I'm not sure what the idea behind posting this is? In a large scale project rarely does someone high up the command chain do any of the "grunt" work (i.e. programming). Also, by training she appears to be dealing more with theory than the actual implementation aspect of this all.
ok, so just so everyone is clear, the point between parent and grandparent is Andrew Chael seems to have written a hell of a lot more code than Katie Bouman, for a lot longer
* achael 566 commits 850,275 ++ 131,044 --
* klbouman 90 commits 2,410 ++ 1,265 --
However, at least at the level of reading the commit messages, Katie's are pretty math heavy:
"fixed bug in the fake briggs weighting"
"starting to fix chirp problems with polrep"
"made it possible to do a min uv cut on closure phase when adding it a..."
While Andrew's lean frequently toward code maintenance:
"updated some docstrings in imager_utils"
"moved imgsum to plotting.summary_plots"
"modified README"
That said, Andrew and others seem to have pretty good insight too.
To add some more context... of the 850k lines, 500k lines are mostly models and machine generated code. Andrew is definitely smart (smarter than an average HN user) and his code is very important but I have never seen so much display of misogyny and sexism against a woman scientist. She never took any credit and clearly said that this was a team effort. Some of the top posts on reddit are trying to mischaracterize the work that Dr.Katie has done and the comments are so vile.
One of the few redeeming features of the HN conventions of civility and seriousness is that we don't have Reddit's problems and we don't need to talk about Reddit.
But what could possibly qualify you to say that "Andrew is definitely smart (smarter than an average HN user) and his code is very important"?
I can not believe you have written the last sentence without any sense of irony. We are just discussing about how stupid the LOC metric is and how most of the LOC Andrew write were machine generated. People were also saying that her commits were more math heavy. Anyway if you actually believe that there is a secret feminist agenda, I don’t think I can say anything that will change your mind.
Don’t think GP supports that statement. That post just explains why the earlier lost was miffed about the commit log.
It’s disappointing to see this celebration of an amazing technical achievement devolve into a contentious meta-analysis inspired by the USA’s broken politics.
You've misunderstood me slightly. You're absolutely right about the loc metric -- seems reasonable to me that she'd design the/some algos and let others do boiler plate and implementation of [other] algo's. That's why I emphasised "appears", as in "someone naively approaches the subject, sees that and thinks 'her contribution was really small'".
I don't think there is a "secret feminist agenda" as such, but news outlets do over-egg the situation to try and create "women heroes of science". The way it's done appears to be sexist in an attempt at, so-called, positive discrimination; rather than being equalist.
You seem to consider my analysis to be abjectly errant, I would appreciate hearing why?
It's fallacious to presume that — because gender, sex, race, etc. shouldn't impact peoples' opportunities — that we should treat is as though it doesn't impact them.
We don’t exist in a purely meritocratic and egalitarian society. Maybe you have never been told that you are not good enough for some work but growing up in deeply paternalistic society, I constantly heard “women are too stupid for hard sciences and they should just stick to kitchens”. If celebrating her achievements in this way changes minds of a few people and inspires a few girls to believe in themselves, I think it is worth the “biased” coverage that she is getting for her work.
People don't surrender their outside political views, their lineage, sexual orientation and other background either. See how stupid the article would sound if titled: "Jane Doe: The divorced homosexual black democratic woman with three children behind the first black hole image". Science matters.
True, but that need not be of high importance when assigning credit. Especially in projects that involve a lot of implementation, the high level algorithms and techniques are developed by someone who might be far removed from actually writing code, and that aspect is outsourced to someone much more competent at programming. A lot of PhD students / professors do not have the talent or have not developed the thought process to write complex code, simply because their focus has been on other things.
Exactly. One project I worked on a while back involved me taking a big pile of very clever and complicated Matlab code and rewriting it in python in a way that made it easy to use from other projects and able to read a couple of additional input file formats. If you just look at the commits on that project it would look like I was responsible for 90+% of the entire thing, while in truth I was basically just doing transcribing and cleaning and had basically nothing to do with any of the difficult parts.
