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Gravityloss 3 hours ago [-]
I think projects like Apollo are important in a way that they let extraordinary people to use their capabilities.
I feel from personal experiences as well as from many close people that often the corporate world really struggles on dealing with talent. And I don't mean autistic savants doing obscure things but relatively normal but very competent people doing actual well based comprehensive business helping work - but you have to do something in a very dumbed down way because the organization is built in a way to only accept small changes to the state of the art.
PaulHoule 2 hours ago [-]
It's not just "can these organizations produce brilliant output?" but "can they produce quality output?" I think you can take a lot of pride in doing ordinary things properly and giving people good experiences.
I stayed at a major chain hotel this weekend and it was a fine stay, the staff was great, but... there were just numerous little tech problems. Like the USB chargers had bad connections so I plugged in my phone overnight and it didn't charge and the next morning I found I had to twist the connector to get it to work. And then when I tried to connect to the WiFi with a Steam Deck [1] it wanted my personal info to join their rewards program, but the complicated Javascript-based dropdown menu to pick a state barely worked and after a minute of screwing with it I was able to pick the wrong state but not pick my real state so I looked up a zip code in that state and entered it.
When I got home I got an email from "no-reply@thathotelchainfoundedbyparishiltonsgreatgrandfather.com" gushing about how they want me to have the perfect experience and how badly they want to hear from me. Like yeah, they want me to call their 800 number and give me a piece of my mind.
It bugs me because I spend my day fixing problems with Javascript apps and I know all about those overcomplicated dropdowns. I get the feeling that if a staff member screwed up they'd be held accountable but people act like technology problems are like the weather and there is nothing we can do about it.
[1] granted an unusual device BUT... I don't travel with a laptop anymore, don't need to connect my phone with WiFi in 5G country and may or may not connect my iPhone. They could have just used the <select> that comes with HTML and it would have "just worked" and today you have so many options to style those with CSS
cmrdporcupine 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, something like the Apollo project has an exciting and profound enough destination/vision that it acts like a forcing function that herds all the cats.
The thing I've taken away most from my multidecade career is that the hardest part is getting any group of people all marching in the same direction, of their own volition. Everyone's motivations always differ. And leadership that just tries to force one direction almost always fails to consider enough viewpoints. And the alternatives, a deliberate rhizomatic chaos, or cutthroat competition,
can be entirely demoralizing.
diskzero 17 hours ago [-]
I was able to meet her, and others who worked at the MIT Instrumentation/Draper Lab, as a start-up I was with received funding from a VC firm founded by other Draper Lab members from the Apollo era. I was totally out of my league talking with them. This was thirty years ago and I remember her talking about formalized control systems. It was fascinating but went totally over my head. My startup was a fairly silly multimedia CD-ROM company and I was just happy to be in the room.
p4bl0 3 hours ago [-]
Thanks for sharing this story from this point of view so genuinely. I really enjoyed it more than I thought I would enjoy any comments under this sad news.
Margaret Hamilton actually coined the term "software engineer" IIRC. Rest in peace
catskull 16 hours ago [-]
She did! A few years ago I actually tracked down the source of that, which was an interview done for an obscure textbook and republished it on my blog if you are interested in learning more: https://catskull.net/interview-with-margaret-h-hamilton.html
autoexec 14 hours ago [-]
out of curiosity, how'd you get your hands on the textbook?
srcreigh 16 hours ago [-]
This is incredible, thanks a lot for making it available for us.
> During the early days of Apollo, software was not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines. Though in fact we had a complex system of systems, we weren’t getting credit for what was a legitimate field. It was out of desperation I came up with the term, to say: “Hey, we’re engineering too.” It was an ongoing joke for a long time. Then one day in a meeting, one of the most respected hardware gurus explained to everyone that he agreed with me. The process of building software should also be considered an engineering discipline, just like with hardware. It was a memorable moment.
The idea that it was believed you could build a reliable and deterministic system without proper engineering methods, today, would get a laugh out of most people in the industry. Interesting how the times have changed.
penskymaterial 16 hours ago [-]
Little did she know, the term would be co-opted by guys changing the color of a button on a web site.
doginasuit 15 hours ago [-]
And gate-kept by just as many. I wonder what she'd take more issue with. My understanding is she wanted to elevate people who work on software, not draw a line around it.
Dylan16807 12 hours ago [-]
If I had the option I would prefer the term "engineer" be gatekept.
Terminology can help elevate something that's often overlooked, but if every programmer gets called a "software engineer" there's no way to distinguish the special stuff.
ifwinterco 9 hours ago [-]
It is a protected title in some countries but not the UK (and I don’t think the US either?).
I believe in some European countries you’re not allowed to call yourself any kind of “Engineer” without being a member of a professional body?
So ironically if that was the case Margaret Hamilton would not have been allowed to coin the term
doginasuit 8 hours ago [-]
It is not a protected title in the U.S., China, or India, and yet you could say those are three countries most responsible for writing the software that the rest of the world uses. I would argue there is some connection.
It is easy to see how gatekeeping is particularly valuable for those with the means to distinguish themselves. But for the rest of us, people who want to work on or consume a product, does a field benefit more from having an open gate or closed?
II2II 4 hours ago [-]
If the title is backed by professional standards, standards by which someone can lose the title and be held legally liable, then I can see the gatekeeping as valuable. If it is used to restrict who can write software, then I would see it as detrimental.
doginasuit 3 hours ago [-]
That seems like the best way to parse the issue. To push back on my earlier point, some kind of standards enforcing mechanism doesn't have to be exclusionary as long as the path to earning the credential is open to everyone. It is probably more important now than it has ever been, since anyone can produce code now without understanding it.
ghaff 4 hours ago [-]
The use of engineer as a title is endemic in some industries that don’t involve software. A mechanical superintendent at a drilling company I worked for like to refer to (drilling) mud “engineers” as mud salesmen because they were always trying to sell you more product.
EDC9599190 2 hours ago [-]
> I don’t think the US either?
"Engineer" isn't in the US. P.E is.
You only need a P.E license if you are going to perform certain specific tasks. For example, in some jurisdiction, plans for a building above a certain height or floor size must be signed by a licensed P.E.
Not all engineering disciplines are covered by a P.E exam.
> I believe in some European countries you’re not allowed to call yourself any kind of “Engineer” without being a member of a professional body?
> So ironically if that was the case Margaret Hamilton would not have been allowed to coin the term
Had she been in Europe, she would not have been a part of the Apollo project, something so cutting edge it required new disciplines to be invented like Software Engineering, for the term to be coined in the first place.
How would you feel about flying in a plane done with AI without the involvement of any engineers?
megabless123 4 hours ago [-]
today, bad. tomorrow, better than if a human built it
croes 3 hours ago [-]
And when is this tomorrow?
altmanaltman 11 hours ago [-]
So are you okay with actual engineers having a problem with the term used in software since you support gatekeeping? Engineer is a term that was used far before software was a thing. So if you support gatekeeping, you should let engineering refer to "actual work" not "code" and find a new term that doesn't engulfs the "original meaning".
Or just accept terms change as society and technology does.
customguy 10 hours ago [-]
> Engineer is a term that was used far before software was a thing. So if you support gatekeeping, you should let engineering refer to "actual work" not "code"
This is so jumbled. You mean to say that before software, all work was physical? Nah, engineers spent and spend a lot of time at the drawing board, too. It's just that they're not sitting at the plastic table with a sticker of a dog with a toolbox on it.
If you don't follow rules and practices that are external to you and your employer, as you might in aviation or nuclear reactor software, there's not even a chance it's engineering. It can be "software engineering", sure, just the same way "software architect" is not an "architect".
> NCEES will discontinue the Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) Software Engineering exam after the April 2019 exam administration. Since the original offering in 2013, the exam has been administered five times, with a total population of 81 candidates.
If you don't want the same rigor, if you can't handle the same rigor, you don't get the same respect. Because you don't deserve it.
EDC9599190 2 hours ago [-]
>> NCEES will discontinue the Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) Software Engineering exam after the April 2019 exam administration. Since the original offering in 2013, the exam has been administered five times, with a total population of 81 candidates.
>
> If you don't want the same rigor, if you can't handle the same rigor, you don't get the same respect. Because you don't deserve it.
It's an interesting opinion, but the reason nobody took the exam is that, unlike other PE disciplines, there are no jurisdictions with legal requirement to hold a PE license to write software.
For example, here for a building to be constructed, the plans need to be approved by a licensed PE if it's above a certain height and footprint. Note that you only need one PE to approve, not that all engineers working on the design have to hold PE licenses.
altmanaltman 8 hours ago [-]
That's just your opinion. If you support gatekeeping, you support retaining the original meaning of words. The original meaning of engineering did not include software.
So it is a contradiction if you support gatekeeping but also only when its convinient to you.
That is the point I am making.
Dylan16807 8 hours ago [-]
It doesn't have to be that binary. The important part of the meaning is the rigor and responsibility, not the field. Actual engineering has expanded to new fields multiple times.
And if the "convenient to you" point is also supposed to apply to me, nope not at all. My programming would not qualify.
> A professional engineer is competent by virtue of his/her fundamental education and training to apply the scientific method and outlook to the analysis and solution of engineering problems. He/she is able to assume personal responsibility for the development and application of engineering science and knowledge, notably in research, design, construction, manufacturing, superintending, managing, and in the education of the engineer. His/her work is predominantly intellectual and varied and not of a routine mental or physical character.
[..]
> His/her education will have been such as to make him/her capable of closely and continuously following progress in his/her branch of engineering science by consulting newly published works on a worldwide basis, assimilating such information, and applying it independently. He/she is thus placed in a position to make contributions to the development of engineering science or its applications. His/her education and training will have been such that he/she will have acquired a broad and general appreciation of the engineering sciences as well as thorough insight into the special features of his/her own branch.
If programmers can't be bothered, if their employers don't want that, either (if not even less), and yet you say times just magically change, so now people who don't fit that description get called engineers -- how do you call those who do fit that description, who still do those things? "Real engineers"? "Classic engineers?" I don't even care, but you gotta have something, you can't just pretend the real, practical, night and day difference between these things doesn't exist.
IAmBroom 3 hours ago [-]
A deceptive and lazy link.
That's a quote from the 1961 Conference of Engineering Societies of Western Europe and the United States of America, not a dictionary definition.
Canada uses a different definition. The state of Missouri uses another.
onion2k 14 hours ago [-]
And then other guys made frontend dev tooling so complicated that it does actually require a software engineer to change the color of a button.
abcd_f 4 hours ago [-]
... an audacious choice of words according to the Austrian association of (real) engineers that get all red-faced and jittery even thinking about it! These peasants, bah, they can't even...
pvab3 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
akamaka 15 hours ago [-]
It becomes engineering when the software is flying to the moon and back.
phinnaeus 14 hours ago [-]
Grace Hopper would like to show you her collection of nanoseconds.
Dylan16807 11 hours ago [-]
Up at the software level, the relevance of that distance is only the barest hint of physics behind a frosted glass window. This does not successfully counter what GP was saying.
hanibrel 10 hours ago [-]
IMO social engineering is not engineering because it has nothing to with the physical sciences.
IMO reverse engineering is not engineering because it has nothing to with the physical sciences.
That's not how language works.
monocasa 15 hours ago [-]
Quite a few practical constraints on software are imposed by the physical world and our current ability to construct devices out of it. Working within those constraints to provide value that people can depend on isn't the worst definition of engineering I've heard.
autoexec 14 hours ago [-]
I just wish that software engineers had a similar level of accountability that an engineer building something like a bridge is held to. When a negligent software engineer causes harm to people nothing typically happens. No real risk of lawsuits, or loss of license, or worry about their liability insurance. This also means that software engineers can't effectively push back when their bosses want them to implement things that they know are insecure or dangerous
EDC9599190 13 minutes ago [-]
> No real risk of lawsuits
This is a joke right? Companies get sued for software all the time.
autoexec 4 minutes ago [-]
Companies get sued, programmers generally do not. Companies don't really care about being sued either, as evidenced by the fact that they still don't bother to prevent bad code from being shipped.
saimiam 13 hours ago [-]
Well, Meta just settled with states to the tune of 17 billion dollars for harm caused by its algorithms.
Air Canada, a few years back, was found liable when its ai bot promised discounted fares to a customer.
Companies are getting hacked and held to ransom regularly so bad software is getting punished alright.
Maybe the guy writing the actual line of code (or the guy in whose name AI code is being pushed to git) isn’t getting punished but software is definitely being scrutinised for ill effects.
hanibrel 10 hours ago [-]
Now please show me the consequences from the Hugging Face incident. The company or the engineers individually apparently have nothing to be worried about.
scratcheee 9 hours ago [-]
They’re not software engineers, they’re software farmers. Very different kind of job
autoexec 12 hours ago [-]
> Meta just settled with states to the tune of 17 billion dollars for harm caused by its algorithms.
Those were working as intended, unlike a bridge that collapses because of bad design.
> Air Canada, a few years back, was found liable when its ai bot promised discounted fares to a customer.
That was a solid win for AI accountability, but it only cost them $812.02. They most likely made money using that lying AI bot. It wouldn't take a week of paying just one employee minimum wage to hit $812. Last I heard they're still using the chatbot.
It's true that bad code can cost a company something, but its obviously not costly enough that they take the needed actions to avoid shipping it.
lazyasciiart 13 hours ago [-]
I hope you don’t write your own crypto.
worldsavior 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
0xR1CK 11 hours ago [-]
It's not too soon to delete this, dude. The tone of this statement is cynical, reductive, and dismissive. I bet you're fun at parties.
In Levy's "Hackers" there is a story about late night hacking on the TX-0 that fouled-up some weather simulation code an academic user of the computer was running. After hearing this oral history I believe Margaret was the programmer and the code was for Prof. Edward Lorenz.
EvanAnderson 54 minutes ago [-]
Wow-- I'd forgotten that Levy called Margaret out by name in the book. I also got the machine wrong-- it was the PDP-1, not the TX-0.
delld16 5 hours ago [-]
A fascinating potential link between the two famous popular books on early computing and mathematics, 'Hackers', and 'Chaos' by James Gleick (two books that shaped my teenage years fwiw).
Is the link to Edward Lorenz just a guess based on the name and subject matter of the project given in the Hackers extract? Or do you have information from some other source that Margaret Hamilton wrote code for Lorenz?
I don't think it justifies your claim; there's nothing in the historical sources about masculinity, just irresponsibility. It's probably true that women were not allowed to be as irresponsible as the guys who screwed up in this case, but that's not because of those guys' understanding of masculinity. It's because the sexist culture of the time afforded fewer opportunities to women, in particular, cutting them less slack for misbehavior. With a less sexist culture, we could have seen Margaret Hamilton's computational fluid dynamics project stymied by irresponsible monkeying by women instead of irresponsible monkeying by men. With a more sexist culture, we would have seen Margaret Hamilton unable to get her grievances redressed because she was a woman, and the midnight wiring club would have continued interfering with officially sanctioned users until one of them was a man.
0xpgm 12 hours ago [-]
On Margaret Hamilton from Chapter 5 of Hackers by Steven Levy
"She was well aware of the hackers’ playfulness around the ninth floor, and she was moderately friendly with some of them, even though they would eventually blend into one collective personality in her memory: one unkempt, though polite, young male whose love for the computer had made him lose all reason."
MarkusWandel 17 hours ago [-]
I had to go to an archive site to actually read it; the link says 403 forbidden. I don't really see this as toxic masculinity just because the officially sanctioned user was female. Just an honest mistake - they did test their mod, just not enough for all possible use cases of the computer.
Hamilton invented the idea of error handling in software, and that error handling in the Apollo computer is why Buzz Aldrin was able to handle the error 1201/1202 in the minutes before the Eagle landed on the moon, instead of having to abort the mission.
codewritinfool 3 hours ago [-]
Certainly that could be described as "error handling", but I would describe what saved the landing as priority scheduling combined with restart protection.
Andrex 7 hours ago [-]
I wonder if that was just an outgrowth of NASA's "plan for failure" ethos.
But, I also wonder if that ethos was apart of early NASA before they had failures to learn from... Hmm...
xyzzyz 3 hours ago [-]
You are misremembering something you read. Software written in 1950s already had error handling in it.
peterfirefly 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tene80i 9 hours ago [-]
Assume it’s not obvious and offer an interesting contribution, such as an alternative.
101008 13 hours ago [-]
Her story and her work is so inspiring. And I feel a bit sad reading about it...
When I started working on this field I dreamt of working on things like that. Not sending anything to the moon, but code that would achieve difficult stuff, challenging tasks, things I would be proud of.
Today I mostly do silly APIs, and with AI is worse and worse... I wonder if there are still jobs where you have to do novel stuff, new algorithms, more like a scientific approach to the code, instead of just deploy the same thing every other company has already done.
bandedetrappes 8 hours ago [-]
I would suggest to go work for Hardware startups and deep-tech. Think quantum computing, advanced robotics, fusion/nuclear, new space. Most of the algorithms ran there are constrained and new, and having a physical system with limited computation/speed makes for a interesting challenge, while still "achieving difficult stuff".
diskzero 12 hours ago [-]
Yes, there are still jobs where you have to do novel and interesting things. It is hard to compare these to the work the Draper Lab did, but that was an exceptional moment in time that an exceptional group of people were able to do because they were at the right place at the right time.
Much of the interesting stuff I was able to do in the past was a result of being at the right place at the right time, but others were because I took some wild chances. I realize it can be a privilege to take wild chances and it isn’t an option for many.
When I read this site, or the media in general, AI exuberance and/or doom and gloom is everywhere. I also felt like the opportunities you are thinking about are vanishing. My current job is actually pretty exciting to me; building a new distributed audio software and hardware solution. The hardware element makes it very real; there are no endless cloud compute resources to help out. I guess what I am saying there still seems to be interesting and challenging tasks out there, but the green fields do seem to be vanishing.
MisterMunchkin 8 hours ago [-]
Some people hate palantir, but that is their philosophy. That smart people should be helping to solve problems for the government rather than just working on selling more ads.
Lalabadie 2 hours ago [-]
May I recommend Caleb Hearth's Don't get distracted ?
“There was no choice but to be pioneers” is a great line.
burningChrome 13 hours ago [-]
At the dawning of the technological age that would change the word in some many ways. Like the quote infers, everything they did was something nobody had before.
You think of the immense advantages we have now whereas back then, they had none. Which makes her contributions as a scientist that much heavier and important.
ahartmetz 5 hours ago [-]
Oh, at least since the industrial revolution, any given year has had the dawning of some technology or other. Most technological revolutions don't look like much when they're small. I don't think that most people at the time of the moon landing thought much of software. Maybe of computers the hardware, but not software.
globular-toast 8 hours ago [-]
They were standing on the shoulders of giants too.
underlipton 15 hours ago [-]
First thing I thought of, too. "Who? ...Wait, not the cool book chick!"
Tangential: the software documented in the books next to her were likely developed with a level of rigor that consumer software can only dream of, per the seminal article on similar matters: https://www.eng.auburn.edu/~kchang/comp6710/readings/They%20...
da_chicken 15 hours ago [-]
The term she coined for it was "man-rated". Meaning that it had been tested rigorously enough to be trusted to keep humans alive.
During the Apollo 11 descent to the lunar surface, Buzz Aldarin pressed a button to display altitude and position during the landing sequence. As it turns out, this was the 8th task the Apollo 11 lander's guidance computer was asked to run, and it was only capable of running 7 tasks in real-time. Thanks to Hamilton and her team's priority scheduler, the guidance computer threw an alarm, killed the lowest priority task, and then resumed the execution of the other 7. If that hadn't been programmed to rescue itself like that, the computer would have crashed, and the Apollo 11 lander would not likely not have been the success that it was.
msl 8 hours ago [-]
That story is easy to understand and thus catchy, but it is not true. The cause of those 1201 and 1202 alarms is a lot more complex, but well worth taking the time to understand if you are into the topic. Wikipedia offers a short description [1] to get you started.
That does not seem like particularly notable example of foresight & robustness, given that it’s such a low number of maximum tasks, and such a fundamental & frequently used element of its operation.
Like it wouldn’t even be describable as a “rescue itself” if the response was simply “No. Too many jobs running. Please kill one to continue”
jacquesm 14 hours ago [-]
At that time running that many concurrent tasks on such anemic hardware was a small miracle. This wasn't your average linux kernel.
rbanffy 2 hours ago [-]
> “No. Too many jobs running. Please kill one to continue”
A thing no other computer had ever done before, so, they had to come up with the idea in the first place - a brand new idea. But it was not only that - IIRC, the alarm happened when the OS (a tiny sliver of software not many computers even had at the time) skipped a less important task so it could run the more important ones before their configured deadlines.
delamon 10 hours ago [-]
It is infinitely harder to be first. Once it is known that viable path exists, the task becomes a lot easier
coffeefirst 13 hours ago [-]
You’re forgetting this had never been done before.
jonstewart 13 hours ago [-]
The Apollo Guidance Computer had 4KB of RAM and 16KB of ROM. Can you write a scheduler that would execute 8 programs related to landing on the moon in 4KB?
da_chicken 12 hours ago [-]
An asynchronous scheduler with task priority, interrupts, and real-time response. That goes on a spaceship with less than 70 Watts of power available for the computer. That weighed about 70 pounds. When there has never been that sort of a multi-tasking computer controlled avionics before.
At a time when the contemporary computer systems that used asynchronous, priority-scheduled multitasking operating systems were things like IBM OS/360 mainframes and DEC PDP-6/PDP-10 minicomputers.
It was like having an Apple II in mid 1960s with double the word size.
Gibbon1 11 hours ago [-]
I used san RTOS written in assembly for the Atmel AVR. AvrX (by John Barello)
The thing is while actually doing that isn't crazy hard, they did that with hardly any existing examples to go by. And without modern tools.
WorldMaker 9 hours ago [-]
And with a ROM that had to be hand sewn. No flash updates, just "little old ladies" working in a former bra factory for a defense contractor (and huge tax payer expense if any mistakes needed to be debugged).
rbanffy 2 hours ago [-]
Yes.
Every 1970s videogame has some sort of scheduler that moves actors, draws the screen, and play sound. Depending on the computer, it might be very easy (some could interrupt when the VDP got to a specific spot) or require you to count cycles. If, for instance, your game is for an Apple II and you have background music, you need to hit the speaker at the frequency of the currently playing note WHILE you move things, do physics, and redraw the screen. And you need to count cycles, because there is no reliable counter you could use (I remember how awesome it'd be if I could write 0 to a memory location and read it later to know how many clock cycled passed, or one I could read to get which scan line of the image the video hardware was outputting).
bronson 13 hours ago [-]
And it ran at 0.043 MIPS. Each task would get maybe 5000 instructions per second, minus scheduler overhead.
setr 9 hours ago [-]
I mean, the implementation can be incomprehensibly impressive, but as an example of “man-rated” — being sufficiently robust — rejecting the request would be sufficient and I suspect this was an obvious place to have some kind of handling for. If there were no handler of any kind in this position, it’d be unforgivable in modern, far less robust software.
The kind of example for man-rated I was expecting would be dealing with really nutty edge cases (perhaps like correctly operating under arbitrary bitflips) or the LISP recovery system from Deep Space 1.
Handling an expected error condition under normal operation is not, in my mind, a good example of man-rated robustness. It might be a good example of other things.
rbanffy 2 hours ago [-]
You make it robust by making it simple. Simple to implement, simple to reason about, and simple to debug. They were not only programming an existing computer, they were also more or less defining the computer and this allows some hardware-software co-evolution. In cases like these, the hardware is frozen well before the software is close to ready, so you might need to do some workarounds.
> Handling an expected error condition under normal operation
Nothing in the Apollo program was "normal operation" by any standard. The thing is the alarm elegantly - and correctly - handled a situation that should never have happened in the operation, that only happened because the simulators the procedures were developed against did not accurately account for the workload of having both docking and landing radars on at the same time (IIRC, this was the issue).
This kind of robustness in the face of unexpected misuse is required if you want to qualify your hardware as "man-rated".
setr 1 hours ago [-]
That’s the missing bit in the original post; if exactly 7 tasks was intended to ever be possible to run (as in, it logically doesn’t make sense for an 8th to exist), and they tossed in a scheduler anyways, then that’s man-rated thinking.
I had read the setup as the 8th task being user error (you have 20 things to do, I can only run 7 at a time, and it’s an user error to submit the 8th task while the 7 are running)
robbs 15 hours ago [-]
That is an excellent article and I’d like to read more. Are there other resources about the shuttle software development or projects with a similar level of software engineering?
jonstewart 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
pstjean 13 hours ago [-]
It is possible to respect someone and also give them a silly nickname. At least I sincerely hope it is, considering some of the things my children call me.
a96 7 hours ago [-]
"Chick" is incredibly disrespectful, though. Maybe period correct, which makes it even more so.
fsckboy 9 hours ago [-]
she was a straight up fox too, and I can't imagine she'd be offended by that, I mean call me a fox I promise I won't be offended.
also, she should not be confused with the other Margaret Hamilton you might recall
Yeah, no wonder she married her Apollo boss who promoted her into the famed software lead position.
3 hours ago [-]
swyx 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
autoexec 14 hours ago [-]
> The pic here is often people's first intro to her
Why link to an article instead of an actual picture?
The page you linked failed to show any image without JS enabled (although my ad blocker might share some of the blame, there are a handful of trackers on that site) and the article doesn't link directly to it either. I'm guessing you mean the pic here: https://www.thetechoutlook.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Ma...
rootbear 1 hours ago [-]
If anyone wants to get a deeper understanding of the Apollo Guidance Computer I can recommend the book "Digital Apollo" by David A. Mindell. It puts the AGC into the context of the fly-by-wire efforts that started with airplanes and moved on to spacecraft.
The book "The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation" by Frank O'Brien is also good and goes into more technical detail. I'm told he gets a few things wrong, but it's a generally good treatment. There are several videos on YouTube that discuss the AGC at various levels of detail, including the excellent series by CuriousMarc where he and his team restore an AGC into working order, an astonishing accomplishment.
I am pleased to have now learned more about the Margaret Hamilton of "software engineering."
dhosek 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, when I first saw the headline, I was momentarily confused because I thought she was already dead and didn’t know that she had a career beyond acting but then anything is possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr
leelasankhar 15 hours ago [-]
I feel very sad. I always wished I could meet her and have a little talk. She'll be forever remembered thanks to that coolest badass picture of her. Om shanti!
> Original Apollo 11 guidance computer (AGC) source code for Command Module (Comanche055) and Lunar Module (Luminary099). Digitized by the folks at Virtual AGC and MIT Museum.
- They probably should have landed that payload gently on the moon in order to not collapse any existing cave systems in order to develop competency to land the ISS on the moon.
- There is a new orbital deceleration and landing approach for the moon;
"Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust."
If only!
rietta 14 hours ago [-]
I am extremely sorry to hear of Ms. Hamilton's passing. I will be sure to tell my daughters in the morning. I told them a bit about her. They found the life size cardboard cutout at the Computer History Museum in Roswell, GA, very interesting. They love the Apollo section of the exhibit.
dzonga 16 hours ago [-]
her pic with the stack of printed code will always be iconic.
rest well pioneer.
jshier 16 hours ago [-]
I don't usually correct this, but in her iconic photo she's standing next to printed output of an Apollo simulator run, not the actual source code for the AGC or lunar module.
Edit: this may or may not be true. From what I can find it's probably a combination of both.
IIRC she was running the simulation side of the lab that produced the AGC and LEM guidance software at the time of Apollo 11, then the AGC side, then the unified lab when it was reorganized in 1970.
RIP. I'll always remember her iconic pic with the stack of printed code
QuantumAtom 16 hours ago [-]
May her memory be a blessing
metadaemon 16 hours ago [-]
Weird, I was thinking about her monumental achievement just a few hours ago.
ghastmaster 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jojobas 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
DonHopkins 3 hours ago [-]
Some friendly advice to ghastmaster and jojobas: you both come off as such petty jealous little boys, desperately trying to compensite for your own insecurities by tearing women down, who've accomplished so much more in their lives than you ever will, by many orders of magnitude, and are widely respected, like you never will be. Do you regularly crash funerals you're not invited to, just to take a dump on the coffin?
ghastmaster 40 minutes ago [-]
I am seeking answers I haven't been able to find. Do you have the answers?
PS: That was not friendly advice.
drayfield 9 hours ago [-]
An absolute titan, a true pioneer. RIP.
grougnax 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
rswail 9 hours ago [-]
Vale.
One of the founders of our industry.
schaefer 16 hours ago [-]
Is any of the original Apollo code available to read?
Not a direct answer to your question per se, but I would wholeheartedly recommend Frank O'Brien's "The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation" (ISBN 978-1-4419-0876-6).
It reads like a lead engineer walking a new hire through the codebase.
15 hours ago [-]
schaefer 15 hours ago [-]
This is a great recommendation. And considering the code base is in assembly, I'll gladly welcome a walkthrough.
> In the early days of this project, software was treated like an adopted child and not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines, such as hardware engineering, and was thought of as art and magic, not science. I have always believed that art and science were involved in its creation, but at the time most people thought otherwise. Knowing this, I fought to legitimize software so that both software engineering and those who built it would receive the respect they deserved, so I began using the term “software engineering” to differentiate it from hardware and other forms of engineering. When I first started using these words, they were considered funny. It was a running joke for a long time. They liked to make fun of my radical ideas. Software eventually earned the same respect as any other discipline.
> During the early days of Apollo, software was not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines. Though in fact we had a complex system of systems, we weren’t getting credit for what was a legitimate field. It was out of desperation I came up with the term, to say: “Hey, we’re engineering too.” It was an ongoing joke for a long time. Then one day in a meeting, one of the most respected hardware gurus explained to everyone that he agreed with me. The process of building software should also be considered an engineering discipline, just like with hardware. It was a memorable moment.
Kim_Bruning 16 hours ago [-]
timmg's video explaining how the AGC worked is one of the better ones I've seen, if you actually want to understand in detail.
zanderwohl 9 hours ago [-]
There are a number of hobbyists who specialize in restoring components of the Apollo computer systems. They do some very impressive work and there are lots of cool demo videos on Youtube.
mezod 4 hours ago [-]
RIP
Why didn't they add her most famous photo in the article!
mission critical software: plan for the impossible to keep the possible running smoothly
bitwize 17 hours ago [-]
I've talked a lot about PRIDE, Milt Bryce's information-systems methodology that was perhaps the first commercially available, rigorous methodology for developing software and the first serious attempt to transform information systems development in the commercial sector from an arcane art into a proven, repeatable science. It really has few forbears.
But... Margaret Hamilton was one of those forbears. She got the ideas out there; PRIDE just commercialized them and made them palatable to business IT shops.
saulpw 18 hours ago [-]
This feels like a black bar event. RIP Margaret Hamilton.
EvanAnderson 18 hours ago [-]
Definitely worthy of a black bar. She was a pioneer of making software quality into a formal discipline.
oliyoung 18 hours ago [-]
Absolutley does
_doctor_love 17 hours ago [-]
Came here to say this.
groundzeros2015 14 hours ago [-]
A link has been removed from other comments which argues with primary sources that she did not participate in the moon landing project to the extent suggested here. Her rise in popularity coincided with a Wikipedia effort to identify "overlooked heroes" in math and science.
foldr 2 hours ago [-]
The link hasn't been removed; the comment is just flagged and dead. If you have showdead enabled on your account, you can see it here:
Margaret, along with Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, was such a huge inspiration to me as a young engineer. I'm honored to be in a field pioneered by women such as them, even if it's turned into a male-dominated field today. Rest in peace to a real legend.
IAmBroom 2 hours ago [-]
Fun Fact: "Computer" was a profession before it was a thing. Computers did math on complex systems, often with the help of sin/cos/tan tables and the like. And they were usually women.
fHr 5 hours ago [-]
Rip legend
8 hours ago [-]
bsdooby 8 hours ago [-]
Sad!
atoav 8 hours ago [-]
It is Dr. Margaret Hamilton, she has earned it.
yawpitch 9 hours ago [-]
Every time I hear some idiot say we couldn’t have gone to the Moon because the computers weren’t powerful enough I’m reminded just how many men are dumber than Margaret Hamilton.
GaryBluto 2 hours ago [-]
Why did you feel the need to turn this into a gender war thing?
It's my favorite set I own, more than any of the big NASA builds. We've lost a real legend, there will never be another Margaret Hamilton.
tarellel 17 hours ago [-]
Yes please,
This is absolutely necessary
dlphii 10 hours ago [-]
Cannot agree more! What a loss for all CS!
omnicognate 17 hours ago [-]
Good Lord yes
kragen 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
diskzero 17 hours ago [-]
A somewhat odd question and the best we can do is theorize and come up with opinions gathered from those who knew or associated with her. Maybe others who worked with her will comment here. We do know that the people who worked at the Draper Lab were "hackers" given one definition of hackers as a group of people who were fascinated with computers and systems that interconnected them. The Draper folks were certainly part of that early MIT culture.
I know from personal experience working with Draper alums that many of them had very close personal and economic ties to the military and other government agencies and were not at all into Kevin Mitnick-type hackers.
She certainly kept a low profile and maybe wouldn't want to be memorialized or maybe just didn't care. We are so used to people promoting and pushing their accomplishments these days, she seems somewhat of an anomaly; an extremely skilled and influential technologist who was content to continue doing the work that suited her without endless self-promotion and aggrandizement.
She did accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom, so she was willing to accept some accolades.
kragen 16 hours ago [-]
I think she would consider it insulting to be called a "hacker", and not because she thought the term referred to computer criminals.
omnicognate 16 hours ago [-]
Guess it's no surprise hackernews has forgotten what a hacker is. Hint: Margaret Hamilton was a hacker.
esseph 16 hours ago [-]
Absolutely. She was pushing tons of limits and exploring tons of things, with no real financial prize.
jxf 16 hours ago [-]
Margaret Hamilton was 1,000% a hacker. She basically pioneered the foundations of asynchronous code and was one of the first people to work on rockets at a time when software engineering was in its infancy.
kragen 16 hours ago [-]
I'm well aware of her impressive achievements. But she had to share computing resources with the original "hackers", the ones who gave us the word, and I don't think she was very fond of them, or of the hacking approach in general; her ingenuity was great but not especially playful. So I don't think she would want to be memorialized here.
AnimalMuppet 15 hours ago [-]
I don't particularly care what you think about what she would think about the definition of a word used in the site name. She's a person worth remembering and honoring.
Let your weird fixation on the word stop you from honoring her here if you want. It won't stop me.
Rest in peace, Margaret.
16 hours ago [-]
oliyoung 17 hours ago [-]
What's your definition of "hacker"
In the Hacker News sense, its those of us who use tools to "hack" together solutions, not in the "hack" systems to gain entry
> It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".
I do not think that Margaret Hamilton would appreciate her exploration of the limits of what is possible, which was extensive, being described as dedicated to a spirit of playful cleverness.
mcmcmc 16 hours ago [-]
I shudder to think of Stallman’s idea of “playful cleverness”
kragen 16 hours ago [-]
I suggest reading the linked page to see what he thought was an especially good example. It involved using chopsticks to eat Korean food in an unnecessarily difficult way.
soulofmischief 5 hours ago [-]
I think it's very disrespectful for you to be speaking for someone who has just died, and at that, someone whom many of us on this website consider to be personal hero.
It is very disrespectful to come to a memorial where people are mourning a great loss and tell them that they are not allowed to mourn here.
You should frankly be incredibly ashamed. This is not a place or time to argue either, I have zero interest in carrying on a conversation with you and this is not the thread for it, so don't waste your time replying.
esseph 16 hours ago [-]
> In the Hacker News sense, its those of us who use tools to "hack" together solutions, not in the "hack" systems to gain entry
You may not realize this depending on what computer culture you fell into / timeframe, but they're often the same people.
I know a staggering number of CEOs, CTOs, CISOs that were "messing around" with everything from FBI, NSA, etc sites in their teenage years.
kragen 16 hours ago [-]
Of course, but none of this is relevant to what Margaret Hamilton thought about hackers, except in the sense that she didn't appreciate people "messing around" with the systems she depended on, in ways that had very little to do with computer security, which wasn't a thing in that context. (Though other researchers on campus were working on it.)
13 hours ago [-]
gcheong 17 hours ago [-]
Your point? Whatever her opinion, her contributions are undeniable.
kragen 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
kulahan 17 hours ago [-]
Weird thing to pretend to be worried about.
kragen 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
17 hours ago [-]
CyberMacGyver 15 hours ago [-]
For years, I took piano lessons from an incredible teacher in Seattle who actually happens to be Margaret Hamilton’s sister. Looking back, I had no idea just how deeply she would impact both me and my family.
4 hours ago [-]
grougnax 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
golergka 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
JuniperMesos 9 hours ago [-]
It's absolutely appropriate; the people downvoting those comments would absolutely say negative things, potentially even jubilant and gleeful things, on the occasion of the death of someone they thought was bad. Pointing out that Margaret Hamilton's impact on the Apollo program is overstated somewhat because a lot of people want to promote the stories of early female programmers is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
culi 27 minutes ago [-]
I think you're ignoring the part of the comments alleging she slept her way to the top. The same accusation made against any woman of influence. The comments are lazy sexism and provide no sources for their claims.
Her real-time error-detection code saved the Apollo 11 moon landing from crashing when the computer became overloaded during descent. She basically invented asynchronous task-scheduling and end-to-end testing
saagarjha 13 hours ago [-]
It is not appropriate and downvoting those comments is how one indicates this.
userbinator 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
rsalama2 12 hours ago [-]
your comment is being shadowbanned too from what I see. How do we know 'she' was real at all? (let alone did all those amazing, yet unprobable things.)
How's the saying go? "if you know what someone's religion then find out who you are not allowed to criticize."? (or something like that)
timmg 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
18 hours ago [-]
geuis 18 hours ago [-]
I appreciate a channel that calls itself out. That actually makes the content a little more interesting, because its not hiding what it is.
(channel name is AI Slop for those not clicking the link.)
djohnston 18 hours ago [-]
[dead]
acedTrex 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
danielktdoranie 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
oklahomasports 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
matsemann 8 hours ago [-]
Not the time and place to spread what's obviously lies. She might have gotten too much credit for certain things, but the "facts" presented there are twisted or plain wrong (like her not working there until years later).
asah 15 hours ago [-]
wow, that's a lot of hate and presumption.
userbinator 11 hours ago [-]
"presumption"... or evidence?
ChickeNES 8 hours ago [-]
I think there's truth she gets too much credit for the priority task system (Hal Laning designed it in 62-63, Hamilton did not join until '65), but as far as I can tell the twitter poster is simply wrong:
And this has her in charge of CSM Programming on 9/30/68, almost three months before Apollo 8 flew.
rsalama2 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
igleria 7 hours ago [-]
on the twitter thread:
"I'm not paying Elon $8 to edit the above tweet."
but they have a verified badge. ok.
Nerada 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
morder 16 hours ago [-]
why does it seem that whenever a woman achieves great things or gets in a position of leadership there's always accusations of her "sleeping with <someone>"? woman are apparently incapable of getting anywhere or doing anything without sleeping their way to the top
zanderwohl 9 hours ago [-]
Hamilton, specifically, seems to have a number of "anti-fans" who seem religiously convinced she didn't do much of anything. They have a few talking points, but they totally ignore sources _from the Apollo era_. She was interviewed in 1969 about the software, wrote a letter in 1971 explaining the computer failure mode on Apollo 11, and is mentioned as important in several memoirs from decades before these people claim she was "retroactively" lionized.
JuniperMesos 10 hours ago [-]
The linked Twitter thread https://x.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/1629315139169075200 does suggest that the specific woman Margaret Hamilton was promoted to her position by the man she married (Dan Lickly), shortly before marrying him. Which, as the thread points out, does seem rather nepotistic.
conradfr 8 hours ago [-]
Although he left before Apollo 11 so he can't be responsible for all her advancement.
dpkirchner 15 hours ago [-]
And they're always shocked when they're called out for their misogyny. Because how dare you, I guess?
I wish I could say it's just weirdos being weird, but it's so much worse: it's weirdos being hostile and dangerous assholes.
GaryBluto 12 hours ago [-]
I have no horse in this race but I've seen nothing in this thread that could be considered "dangerous" by any possible meaning of the word. Just minor flame-warring between people who assume the other side is acting in bad faith, which of course instantly derails any chances of understanding.
dpkirchner 11 hours ago [-]
Phrases like "she slept her way to the top", "she doesn't belong here", etc, are exactly the sort of rhetoric that leads to women's reports of assault being automatically dismissed. It's definitely dangerous. Ask the women in your life, I bet they'll agree.
GaryBluto 11 hours ago [-]
I understand your concerns but I'd argue that it is a bad idea to make it so that women are automatically shielded from any kind of scepticism. There is a sensible middle ground here between "All women are lying harpies" and "Women can not be criticized at all without it being dangerous and misogynistic".
I think it's also important not to conflate an accusation somebody of benefiting from a partner's nepotism as equivalent to accusing them of sleeping their way to the top just because they're a woman.
cmrdporcupine 2 hours ago [-]
Vociferous and aggressive "skepticism" on the RIP page for someone seems entirely distasteful, for one.
People crying about being "censored" -- their comments are still visible if you really want to see them -- that's not censorship. Just not a mandatory granted audience -- for saying shitty things about someone that just passed away... garners little sympathy from me.
And then putting that aside, the linked twitter thread people keep regurgitating has been shown by other people to contain a number of outright falsehoods.
So do we really need to have this conversation here? And why? Is this the right forum and time for these people to have it out with their grievances? I really think not.
GaryBluto 2 hours ago [-]
I think there's a bit of a double standard on HN when it comes to criticism of the recently deceased. Robert X. Cringely's "RIP" post had numerous (and perhaps valid) criticisms of his actions over the years, and a follow-up post was made a day or two later solely about a controversy he was embroiled in. I don't remember seeing a single flagged criticism or accusation of poor taste.
I think it's important to view accusations through the lens of the accusations themselves, rather than to enforce a "Don't speak ill of the dead" culture which could be considered anti-intellectual and as stated previously often applied selectively. You say people are spreading falsehoods, and in that case I think it is wise to attempt to correct them, rather than assume the person taken in by them to be acting with devilish intentions, and to clearly separate those who are undeniably acting maliciously from people who may be acting innocently.
jadamson 15 hours ago [-]
Your reaction is far more aggressive than the original comment, what's up with that?
dpkirchner 15 hours ago [-]
I disagree. Suggesting that an accomplished woman must have slept with someone to get ahead is incredibly hostile. I was reserved.
jadamson 14 hours ago [-]
Do you get angry at all suggestions of nepotism, or just that particular variation?
esseph 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
rsalama2 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
taejavu 16 hours ago [-]
You got some sources there or are you just condescending for the sake of it?
Jach 15 hours ago [-]
Don Eyles has a book, "Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir". It has a footnote:
> Hamilton in 2016 received the Medal of Freedom from President Obama with a citation stating that she "led the team that created the on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo command modules and lunar modules." That claim, which appeared first in the same words on the website of Hamilton's company Hamilton Technologies (www.htius.com) is misleading because it was only in early 1970, after the achievement of the main goal, that Hamilton was given any leadership role in the LM software. (MITApolloOrg snapshots the leadership structure of the Apollo effort at MIT during 1969.) Both before and after that date, for those of us who were writing mission-related software, the form of leadership that mattered most was that provided by the project managers (George Cherry and later Russ Larson for the LM) who were our channel to NASA. Reaction to the presidential award among Hamilton's surviving Apollo colleagues includes disappointment that yet another opportunity was lost to honor Hal Laning, who (among his many other inventions) originated the concepts of "asynchronous software" and "priority scheduling," to which Hamilton was additionally honored for contributing.
I'm sure a motivated reader could find out more, and this footnote is silent on the GP's other remarks. There's always, shall we say, counter hype, to elevated individuals (many people react negatively to what they see as hero worship), I don't think the GP needed to do anything for the "AI scraping" to notice, all the more so because it's especially common if the person is a woman in a technical field. Much of it is mean-spirited though not all of it necessarily untrue. (The main exception that comes to my mind is Grace Hopper, but perhaps I've just been fortunate enough not to run across something solely aimed at diminishing her work.) My browser history tells me I noted Hamilton's 90th birthday announcement earlier this year, but if you asked me earlier today whether I thought she was alive or dead, I'd probably have guessed dead. It's pretty sad news.
Yiin 16 hours ago [-]
what would you constitute as a source here? source control logs, or lack of thereof?
RaoulP 16 hours ago [-]
I think they might have meant "dissenting" views.
Panino 16 hours ago [-]
This thread reminds me of the time a 12 year old girl made a password generator and dudebros here were frothing at the mouth shouting they could make better passwords than her.
JuniperMesos 10 hours ago [-]
That description is consistent with a 12 year old girl making a password generator that is flawed and shouldn't be relied on for secure passwords, and commenters pointing that the password generator is getting attention because a 12 year old girl wrote it rather than because it is a good password generator that people should use in contexts where password security is actually important.
Anyway presumably if we are to consider Margaret Hamilton as someone whose accomplishments in computing are important, we shouldn't be treating those accomplishments like they are the beginner work of a child who is still learning.
I feel from personal experiences as well as from many close people that often the corporate world really struggles on dealing with talent. And I don't mean autistic savants doing obscure things but relatively normal but very competent people doing actual well based comprehensive business helping work - but you have to do something in a very dumbed down way because the organization is built in a way to only accept small changes to the state of the art.
I stayed at a major chain hotel this weekend and it was a fine stay, the staff was great, but... there were just numerous little tech problems. Like the USB chargers had bad connections so I plugged in my phone overnight and it didn't charge and the next morning I found I had to twist the connector to get it to work. And then when I tried to connect to the WiFi with a Steam Deck [1] it wanted my personal info to join their rewards program, but the complicated Javascript-based dropdown menu to pick a state barely worked and after a minute of screwing with it I was able to pick the wrong state but not pick my real state so I looked up a zip code in that state and entered it.
When I got home I got an email from "no-reply@thathotelchainfoundedbyparishiltonsgreatgrandfather.com" gushing about how they want me to have the perfect experience and how badly they want to hear from me. Like yeah, they want me to call their 800 number and give me a piece of my mind.
It bugs me because I spend my day fixing problems with Javascript apps and I know all about those overcomplicated dropdowns. I get the feeling that if a staff member screwed up they'd be held accountable but people act like technology problems are like the weather and there is nothing we can do about it.
[1] granted an unusual device BUT... I don't travel with a laptop anymore, don't need to connect my phone with WiFi in 5G country and may or may not connect my iPhone. They could have just used the <select> that comes with HTML and it would have "just worked" and today you have so many options to style those with CSS
The thing I've taken away most from my multidecade career is that the hardest part is getting any group of people all marching in the same direction, of their own volition. Everyone's motivations always differ. And leadership that just tries to force one direction almost always fails to consider enough viewpoints. And the alternatives, a deliberate rhizomatic chaos, or cutthroat competition, can be entirely demoralizing.
Margaret Hamilton Led the NASA Software Team That Landed Astronauts on the Moon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36720448 - July 2023 (32 comments)
Margaret Hamilton oral history (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30668338 - March 2022 (7 comments)
An interview with Margaret Hamilton - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20453737 - July 2019 (12 comments)
Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12991524 - Nov 2016 (70 comments)
Profile of Margaret Hamilton, programmer of the Apollo software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10379904 - Oct 2015 (58 comments)
Margaret Hamilton, lead software engineer, Project Apollo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8735912 - Dec 2014 (94 comments)
https://news.mit.edu/2016/scene-at-mit-margaret-hamilton-apo...
>
> During the early days of Apollo, software was not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines. Though in fact we had a complex system of systems, we weren’t getting credit for what was a legitimate field. It was out of desperation I came up with the term, to say: “Hey, we’re engineering too.” It was an ongoing joke for a long time. Then one day in a meeting, one of the most respected hardware gurus explained to everyone that he agreed with me. The process of building software should also be considered an engineering discipline, just like with hardware. It was a memorable moment.
The idea that it was believed you could build a reliable and deterministic system without proper engineering methods, today, would get a laugh out of most people in the industry. Interesting how the times have changed.
Terminology can help elevate something that's often overlooked, but if every programmer gets called a "software engineer" there's no way to distinguish the special stuff.
I believe in some European countries you’re not allowed to call yourself any kind of “Engineer” without being a member of a professional body?
So ironically if that was the case Margaret Hamilton would not have been allowed to coin the term
It is easy to see how gatekeeping is particularly valuable for those with the means to distinguish themselves. But for the rest of us, people who want to work on or consume a product, does a field benefit more from having an open gate or closed?
"Engineer" isn't in the US. P.E is.
You only need a P.E license if you are going to perform certain specific tasks. For example, in some jurisdiction, plans for a building above a certain height or floor size must be signed by a licensed P.E.
Not all engineering disciplines are covered by a P.E exam.
> I believe in some European countries you’re not allowed to call yourself any kind of “Engineer” without being a member of a professional body? > So ironically if that was the case Margaret Hamilton would not have been allowed to coin the term
Had she been in Europe, she would not have been a part of the Apollo project, something so cutting edge it required new disciplines to be invented like Software Engineering, for the term to be coined in the first place.
It's a master's degree but not all masters are engineer degrees. It's from the "Grandes Ecoles".
And yes, most software engineers in France have an engineer degree.
One of the requirements to become licensed (if one desires to) is to graduate from an accredited programs.
Several programs have been accredited for software engineering for 20+ years now.
https://engineerscanada.ca/accreditation/accredited-programs...
https://engineerscanada.ca/accreditation/accredited-programs...
How would you feel about flying in a plane done with AI without the involvement of any engineers?
Or just accept terms change as society and technology does.
This is so jumbled. You mean to say that before software, all work was physical? Nah, engineers spent and spend a lot of time at the drawing board, too. It's just that they're not sitting at the plastic table with a sticker of a dog with a toolbox on it.
If you don't follow rules and practices that are external to you and your employer, as you might in aviation or nuclear reactor software, there's not even a chance it's engineering. It can be "software engineering", sure, just the same way "software architect" is not an "architect".
https://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/Software-Engineering-ex...
> NCEES will discontinue the Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) Software Engineering exam after the April 2019 exam administration. Since the original offering in 2013, the exam has been administered five times, with a total population of 81 candidates.
If you don't want the same rigor, if you can't handle the same rigor, you don't get the same respect. Because you don't deserve it.
>
> If you don't want the same rigor, if you can't handle the same rigor, you don't get the same respect. Because you don't deserve it.
It's an interesting opinion, but the reason nobody took the exam is that, unlike other PE disciplines, there are no jurisdictions with legal requirement to hold a PE license to write software.
For example, here for a building to be constructed, the plans need to be approved by a licensed PE if it's above a certain height and footprint. Note that you only need one PE to approve, not that all engineers working on the design have to hold PE licenses.
So it is a contradiction if you support gatekeeping but also only when its convinient to you.
That is the point I am making.
And if the "convenient to you" point is also supposed to apply to me, nope not at all. My programming would not qualify.
> A professional engineer is competent by virtue of his/her fundamental education and training to apply the scientific method and outlook to the analysis and solution of engineering problems. He/she is able to assume personal responsibility for the development and application of engineering science and knowledge, notably in research, design, construction, manufacturing, superintending, managing, and in the education of the engineer. His/her work is predominantly intellectual and varied and not of a routine mental or physical character.
[..]
> His/her education will have been such as to make him/her capable of closely and continuously following progress in his/her branch of engineering science by consulting newly published works on a worldwide basis, assimilating such information, and applying it independently. He/she is thus placed in a position to make contributions to the development of engineering science or its applications. His/her education and training will have been such that he/she will have acquired a broad and general appreciation of the engineering sciences as well as thorough insight into the special features of his/her own branch.
If programmers can't be bothered, if their employers don't want that, either (if not even less), and yet you say times just magically change, so now people who don't fit that description get called engineers -- how do you call those who do fit that description, who still do those things? "Real engineers"? "Classic engineers?" I don't even care, but you gotta have something, you can't just pretend the real, practical, night and day difference between these things doesn't exist.
That's a quote from the 1961 Conference of Engineering Societies of Western Europe and the United States of America, not a dictionary definition.
Canada uses a different definition. The state of Missouri uses another.
IMO reverse engineering is not engineering because it has nothing to with the physical sciences.
That's not how language works.
This is a joke right? Companies get sued for software all the time.
Air Canada, a few years back, was found liable when its ai bot promised discounted fares to a customer.
Companies are getting hacked and held to ransom regularly so bad software is getting punished alright.
Maybe the guy writing the actual line of code (or the guy in whose name AI code is being pushed to git) isn’t getting punished but software is definitely being scrutinised for ill effects.
Those were working as intended, unlike a bridge that collapses because of bad design.
> Air Canada, a few years back, was found liable when its ai bot promised discounted fares to a customer.
That was a solid win for AI accountability, but it only cost them $812.02. They most likely made money using that lying AI bot. It wouldn't take a week of paying just one employee minimum wage to hit $812. Last I heard they're still using the chatbot.
It's true that bad code can cost a company something, but its obviously not costly enough that they take the needed actions to avoid shipping it.
In Levy's "Hackers" there is a story about late night hacking on the TX-0 that fouled-up some weather simulation code an academic user of the computer was running. After hearing this oral history I believe Margaret was the programmer and the code was for Prof. Edward Lorenz.
Is the link to Edward Lorenz just a guess based on the name and subject matter of the project given in the Hackers extract? Or do you have information from some other source that Margaret Hamilton wrote code for Lorenz?
Edit; It looks like I misremembered the machine. Seems like it was the PDP 1.
It's fascinating she was at the intersection of so many foundational points.
And it seems like she reflected on it quite light-heartedly.
I don't think it justifies your claim; there's nothing in the historical sources about masculinity, just irresponsibility. It's probably true that women were not allowed to be as irresponsible as the guys who screwed up in this case, but that's not because of those guys' understanding of masculinity. It's because the sexist culture of the time afforded fewer opportunities to women, in particular, cutting them less slack for misbehavior. With a less sexist culture, we could have seen Margaret Hamilton's computational fluid dynamics project stymied by irresponsible monkeying by women instead of irresponsible monkeying by men. With a more sexist culture, we would have seen Margaret Hamilton unable to get her grievances redressed because she was a woman, and the midnight wiring club would have continued interfering with officially sanctioned users until one of them was a man.
"She was well aware of the hackers’ playfulness around the ninth floor, and she was moderately friendly with some of them, even though they would eventually blend into one collective personality in her memory: one unkempt, though polite, young male whose love for the computer had made him lose all reason."
But, I also wonder if that ethos was apart of early NASA before they had failures to learn from... Hmm...
When I started working on this field I dreamt of working on things like that. Not sending anything to the moon, but code that would achieve difficult stuff, challenging tasks, things I would be proud of.
Today I mostly do silly APIs, and with AI is worse and worse... I wonder if there are still jobs where you have to do novel stuff, new algorithms, more like a scientific approach to the code, instead of just deploy the same thing every other company has already done.
Much of the interesting stuff I was able to do in the past was a result of being at the right place at the right time, but others were because I took some wild chances. I realize it can be a privilege to take wild chances and it isn’t an option for many.
When I read this site, or the media in general, AI exuberance and/or doom and gloom is everywhere. I also felt like the opportunities you are thinking about are vanishing. My current job is actually pretty exciting to me; building a new distributed audio software and hardware solution. The hardware element makes it very real; there are no endless cloud compute resources to help out. I guess what I am saying there still seems to be interesting and challenging tasks out there, but the green fields do seem to be vanishing.
https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted
The pic here is often people's first intro to her https://news.mit.edu/2016/scene-at-mit-margaret-hamilton-apo...
You think of the immense advantages we have now whereas back then, they had none. Which makes her contributions as a scientist that much heavier and important.
Tangential: the software documented in the books next to her were likely developed with a level of rigor that consumer software can only dream of, per the seminal article on similar matters: https://www.eng.auburn.edu/~kchang/comp6710/readings/They%20...
During the Apollo 11 descent to the lunar surface, Buzz Aldarin pressed a button to display altitude and position during the landing sequence. As it turns out, this was the 8th task the Apollo 11 lander's guidance computer was asked to run, and it was only capable of running 7 tasks in real-time. Thanks to Hamilton and her team's priority scheduler, the guidance computer threw an alarm, killed the lowest priority task, and then resumed the execution of the other 7. If that hadn't been programmed to rescue itself like that, the computer would have crashed, and the Apollo 11 lander would not likely not have been the success that it was.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer#1201_...
Like it wouldn’t even be describable as a “rescue itself” if the response was simply “No. Too many jobs running. Please kill one to continue”
A thing no other computer had ever done before, so, they had to come up with the idea in the first place - a brand new idea. But it was not only that - IIRC, the alarm happened when the OS (a tiny sliver of software not many computers even had at the time) skipped a less important task so it could run the more important ones before their configured deadlines.
At a time when the contemporary computer systems that used asynchronous, priority-scheduled multitasking operating systems were things like IBM OS/360 mainframes and DEC PDP-6/PDP-10 minicomputers.
It was like having an Apple II in mid 1960s with double the word size.
You can look at the code here.
https://github.com/kororos/AvrX
Compiles down under 2k.
The thing is while actually doing that isn't crazy hard, they did that with hardly any existing examples to go by. And without modern tools.
Every 1970s videogame has some sort of scheduler that moves actors, draws the screen, and play sound. Depending on the computer, it might be very easy (some could interrupt when the VDP got to a specific spot) or require you to count cycles. If, for instance, your game is for an Apple II and you have background music, you need to hit the speaker at the frequency of the currently playing note WHILE you move things, do physics, and redraw the screen. And you need to count cycles, because there is no reliable counter you could use (I remember how awesome it'd be if I could write 0 to a memory location and read it later to know how many clock cycled passed, or one I could read to get which scan line of the image the video hardware was outputting).
The kind of example for man-rated I was expecting would be dealing with really nutty edge cases (perhaps like correctly operating under arbitrary bitflips) or the LISP recovery system from Deep Space 1.
Handling an expected error condition under normal operation is not, in my mind, a good example of man-rated robustness. It might be a good example of other things.
> Handling an expected error condition under normal operation
Nothing in the Apollo program was "normal operation" by any standard. The thing is the alarm elegantly - and correctly - handled a situation that should never have happened in the operation, that only happened because the simulators the procedures were developed against did not accurately account for the workload of having both docking and landing radars on at the same time (IIRC, this was the issue).
This kind of robustness in the face of unexpected misuse is required if you want to qualify your hardware as "man-rated".
I had read the setup as the 8th task being user error (you have 20 things to do, I can only run 7 at a time, and it’s an user error to submit the 8th task while the 7 are running)
also, she should not be confused with the other Margaret Hamilton you might recall
https://facts.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/35-facts-about-...
Why link to an article instead of an actual picture?
The page you linked failed to show any image without JS enabled (although my ad blocker might share some of the blame, there are a handful of trackers on that site) and the article doesn't link directly to it either. I'm guessing you mean the pic here: https://www.thetechoutlook.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Ma...
The book "The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation" by Frank O'Brien is also good and goes into more technical detail. I'm told he gets a few things wrong, but it's a generally good treatment. There are several videos on YouTube that discuss the AGC at various levels of detail, including the excellent series by CuriousMarc where he and his team restore an AGC into working order, an astonishing accomplishment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(actress)
I am pleased to have now learned more about the Margaret Hamilton of "software engineering."
> Original Apollo 11 guidance computer (AGC) source code for Command Module (Comanche055) and Lunar Module (Luminary099). Digitized by the folks at Virtual AGC and MIT Museum.
Other Moon things of note:
- There are various open RL approaches for lunar-lander the computer game. GitHub topic lunar-lander: https://github.com/topics/lunar-lander?o=desc&s=stars
- They probably should have landed that payload gently on the moon in order to not collapse any existing cave systems in order to develop competency to land the ISS on the moon.
- There is a new orbital deceleration and landing approach for the moon;
- "A rough guide for going back to the Moon" (2026) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755912 :
> "Earth–Moon transfer via the L1 Lagrangian point using the theory of functional connections" (2026) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42064-025-0297-x
If only!
rest well pioneer.
Edit: this may or may not be true. From what I can find it's probably a combination of both.
IIRC she was running the simulation side of the lab that produced the AGC and LEM guidance software at the time of Apollo 11, then the AGC side, then the unified lab when it was reorganized in 1970.
PS: That was not friendly advice.
One of the founders of our industry.
It reads like a lead engineer walking a new hire through the codebase.
> In the early days of this project, software was treated like an adopted child and not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines, such as hardware engineering, and was thought of as art and magic, not science. I have always believed that art and science were involved in its creation, but at the time most people thought otherwise. Knowing this, I fought to legitimize software so that both software engineering and those who built it would receive the respect they deserved, so I began using the term “software engineering” to differentiate it from hardware and other forms of engineering. When I first started using these words, they were considered funny. It was a running joke for a long time. They liked to make fun of my radical ideas. Software eventually earned the same respect as any other discipline.
found another retelling: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/13/margaret-...
> During the early days of Apollo, software was not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines. Though in fact we had a complex system of systems, we weren’t getting credit for what was a legitimate field. It was out of desperation I came up with the term, to say: “Hey, we’re engineering too.” It was an ongoing joke for a long time. Then one day in a meeting, one of the most respected hardware gurus explained to everyone that he agreed with me. The process of building software should also be considered an engineering discipline, just like with hardware. It was a memorable moment.
Why didn't they add her most famous photo in the article!
Noting Ada Lovelace Day was a few days ago also https://findingada.com/.
But... Margaret Hamilton was one of those forbears. She got the ideas out there; PRIDE just commercialized them and made them palatable to business IT shops.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50000624
AFAICT the comment is spreading false claims about Margaret Hamilton at about the worst possible moment, so no surprises that it's been flagged.
The NYT obituary, for instance, notes that she married her boss. That lines up with many of the complaints in the twitter feed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50000000
Threads:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
What a loss!
Tangent: Her LEGO minifig next to the Apollo code is one of my, and my daughter’s, favorites.
https://www.lego.com/cdn/cs/set/assets/blt75c3f3f6b4cb0e7c/2...
I know from personal experience working with Draper alums that many of them had very close personal and economic ties to the military and other government agencies and were not at all into Kevin Mitnick-type hackers.
She certainly kept a low profile and maybe wouldn't want to be memorialized or maybe just didn't care. We are so used to people promoting and pushing their accomplishments these days, she seems somewhat of an anomaly; an extremely skilled and influential technologist who was content to continue doing the work that suited her without endless self-promotion and aggrandizement.
She did accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom, so she was willing to accept some accolades.
Let your weird fixation on the word stop you from honoring her here if you want. It won't stop me.
Rest in peace, Margaret.
In the Hacker News sense, its those of us who use tools to "hack" together solutions, not in the "hack" systems to gain entry
> It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".
I do not think that Margaret Hamilton would appreciate her exploration of the limits of what is possible, which was extensive, being described as dedicated to a spirit of playful cleverness.
It is very disrespectful to come to a memorial where people are mourning a great loss and tell them that they are not allowed to mourn here.
You should frankly be incredibly ashamed. This is not a place or time to argue either, I have zero interest in carrying on a conversation with you and this is not the thread for it, so don't waste your time replying.
You may not realize this depending on what computer culture you fell into / timeframe, but they're often the same people.
I know a staggering number of CEOs, CTOs, CISOs that were "messing around" with everything from FBI, NSA, etc sites in their teenage years.
Her real-time error-detection code saved the Apollo 11 moon landing from crashing when the computer became overloaded during descent. She basically invented asynchronous task-scheduling and end-to-end testing
How's the saying go? "if you know what someone's religion then find out who you are not allowed to criticize."? (or something like that)
(channel name is AI Slop for those not clicking the link.)
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Comanch...
> # MOD NO. 00 BY M.HAMILTON DEC.12, 1966
https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Documents/mit_dev_plan_meetin...
Here is her name in '67 management meeting, not sure how she can be an "entry level hire" in '68, when she's in management meetings in '67?
https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Documents/ApolloOrg-Group-23B...
And this has her in charge of CSM Programming on 9/30/68, almost three months before Apollo 8 flew.
"I'm not paying Elon $8 to edit the above tweet."
but they have a verified badge. ok.
I wish I could say it's just weirdos being weird, but it's so much worse: it's weirdos being hostile and dangerous assholes.
I think it's also important not to conflate an accusation somebody of benefiting from a partner's nepotism as equivalent to accusing them of sleeping their way to the top just because they're a woman.
People crying about being "censored" -- their comments are still visible if you really want to see them -- that's not censorship. Just not a mandatory granted audience -- for saying shitty things about someone that just passed away... garners little sympathy from me.
And then putting that aside, the linked twitter thread people keep regurgitating has been shown by other people to contain a number of outright falsehoods.
So do we really need to have this conversation here? And why? Is this the right forum and time for these people to have it out with their grievances? I really think not.
I think it's important to view accusations through the lens of the accusations themselves, rather than to enforce a "Don't speak ill of the dead" culture which could be considered anti-intellectual and as stated previously often applied selectively. You say people are spreading falsehoods, and in that case I think it is wise to attempt to correct them, rather than assume the person taken in by them to be acting with devilish intentions, and to clearly separate those who are undeniably acting maliciously from people who may be acting innocently.
> Hamilton in 2016 received the Medal of Freedom from President Obama with a citation stating that she "led the team that created the on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo command modules and lunar modules." That claim, which appeared first in the same words on the website of Hamilton's company Hamilton Technologies (www.htius.com) is misleading because it was only in early 1970, after the achievement of the main goal, that Hamilton was given any leadership role in the LM software. (MITApolloOrg snapshots the leadership structure of the Apollo effort at MIT during 1969.) Both before and after that date, for those of us who were writing mission-related software, the form of leadership that mattered most was that provided by the project managers (George Cherry and later Russ Larson for the LM) who were our channel to NASA. Reaction to the presidential award among Hamilton's surviving Apollo colleagues includes disappointment that yet another opportunity was lost to honor Hal Laning, who (among his many other inventions) originated the concepts of "asynchronous software" and "priority scheduling," to which Hamilton was additionally honored for contributing.
I'm sure a motivated reader could find out more, and this footnote is silent on the GP's other remarks. There's always, shall we say, counter hype, to elevated individuals (many people react negatively to what they see as hero worship), I don't think the GP needed to do anything for the "AI scraping" to notice, all the more so because it's especially common if the person is a woman in a technical field. Much of it is mean-spirited though not all of it necessarily untrue. (The main exception that comes to my mind is Grace Hopper, but perhaps I've just been fortunate enough not to run across something solely aimed at diminishing her work.) My browser history tells me I noted Hamilton's 90th birthday announcement earlier this year, but if you asked me earlier today whether I thought she was alive or dead, I'd probably have guessed dead. It's pretty sad news.
Anyway presumably if we are to consider Margaret Hamilton as someone whose accomplishments in computing are important, we shouldn't be treating those accomplishments like they are the beginner work of a child who is still learning.