[matt4077]

Reposting my comment from another story that didn’t get traction (edit: thar was quickly flagged off the front page, as this one is now as well):

It should be noted that this community here was among the worst in this regard.

This isn’t about measuring the exact contribution she may or may not have made to the project. It’s that there are limitless stories of „meet the man behind <x>“ where that question just never crosses anyone’s mind. See "The Man Behind Windows PowerShell" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15250349

Yet for her (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19632086), the discussion was easily dominated by attempts to tear her down, a few defenders, and entirely transparent attempts to differentiate her case from all the others that avoid the obvious reason.

[davemp]

Top three replies to the PS thread:

> . . . It's a miserable language, full of unexpected behaviors and badly designed features. . .

> I haven't met a single person who likes PowerShell. It's perhaps the textbook example of ugly design that looks technically consistent but utterly unfriendly and mind bogglingly verbose. . .

> PowerShell is one of the few bits of software which has actually made me throw a computer in anger. The idea has potential but the implementation is just bad. . .

No one is really looking into his IC but the thread is not positive. I have no idea who contributed what, but I’m not sure anyone would want to claim part of the credit for powershell.

——

Here’s a thread for man behind AMD’s zen architecture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14989551

First comment:

> Zen is the work of a huge team of talented engineers. To single one out as "the man behind Zen" seems very wrong. . .

——

The man behind objective-c: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8422695

Second comment:

> The man behind Objective-C these days (and for the past decade plus) is this guy: http://www.sealiesoftware.com/blog/

——

For the other threads I saw, some were actually individual efforts, others were just ignoring “the man behind” and talking about the tech. Changing my search to “woman behind”, I saw no comments disparaging the level of contribution.

EDIT: I’m also by no means justifying the vitriol in the black hole thread or the harassment. Just doing some legwork.

[ALittleLight]

I'm far from an expert on either of these topics but just looking at your links, one main difference is that the "man behind Windows PowerShell" was the Chief Architect of the project. Katie Bouman (per a ten second Google search) seems to have been a contributor to the black hole project.

When I looked at the PowerShell thread, the top five threads were people hating on PowerShell, followed by one person who liked it. In general, I think comments tend to be biased towards people with a disagreement with the main article. If you agreed with it entirely, you'd just upvote and move on. If you're leaving a comment you probably have an objection or qualification you want to make. In the PowerShell example the qualification was how much people hate PowerShell. In the Bouman example it's arguing over the phrase "woman behind".

Here's a counter example about "The woman behind two men and a truck" [1]. None of the top level comments seem to be complaining about her not being the only one to contribute to the company etcetera. As far as I can tell with a bit of research, she really is the woman behind the company (the founder), the PowerShell guy really was the Chief Architect, and Bouman really was a contributor but not the lead or central figure behind the black hole effort. So, I'm not persuaded this is evidence of a misogynistic attitude at HackerNews. I think it can be true that women face sexist attitudes in the sciences, that mean people are being mean to Bouman online, and that Bouman can be incorrectly described as the "woman behind black hole pictures".

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16164620

[fzeroracer]

As a thought experiment, if you believe Bouman can't be described as 'the woman behind the black hole pictures', then can you describe for me what contributions she made?

[ALittleLight]

As I mentioned I am not especially familiar with Katie Bouman or the black hole project and everything I'm writing is just from a few seconds of google searching. Based on that, I would say that Bouman was a scientist, mathematician, and programmer who worked on the project.

Per Wikipedia

Bouman - She researches computational methods for imaging, and was a member of the Event Horizon Telescope team that captured the first image of a black hole

Snover - Jeffrey Snover is a Microsoft Technical Fellow, PowerShell Chief Architect, and the Chief Architect for the Azure Infrastructure and Management group which includes Azure Stack, System Center and Operations Management Suite. Snover is the inventor of Windows PowerShell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Bouman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Snover

From these two excerpts alone it sounds more correct to say that Snover was the "Man behind" PowerShell than Bouman was the "Woman behind" the black hole pictures.

[throwawaysea]

Per Andrew Chael (the person who seemingly did most of the implementation in terms of code, and would therefore have some authority to speak to this) - https://twitter.com/thisgreyspirit/status/111651854732747571...

> With a few others, Katie also developed the imaging framework that rigorously tested all three codes and shaped the entire paper

So taken at face value, her contribution seems to be this image testing framework and whatever she contributed to the paper.

Most articles attributed Bouman as the inventor of the algorithm used to generate the image. This was directly in the titles of these articles. Now it is clear her algorithm was not used in the generation of the image (see https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/katie-bouman-blac...).

This isn't to say her own algorithmic work did not count as a contribution just because it wasn't used. I think that exploration matters, if only to see where that path leads while others explore alternative paths. She is listed as the primary author on this 2016 paper (http://people.csail.mit.edu/klbouman/pw/papers_and_presentat...).

But I think given that there were at least 5 other papers here relating to image reconstruction, given that the code was written mostly by others, and given that 3 other algorithms (which she was not involved in) were used in the construction of the final image, I think it is fair to say that Bouman was not the woman behind the black hole picture. She was a woman, alongside a team of many women and many men. Sara Issaoun (female scientist on same project) said on Twitter that a team of 40 worked on image reconstruction: https://twitter.com/SaraIssaoun/status/1116304522660519936

[throwawaysea]

Powershell was actually a one-man project. It was originally code-named Monad. See https://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/monad-manifesto-th..., which contains a link to the original "manifesto" written solely by Jeffrey Snover.

Monad was available in various early stages internally within Microsoft and externally to the world, before it eventually became a feature with a whole team behind it.

Snover, by the way, is a Microsoft Technical Fellow (their highest title for engineers): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Snover

This is a very different example than the effort behind the EHT, which includes not just those working on imaging and reconstruction, but numerous others as well. The total team has been said to be ~200 people. Furthermore, even on the imaging side, there were several papers and several different reconstruction algorithms to fill in gaps in sensor data. And those papers themselves reference numerous prior work in this space, upon which these newer algorithms are evolutionary improvements.

[daenz]

>See "The Man Behind Windows PowerShell"

Everything I'm finding about Jeffrey Snover indicates that he did, in fact, by himself, invent PowerShell. The idea and original implementation was developed by him, and then he picked a small team (Bruce Payette and James Truher) to bring it to maturity. So I don't see how that's a fair comparison.

[13of40]

There were about 30 people in dev/test/pm working on PowerShell version 1. What were their names again?

[throwawaysea]

Prior to it being a full-fledged team, it was indeed a one-man project code-named "Monad". You can find the original vision document, written by one person (Jeffrey Snover), at https://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/monad-manifesto-th...

[13of40]

At least a year before that we all got together in that conference room off the building 40 cafeteria and watched the vision demo of making every management action in MMC translate to script. I don't recall Snover being in the picture at that point. Could be wrong. I got the impression he was brought in to solve a problem that was already distinctly on the radar.

[kzcqt]

Giving one person the credit for a team effort is wrong. In this case some people are pretending it's right because it's a female, but two wrongs don't make one right.

[fzeroracer]

And yet these discussions, as Matt brings up, generally only occur when there are women involved.

No one's been giving her sole credit for this project, they've been highlighting her as part of the team. She admits that it was a team effort, her team admits it was a team effort and wants people to stop downplaying her accomplishments. Yet the discussion on sites like HN keeps veering into a narrative in which she is being overly credited or attempting to downplay everything she did.

[rectang]

As far as I can tell, despite having been fairly high profile in the past (she gave a TED talk), Bouman is not talking to the media now at all and only made the one Facebook post. The only thing that happened was the publication of the photograph.

[kzcqt]

She and the team she belongs to have been reasonable. I'm talking about what the media is reporting, since they are exploiting this story just for clicks.

These discussions are the result of the media trying to push a feminist narrative. They chose a female member of the team, and they knew where they were going with it. People can see through it, and are rightly upset.

Harassing her personally is, obviously, not the way to go, though. I'm sure the media doesn't care about her at all, or they are even happy that she's getting harassed, because they now have more stories to run.

[brlewis]

> These discussions are the result of the media trying to push a feminist narrative

Because whenever they don't have an agenda to push, they apportion credit for accomplishments with perfect accuracy from the beginning?

It's common for recognition to come from some combination of hard work, intelligence, and luck. When you see people getting all bent out of shape over the luck involved in this case and not in others, you have to wonder why.

[fzeroracer]

You haven't addressed the fact that when someone chooses a male member of the team and gives them undue credit, people don't get upset. Do you really think Jeffrey Snovey was the sole person behind Powershell? That there was no one else on his team that contributed to his project and helped make it a reality? Where was the outrage in that HN thread?

Yet now we have 'the media' pushing a 'feminist narrative' because they're highlighting a woman on the team. Now why would pushing a 'feminist narrative' using your logic cause people to get angry?

[kzcqt]

Nobody gets upset when a male gets undue credit because that's not seen as following a politised agenda. Whether that's right or wrong, or how we could fix that, that's an entirely different matter.

People get upset when the media pushes a feminist narrative because feminism is a very divisive issue. Talking about a divisive issue drives clicks, interactions, retweets, etc. Especially when you get dismissive with one half of the pie. The only purpose of the media is to piss people off so they can get eyeballs on ads.

[Nasrudith]

Then people are a bunch of bigotted asses. Just because it is their twisted norm in no way makes it acceptable. Less so in fact as it isn't just some rando who thinks it but a social bloc promoting it.

[bobfromhuddle]

Your comments here aren't helping. The clear implication is that Dr Bouman is receiving "undue credit" in order to push a "feminist narrative".

If that's your honest reading of events, then you're the problem here, my dude.