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=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
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.
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.
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.
Most of that 850,000 lines of code is likely boilerplate setup code.
if I'm wrong here please point it out
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.
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.
Which of them have you dug into before? Any of them?
Was it because a woman participated?
She's done ground-breaking research, TED talks, published papers, given interviews, why didn't you try researching any of that instead? If you spent anytime watching her TED talks and interviews you would've always heard herself say it was an international team of scientists and her enthusiasm behind the historic achievement was always "we" as a collective [1], I've not heard her once take credit for the historic achievement herself, it was always "we" as a team [2].
There's so few % of women in STEM precisely because of toxic behavior like yours, instead of actively trying to downplay her achievements with misinformation, her infectious enthusiasm was an opportunity that should've been celebrated and serve as a role model for others to get into STEM. Instead your comments have been used to tarnish the entire HN community and industry overall. I hope you think of that next time you try to jump in and quickly tarnish the achievements of others, esp. when you have no comprehension of their efforts, achievements and ground breaking research [3].
[1] https://twitter.com/thisgreyspirit/status/111651854496183091...
[2] https://twitter.com/NatureNews/status/1116370136800296965