of trying to promote/advance/assist a particular group of people. Any time that happens, it casts suspicion on the whole group. Both the deserving and the undeserving are suspected of having what isn't earned. Everybody in the group is thus hurt.
  - throc3 8y ago
    cough James Watson cough
  - danso 8y ago
    > The media never promotes an inflated story of a man's accomplishments due to him being a man, so it would be silly to suspect it. Stories about men aren't thought of as being inflated "due to him being a man" because the default perspective is that men make history. Now that more awareness is being given to the contributions of overlooked women and members of other disenfranchised groups, people seem more eager to think that someone is being celebrated because of their identity. > Nobody is doubting that it is possible for a woman to do impressive science. Women's contributions to science and engineering have long been overlooked, if not outright doubted. Fran Allen's (the first woman to win the Turing Award) chapter in "Coders at Work" [0] is a good example. > Seibel: So when you won the Turing, did you think to yourself, "Gee, there's another woman who should have won this a long time ago?" > Allen: Well, the very first thing I thought about was how wonderful it was. And then I started to think about all the many other women who were never recognized at all for their work. In many cases, their work was stolen. I thought about the women who had done some very amazing things that have not been recognized, even by their peers. When I approach them and say, "You need to join some professional organizations-I'll write some recommendations for you," they kind of shy away from that. > Seibel: So you think that part of the problem is they don't get recognized because they're not putting themselves in a place to be recognized as easily. > Allen: Right. > Seibel: Are there any particular folks that you would like to name-to give a little recognition now? > Allen: Well, there's Edith Schonberg, who is a great computer scientist. In terms of technical work, it's just one first after another on some of her papers. She's had work stolen-absolutely brutally stolen. She wrote a paper on debugging of parallel code, which is a very hard problem. It was not accepted at a conference and somebody who had been on the program committee made three papers out of it. That kind of thing. It happens in our field and we don't have good ways of dealing with it. > Seibel: And it happens more to women? > Allen: Yes, I think it does. They were often viewed as not going to put up a fight-that they were more isolated and don't have the advocates who will deal with a famous thief. He was a famous thief, known but nobody dared touch it. And there are plenty of others way back from the Stretch days. There was a woman who essentially was the inventor of multiprogramming and credit was taken by somebody who eventually became a Turing Award winner.* Peter Seibel. Coders at Work: Reflections of the Craft of Programming (Kindle Locations 6413-6419). Kindle Edition. [0] http://www.codersatwork.com/fran-allen.html http://www.codersatwork.com/fran-allen.html
throc3 8y ago
I created an account to let you know you should probably apologize and delete this comment. Unless you like this sort of low-effort assholery to be linked to your real name, which took me way too little time to establish.
- sodafountan 8y ago
  You can't delete comments from hacker news after a certain period of time has passed and that's ok, I was wrong about the amount of work she committed and in all honesty, I didn't doubt her in any way. I looked up what she had contributed because I was curious and initially I didn't find much. I do apologize for not digger a bit deeper. I still stand by the fact that all people's work of this magnitude should be reviewed and analyzed - it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman.
  - throc3 8y ago
    There are probably a dozen papers of this magnitude published each month across the sciences with multiple authors and github repos. Which of them have you dug into before? Any of them?
    - sodafountan 8y ago
      Considering how few I was aware of the answer is zero. Let me ask you something though, why was I made aware of this discovery and not the others? Was it because a woman participated?
      - araneae 8y ago
        Maybe because it's the first ever photo of a black hole, was widely anticipated, and was published by pretty much every news organisation and was on the cover of many of them, before any interviews with her came out?
        throc3 8y ago
Jasper_ 8y ago
Regardless of all the other problems with this comment, your statement of "she doesn't have any commits" is wrong. Simply not all of her commits are linked to her GitHub account. https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits/master?after=20d1ec6a6f7e3432d748bd6c7eb7ebfb47081dc0+174 https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits/master?after=2...