But a piano-roll (presumably of type she discovered in music boxes) is quite ingenious solution for synchronised key sequences, for the technology of the time. Kinda similar analogical transfer going on for the Jacquard loom as early "program storage".

I don't think OP says that her work was not smart or non-innovative, merely that presenting it as “pioneering frequency hoping” is over the top.

E.g. Hoare did a lot of smart things with Rust bringing real-world impact, still you wouldn't write on its epitaph that he “pioneered programming languages”.

Ding ding ding! Just the lastest example in the growing trend of pinkwashing, where the very real history of male and female achievement alike are substituted for a fantastical view of history and the contemporary world alike where women are lionized and valorized for achievements they weren't the first to perform (frequency hopping), where real female accomplishment is insulted by gross exaggerations of female contributions where the bulk were actually male contributions (remember "this is the girl who wrote the code that imaged a black hole for the first time", Katie Bouman? Go look at the public repo history), and where female mediocrity is loudly and publicly rewarded (e.g. Linux Kernel Guru scholarships from The Linux Foundation go to women who do absolutely nothing besides prefixing "const" to 340 variables - Google "Bhumika Goyal").

I know several extremely competent women in technical roles - like, better than 99% of others in their field regardless of gender. None of them EVER self-refer as "women in tech", or "women who code". Like other actual competent engineers and developers, they don't concern themselves with trivialties, nor do they claim credit for other's accomplishments, nor do they pat themselves on the back for no reason.

Pinkwashing is unfortunately very real, and the only people it's hurting are other women.

Another thing I find uncomfortable about this kind of "pinkwashing" is that it papers over the actual reality of history, which is that (with a very small number of exceptions) women simply didn't get get the opportunity to be "pioneers" in technology, because of the incredibly unfair nature of society at the time. In a fairer society, someone like Lamarr, who was clearly extremely intelligent and curious, might well have gone on to be a pioneer. But that wasn't the reality at the time - and we should acknowledge that.

> women simply didn't get get the opportunity to be "pioneers"

It is bigger than that.

Virtually no one had that opportunity.

Lamarr was lucky enough to be part of a very small élite where "her father was deputy director of Wiener Bankverein, and in the end of his life a director at the united Creditanstalt-Bankverein. Her mother, a pianist and a native of Budapest, had come from an upper-class Hungarian-Jewish family.". She had a lot more opportunities than most of her contemporaries.

Except this was an actual real accomplishment, whose out of patent idea was used later by the Navy: https://physicsworld.com/a/a-tale-of-two-lives/. The application was indeed original, as evidenced by the receipt of a patent for it. You can argue with how the work is described here, but trying to claim it wasn’t a real accomplishment or is somehow comparable to someone adding a bunch of consts is absurd.

It was a real accomplishment, no doubt, but it's not an accomplishment of the order that the article claims.

Agreed. The reply I was responding to went way too far in the other direction, though, which is why I took issue with it.

Much better write-up:

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/random-paths-to-fr...

There is no proof that the Patent Office ever issued a secrecy order regarding her patent during WW2. One small detail, but there are large numbers of 'small' details with her story that add up to Lamarr's frequency hopping patent not being remotely what is being claimed it is now (foundation or inspiration of many future inventions), nor having wide ranging effects.

Independently thinking up her scheme was very impressive in itself. She was a very talented person.

But most coverage of Lamarr is modern propaganda.

I used to acknowledge, but, I've gotten bitter, I've been hearing about Hedy since I joined reddit. which was years ago, and I don't even care about frequency hopping, I can only be forcefully swallowed propaganda for so long until I start actively working against the subject no matter what it is.

The fact that “extremely competent women” recognize your triggers around gender and choose to avoid the topic around you does not mean they are as uninterested in historical and current gender disparities as you would like to think.

“Pinkwashing” is garden variety bigoted myth making.

And it hurts both men and women — as bigotry tends to do.

HN really needs to do better about stomping out casual misogyny. Insipid hot takes stays up here that would get the user kicked or banned in better moderated forums.

> I know several extremely competent women in technical roles - like, better than 99% of others in their field regardless of gender. None of them EVER self-refer as "women in tech", or "women who code".

FWIW, I know some excellent engineers, technologists, professors, etc. who are women, and who also participate in programs to address sexism.

We have a long history of really stupid and unjust sexism, and that's a lot to dig out of. Different people tackle that different ways.

Sometimes I hear of approaches that I don't understand. If I tried to make snap judgments of them, I'd hope I'd usually be right, but I suspect I'd often be wrong.

In general, I think I'm best off focusing on support of things that seem positive.

I agree that to put someone on a pedestal simply by dint of their gender, race or sexuality does a disservice to that group. Would love to see a version of this story in which her "just happening to be a fabulously beautiful film star" is a marginal remark.

But isn't it the same when we lionise sociopathic, charismatic men [0] who "never cared about norms" but end up enshitifying the world with their reckless engineering and cocaine addled moral ambivalence?

As a "man in tech who eschews the norms" I'm a little uncomfortable that my fellow computer scientists might hold up Hank Asher as an example of anything but a criminal whose mindset is the exemplar of everything we should seek not to be as ethical hackers.

Is there a double standard when a woman with talent, charm and beauty is seen to succeed _despite_ those qualities, whereas a man who is a "lovable rogue" is claimed to succeed because of them?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37612750

> But isn't it the same when we lionise sociopathic, charismatic men

Yes.

Steve Jobs myth is completely overblown.

Elon Musk is far from being a great entrepreneur, on the contrary he's a malevolent reactionary who's greater achievement is making people believe that a company that profits from selling carbon credits is a car company or a tech company or a software company or a battery company, depending on who you ask.

Jeff Bezos normalized new more subtle forms of exploitation of US workforce.

etc. etc.

> But isn't it the same when we lionise sociopathic, charismatic men [0] who "never cared about norms"

who is this "we" are you referring to? to me, assholes are assholes. be it a man, woman, it, or anything in between. especially if this person works in adtech and adjacent industry.

> my fellow computer scientists might hold up Hank Asher as an example of anything but a criminal

seems like a problem with your education system. I think there's this thing called ethics, not sure if they teach it there.

> seems like a problem with your education system. I think there's > this thing called ethics, not sure if they teach it there.

Absolutely correct. There's an awful, awful problem with our education system (I am from the UK). It is in ruins, completely unfit for purpose in a modern technological society.

As for ethics, you're right, we absolutely don't teach it. Worse, we actively downplay or avoid it. I speak from experience of witnessing that first hand.

The result: a cult of personality, self-aggrandisement, conquest, kleptomania, and domination passed-off as "business".

I absolutely agree that education has lost its way. Do please read my piece about it in the Times HE next week.

The man who "wrote" the code disagrees with your take on Katie Bouman:

"While I wrote much of the code for one of these pipelines, Katie was a huge contributor to the software; it would have never worked without her contributions and the work of many others who wrote code, debugged, and figured out how to use the code on challenging EHT data."

Btw lines of code != amount of contribution, sad to see this kind of take on a supposedly programmer focused site.

https://www.foxnews.com/science/internet-trolls-discredit-ka... https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/438617-white-m...

> I know several extremely competent women in technical roles - like, better than 99% of others in their field regardless of gender. None of them EVER self-refer as "women in tech", or "women who code".

One such person’s explanation: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14702676>

This isn't the latest example of anything. Hedy Lamarr's interests were the subject of podcasts over a decade ago, and books long before that.

This isn't a good example of pinkwashing. There's no harm in recognizing the efforts of the underdog. We valorize Nikola Tesla despite him living and dying as a failure.

Terry Davis too. Nobody needed TempleOS, but we're proud for him for trying.

You see the same thing with inventions falsely attributed to African Americans, like peanut butter and the traffic light, while actual awesome inventions by African Americans (like the super soaker) often get ignored. Or the video game cartridge is a good example. Jerry Lawson didn't invent it, but his other impressive engineering work gets ignored and instead a lie gets spread.

You can't take HN threads into gender war, or any ideological flamewar, like this. The way you crossed into personal attack is particularly ugly. We ban accounts that post like this, so please don't post like this again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And the spread spectrum as used in modern devices is not frequency hopping.

Could you explain what it is, then, and how it differs from frequency hopping?

Yes, this is one of my favorite articles discussing the early patents dealing with frequency hopping and spread spectrum.

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/random-paths-to-fr...

Looking at the early Wikipedia pages is fairly telling. From the first day that her page is up, Hedy Lamarr had a large section devoted to this invention[1]. But her co-inventor's Wikipedia only made a brief mention of it for the first several years[2]. It seems clear that people were interested in exaggerating her contributions in particular.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hedy_Lamarr&oldid... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Antheil&ol...