zlacker

>>lordna+(OP)
“In April, when a story about Katie Bouman, an M.I.T. researcher who helped develop a technology that captured the first photo of a black hole, rose to the front page, users combed through her code on GitHub in an effort to undermine the weight of her contributions.”

This is an odd statement as it implies the purpose was to undermine. Reading code and critiquing isn’t meant to “undermine” but to identify truth and constantly look for better ways.

>>prepen+R
The reason people were trawling through her Github contributions and comparing them to other members of the team she worked with, and then posting about lines of code as if that's a measure of the value of someone's contribution to a project, was absolutely to undermine her work and show that she wasn't deserving of credit (despite the fact she was repeatedly quoted saying it wasn't all her and that it was a team effort).

When that story was on the front page it was one of the few times I've thought about leaving HN. It was embarrassing.

>>onion2+n1
It was an overreaction which, however, was only enabled by absolutely lazy journalism. They basically took Bouman's Facebook post with a photo of her smiling next to the black hole claiming that she produced the picture, blowing her contributions way out of proportion. Some reports corrected this later that day, but by then, the shitstorm and investigation had already started. Perhaps understandably--she did not produce the picture. One could argue that Bouman's reaction was also way too delayed and she did not enough to clarify the situation, but this is perhaps understandable assuming she did not follow social media very closely.

The entire fiasco was mainly caused by the obsession of the media to put women at the forefront.