Women who had high-level roles in breaking codes | Hacker News Reader

Women who had high-level roles in breaking codes

bbc.com

110 pointssonabinu20 comments

And thanks to papers recently declassified, it is now known that during World War Two Elizebeth helped to smash a network of Nazi spies trying to foment fascist revolutions in South America – their ultimate goal being an attack on the US. Many of these spies were arrested as a direct consequence of her and her team’s work at the US Coastguard. However, for decades J Edgar Hoover and the FBI claimed more or less all the credit for this achievement. Elizebeth, sworn to secrecy and uninterested in publicity, stayed quiet.

Kind of what I figured. It isn't very wise or practical to loudly advertise who does secret work during their own lifetime.

I suspect we know as much as we do about Turing in part because he committed suicide at a relatively young age. When he was actually doing code breaking for the military and couldn't talk about it, other military units referred to his unit as "The Do Nothings" (IIRC).

Its interesting that some of the volunteers in Belgium who worked with the Security Service in ww1 wanted and got recognition - unfortunately when ww2 happened the Germans rounded them up and sent many to the camps :-(

Agree. I recently visited Bletchley Park and one of the astonishing life stories was of Bill Tutte. He was as instrumental as Turing and became a professor in graph theory after WW2. Astonishing for me was that he had to 'restart' a career after the war in science, since nothing he did during the war counted as professional experience. Obviously he did very well, but I still felt for the people coming out Bletchley post-war. You had nothing of professional experience to show, while at least some did groundbreaking stuff. There must be untold stories of people whom did not become well-known.

This happened at los Alamos one famous music producer worked there but was unable to use what he had learnt to complete his PHD so he went and invented the modern recording studio set up and helped found Atlantic records

"Left out" is an odd way to put it, given that anybody who published these details would have violated the Official Secrets Act.

An excellent series using characters in these roles is "The Bletchley Circle" (highly recommended, with great attention to historical detail).

What you and Mz both pointed out makes the article's headline (rather shamelessly) misleading, so I replaced it with language from the subtitle.

Edit: I also turned off flags on the article, assuming that people were mostly flagging the (rather shamelessly) misleading title.

Why not have a comment- or flag list-box so people can tell you why they flagged?

It would be a step toward bureaucracy.

I do think about it from time to time, but since the temptation with features like this is to grossly underestimate their cost, or maybe even not see it at all, I err on the side of paranoid aversion to them, and in this way achieve balance.

That assumption was wrong for me personally. I flagged since code breaking during the world wars was a massive collaborate effort, and this kind of article tries to distill it down to a few people in order to then complain about it and make a political piece about gender. Discussions resulting from that approach is designed to turn volatile in order to raise shares and clicks.

Most of this is from NSA's historical website.[1]

[1] https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic-heritage/historical-fi...

Oh, because everyone else's story was told but theirs? Rly... 2017, year of the pro-female SEO and marketing. BBC is doing what about it?

Flag this all you want, I'm a transgender female coder with a wife who also is a computer scientist. Silence me some more while you post headlines about women you hypocrites. Be sure to preach about freedom of speech too.

This breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you to avoid snark and flamebait. This was both. That's bad. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't post like this again.

Edit: it sounds like you have a rare perspective to share, and you're more than welcome to share it here. But you need to follow the rules like everyone else. Our idea here is to try to hold a container for interesting discussion. It's forever fragile, and snark and flamebait have the effect on interestingness that salt has on a slug.

A nice additional effect of posting civilly and substantively is that then your perspective will more likely be truly received.

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