[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