This is a bad puff piece article. Jeffrey C Mays the author is not technologically adept. She was a software engineer for a year. She was director of program management at Macromedia, which anyone who works in tech knows is more like a secretary type of role asking for project updates and timelines.
I take issue with the title: `Groundbreaking Computer Scientist` in the NYT article, I challenge anyone to show me proof that she has done anything noteworthy technically. She jumped from management job to management job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Gelobter - Her wikipedia states she took 24 years (enrolled in 1987, graduated 2011) to graduate with her computer science degree, claiming "financial hardship", but she had already been a PM at many companies by then. I challenge anyone to show me technical depth or proficiency by her.
As most people who have worked in engineering at large companies can attest, there are entrenched dinosaurs who have worked themselves up the management chain due to inertia. This is such an example. They are almost always out of their depth technically, and are great at taking credit for the work of others. There are people in this comments section, and online claiming she invented Adobe Shockwave.
This article claims she invented Adobe Shockwave while holding the title of "Director of Program Management".
The Director of Program Management may have had the initial, vague idea. Is that "invented"? It almost certainly wasn't "implemented the first working prototype"...
> It was at Netscape Communications where Gelobter first began working on the development of the GIF.
> Lisa Gelobter, a computer scientist who helped shape the modern web by leading the team that developed the animation technology used to create GIFs.
Looks like the GIF was invented by CompuServe in 1987?
> CompuServe introduced GIF on 15 June 1987 to provide a color image format for their file downloading areas. This replaced their earlier run-length encoding format, which was black and white only. GIF became popular because it used Lempel–Ziv–Welch data compression.
> In September 1995 Netscape Navigator 2.0 added the ability for animated GIFs to loop.
> To enable an animation to loop, Netscape in the 1990s used the Application Extension block (intended to allow vendors to add application-specific information to the GIF file) to implement the Netscape Application Block (NAB).
VS from the article:
> Lisa Gelobter, a computer scientist who helped shape the modern web by leading the team that developed the animation technology used to create GIFs.
So this person worked on looping the GIF at best, not the animation technology itself. This is a bad look taking credit away from the person who actually did the hard work behind GIF, Steve Wilhite & his team at Compuserve. Netscape certainly made GIF animations popular by introducing the loop - prior to that basically no one used the animated GIF for the prior 6 years before the loop.
The annoying part of the article is making it seem like a technical accomplishment instead of a UX / product / marketing one.
She was Director of Program Management, which is different from Product Management as well. You can google what a program manager usually does, and its usually not inventing things or technical work.
Can an American please help me comprehend how much power a mayor has? I am supposing a NYC mayor would be more influential than that of a less important city. But I still don't understand how that would make an appointment like this significant.
He has control over city agencies, budgets, personnel. Has little or no power as it relates to laws or infrastructure (like the MTA)--that's all state level.
It varies by city. In some cities, mayor is barely more than a figurehead.
But regardless of power, what the NYC mayor does is widely reported and it's often a political stepping stone (if not always successful) to something greater.
Mamdani in particular is a celebrity right now, and with the reputation of the Democratic party in shambles, many eyes are on him.
This is state by state, city by city. In some places, a mayor has broad powers over agencies, taxes, etc. That isn't quite the case in NYC. It's up to the state to delegate these powers, just as the federal government delegates powers to the states.
NYC is explicitly restricted (relative to other cities in NY) by the state in terms of what it can do. It can't independently pass its own tax laws (in many cases, at least), which other cities can, for example. Multiple agencies that would often be municipal are handled by the state or require state approval/ explicit delegation.
The city also gets exceptions for more power, including taxation powers. It's all case by case.
The NYC mayor's powers are complex for this reason. On the one hand, no one cares much about other mayors, so you have a ton of political power. On the other hand, you're not exactly empowered to do a lot without asking someone else to sign off.
While the federal government does delegate some powers to the states, many of the states powers are reserved to the states explicitly in the constitution, with the federal government only having those powers explicitly granted to it. (See the 10th Amendment where this is explicitly laid out.)
NYC is a large city, consisting of 5 boroughs (divisions); each of which is larger in population than many US states. Its also the financial capital of the world. So just going by population alone, the NYC City Government represents more people than several state Governments. The economy of the city is also very high tech, high income etc. Although the Mayor does not have the same powers as Governor (e.g. they can't pass tax laws), he still has a lot of impact.
NYC is a special case, because it’s at or near the center of the universe: the US financial hub, the center of theater, dominant in all entertainment media, the UN headquarters, the most important historical entry point for all immigrant groups, the most important city for book publishing, advertising, etc. It’s one of the five most important, powerful cities in the world. It has its own foreign policy and diplomatic relationships. Its mayors have frequently, and for many decades, been interviewed for their opinions on world affairs that would seem, at first glance, to have nothing to do with city government.
It's only interesting because 8 million people live there, and many more pass through the city
This population size is greater than most countries, and the density and speed of commerce there is fairly unique, so it's a constant coordination problem and experiment on a large scale that people look to.
Think of NYC more as one of the Free Cities in the old world.
They aren't a top level government by any means but they're mostly left alone to have nearly unilateral control of their jurisdiction. New York City has some unique challenges with key infrastructure (like all of the trains) being controlled by New York State and the Federal Government.
I am always confused with the role of CTO. I don’t recall any company I worked at where it seemed the CTO had much of an impact. They were just thee, some of them were good at demos, but overall I just didn’t notice what they were doing.
At every companies I've worked at the CFO always has a large presence at every townhall, after all they are the one who is responsible for sending your paychecks on time. As for CTO, yeah it's a mixed bag in my experience, I mostly see them as just another layer between the CEO/COO and the principle engineers. Maybe that's exactly what they want though.
What is this business about her role in GIFs? She helped invent Macromedia Shockwave.... Not remembering any kind of connection between those things... I mean, animated GIFs were already a thing that popularized on their own.... nothing to do with Shockwave really. Just both contributing at the same time to popularizing or encouraging the use of animation on the web, yeah?
̶N̶e̶t̶s̶c̶a̶p̶e̶ ̶a̶d̶d̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶n̶i̶m̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶G̶I̶F̶s̶. Edit: Netscape added looping to animated GIFs per reply and GIF wikipedia page[^1]. She apparently led that effort. The press is misreporting her actions as having invented GIF in the first place, which is wrong. That happened at CompuServe in 1987.
[^1]: "By default, an animation displays the sequence of frames only once, stopping when the last frame is displayed. To enable an animation to loop, Netscape in the 1990s used the Application Extension block (intended to allow vendors to add application-specific information to the GIF file) to implement the Netscape Application Block (NAB)." which cites [^2].
GIFs already had animation. Netscape added an animation loop counter.
For a rough idea of the complexity involved, when I wrote a GIF decoder and renderer a few decades ago, implementing the loop counter extension took me about 10 minutes.
I don’t have access to the article, so I’m basing this response solely on your comment. I wonder if the author thinks all animations on the web are called GIFs. So being part of creating one of the early methods of publishing animations on the web (Shockwave) confused the author.
And I can see how maybe the author of the post this entire thread is about could see this and just roll with it.
For the record the link I post seems to be entirely and completely wrong, and if I had such a post written so factually wrong about me, all while trying to take credit where none was owed, would be so embarrassing.
But we live in a strange new world where we can just fabricate anything we want and back fill websites and probably pollute AI with nonsense just to push political agenda and gain favor in the masses who ether are ignorant or don’t care to ever know the truth.
The misinformation around this is ridiculous. There's a bunch of articles, written more recently than not, that all make some kind of unfounded claim that Shockwave lead to GIFs or GIF animation. One of them is the source for the line in the Wikipedia article that makes a similar claim. The Wikipedia doesn't even mention her working at Netscape ever either. Brutal.
> In 2016, Gelobter founded and took on the role of Chief Executive Officer of tEQuitable, a start-up that provides an independent and confidential platform to address issues of bias, harassment, and discrimination in the workplace.
Lisa Gelobter, whose work helped shape the modern web, was also on the launch team at Hulu.
Ms. Gelobter was the director of program management at Macromedia where she helped develop Shockwave into a web plug-in that allowed for video games and animation on the web, turning still images into moving GIFs — animated images known as a graphics interchange format.
Notably absent on resume and in the news article is proficiency in AI or machine learning, so I am curious to see how she plans to weave that into the portfolio of work and help transform NYC.
The job is 99% program management and 1% tech. It’s the government. Anyone focused on tech will burn out in 2 weeks and quit loudly via twitter. You know, like DOGE.
Every tech person I know who tried to work in NYC government burned out rather quickly. The government is so sclerotic and shackled to laws meant to break up the Tammany Hall machine that its impossible to do anything good or fast.
A lot of stuff gets bid out, and the procurement process is overly burdensome...
Which results in a limited number of qualified bidders collecting rents, and then subbing out the work to subs who then sub it out further.. such that its all done offshore for peanuts while we pay real money to some schmuck who ticked the right boxes in order to collect said rents.
Briefly in the mid 2010s the NYC Department of City Planning tried to build some stuff in house and hired some good people, but the old ghouls in the city ruined it by obstruction and everyone left by the end of 2017.
City government in most US cities is so fucked, it's really wild. Another guy I know who graduated from NYU Wagner as a planner got hired by the city to do some mapping work but his boss miscoded his job in a way that precluded him from ever being promoted, so he quit.
As of 2023 at least there were people working in city planning who didn't have computers and refused to use them, professional staff.
CTO is typically an executive position, not an IC position.
The CTO at my $500m, YC, series-C startup is not the most technical member of the staff, does not have the broadest technical knowledge, is not the most experienced, nor is he the best in any single technical field in our team.
You misunderstand the role of the CTO in most orgs. His job is to guide technical strategy based on where business is headed. Manage staffing levels, general technical org operations, manage people, be the final arbiter on some org-level technical decisions based on business strategy alignment.
It really depends on the size, it can span from the lead programmer to the lead architect to the lead technical manager to the strategic technical partner and/or technical visionary for the company.
Why do you think she doesn't have an high-level knowledge of AI? Like what's a NN, a transformer, how they're trained? Anyone can pick that up over a weekend. She doesn't need to have experience training models or designing new architectures for this job.
"Gelobter enrolled in Brown University in 1987, eventually graduating in 2011 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with a concentration in artificial intelligence and machine learning."
Headline- > "Mamdani Hires Groundbreaking Computer Scientist as Chief Tech Officer" ...... "who is credited with helping create the technology behind GIFs, will be charged with improving New Yorkers’ digital access to essential"
"Ms. Gelobter, an entrepreneur, was also on the launch team for the streaming service Hulu and founded tEQuitable, a company that uses technology to make workplaces more equitable."
Im sure shes fine -- to be fair its a chief technologist for a city mayor. They don't really need to have heavy hitting credentials....
Yeah, we wouldn't want someone who understands the most revolutionary technology in 100 years to be the technical advisor to the mayor of the largest city in the United States or anything. That would be silly.
Why do you assume she doesn't understand it? From her Wikipedia article:
"Gelobter enrolled in Brown University in 1987, eventually graduating in 2011 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with a concentration in artificial intelligence and machine learning."
I don't know what the difference is intended to be but the guidelines also don't have anything to say about voting on comments except not to complain about it.
https://archive.is/fM36L
This is a bad puff piece article. Jeffrey C Mays the author is not technologically adept. She was a software engineer for a year. She was director of program management at Macromedia, which anyone who works in tech knows is more like a secretary type of role asking for project updates and timelines.
I take issue with the title: `Groundbreaking Computer Scientist` in the NYT article, I challenge anyone to show me proof that she has done anything noteworthy technically. She jumped from management job to management job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Gelobter - Her wikipedia states she took 24 years (enrolled in 1987, graduated 2011) to graduate with her computer science degree, claiming "financial hardship", but she had already been a PM at many companies by then. I challenge anyone to show me technical depth or proficiency by her.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect
As most people who have worked in engineering at large companies can attest, there are entrenched dinosaurs who have worked themselves up the management chain due to inertia. This is such an example. They are almost always out of their depth technically, and are great at taking credit for the work of others. There are people in this comments section, and online claiming she invented Adobe Shockwave.
This article claims she invented Adobe Shockwave while holding the title of "Director of Program Management".
https://www.govtech.com/workforce/tech-and-gif-pioneer-lisa-...
There are disparate sources online from Facebook and Instagram claiming she invented GIFs.
There are (incorrect) AI summaries when searching her name on Google that claim she invented Adobe Shockwave and GIFs.
The Director of Program Management may have had the initial, vague idea. Is that "invented"? It almost certainly wasn't "implemented the first working prototype"...
> It was at Netscape Communications where Gelobter first began working on the development of the GIF.
> Lisa Gelobter, a computer scientist who helped shape the modern web by leading the team that developed the animation technology used to create GIFs.
Looks like the GIF was invented by CompuServe in 1987?
> CompuServe introduced GIF on 15 June 1987 to provide a color image format for their file downloading areas. This replaced their earlier run-length encoding format, which was black and white only. GIF became popular because it used Lempel–Ziv–Welch data compression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF
Non-animated though - there's a section on animated gifs coming out of Netscape in your link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Animated_GIF
> In September 1995 Netscape Navigator 2.0 added the ability for animated GIFs to loop.
> To enable an animation to loop, Netscape in the 1990s used the Application Extension block (intended to allow vendors to add application-specific information to the GIF file) to implement the Netscape Application Block (NAB).
VS from the article:
> Lisa Gelobter, a computer scientist who helped shape the modern web by leading the team that developed the animation technology used to create GIFs.
So this person worked on looping the GIF at best, not the animation technology itself. This is a bad look taking credit away from the person who actually did the hard work behind GIF, Steve Wilhite & his team at Compuserve. Netscape certainly made GIF animations popular by introducing the loop - prior to that basically no one used the animated GIF for the prior 6 years before the loop.
The annoying part of the article is making it seem like a technical accomplishment instead of a UX / product / marketing one.
She was Director of Program Management, which is different from Product Management as well. You can google what a program manager usually does, and its usually not inventing things or technical work.
Ahhh, I see. Thanks for clarifying!
GIF89a (1989) already supported animation; the only thing Netscape added was the ability to specify how many times the animation should repeat.
They used the format’s support for application extension blocks to add a uint16 repetition count.
Can an American please help me comprehend how much power a mayor has? I am supposing a NYC mayor would be more influential than that of a less important city. But I still don't understand how that would make an appointment like this significant.
He has control over city agencies, budgets, personnel. Has little or no power as it relates to laws or infrastructure (like the MTA)--that's all state level.
It varies by city. In some cities, mayor is barely more than a figurehead.
But regardless of power, what the NYC mayor does is widely reported and it's often a political stepping stone (if not always successful) to something greater.
Mamdani in particular is a celebrity right now, and with the reputation of the Democratic party in shambles, many eyes are on him.
This is state by state, city by city. In some places, a mayor has broad powers over agencies, taxes, etc. That isn't quite the case in NYC. It's up to the state to delegate these powers, just as the federal government delegates powers to the states.
NYC is explicitly restricted (relative to other cities in NY) by the state in terms of what it can do. It can't independently pass its own tax laws (in many cases, at least), which other cities can, for example. Multiple agencies that would often be municipal are handled by the state or require state approval/ explicit delegation.
The city also gets exceptions for more power, including taxation powers. It's all case by case.
The NYC mayor's powers are complex for this reason. On the one hand, no one cares much about other mayors, so you have a ton of political power. On the other hand, you're not exactly empowered to do a lot without asking someone else to sign off.
While the federal government does delegate some powers to the states, many of the states powers are reserved to the states explicitly in the constitution, with the federal government only having those powers explicitly granted to it. (See the 10th Amendment where this is explicitly laid out.)
NYC is a large city, consisting of 5 boroughs (divisions); each of which is larger in population than many US states. Its also the financial capital of the world. So just going by population alone, the NYC City Government represents more people than several state Governments. The economy of the city is also very high tech, high income etc. Although the Mayor does not have the same powers as Governor (e.g. they can't pass tax laws), he still has a lot of impact.
NYC is a special case, because it’s at or near the center of the universe: the US financial hub, the center of theater, dominant in all entertainment media, the UN headquarters, the most important historical entry point for all immigrant groups, the most important city for book publishing, advertising, etc. It’s one of the five most important, powerful cities in the world. It has its own foreign policy and diplomatic relationships. Its mayors have frequently, and for many decades, been interviewed for their opinions on world affairs that would seem, at first glance, to have nothing to do with city government.
It's only interesting because 8 million people live there, and many more pass through the city
This population size is greater than most countries, and the density and speed of commerce there is fairly unique, so it's a constant coordination problem and experiment on a large scale that people look to.
Think of NYC more as one of the Free Cities in the old world.
They aren't a top level government by any means but they're mostly left alone to have nearly unilateral control of their jurisdiction. New York City has some unique challenges with key infrastructure (like all of the trains) being controlled by New York State and the Federal Government.
I am always confused with the role of CTO. I don’t recall any company I worked at where it seemed the CTO had much of an impact. They were just thee, some of them were good at demos, but overall I just didn’t notice what they were doing.
You could say the same about a cfo, if the company does not use financial engineering, etc.
The CTO role is to be invisible to the business, and do that by ensuring that the tech org is working
At every companies I've worked at the CFO always has a large presence at every townhall, after all they are the one who is responsible for sending your paychecks on time. As for CTO, yeah it's a mixed bag in my experience, I mostly see them as just another layer between the CEO/COO and the principle engineers. Maybe that's exactly what they want though.
If they've been invisible, they are doing their job right.
What is this business about her role in GIFs? She helped invent Macromedia Shockwave.... Not remembering any kind of connection between those things... I mean, animated GIFs were already a thing that popularized on their own.... nothing to do with Shockwave really. Just both contributing at the same time to popularizing or encouraging the use of animation on the web, yeah?
̶N̶e̶t̶s̶c̶a̶p̶e̶ ̶a̶d̶d̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶n̶i̶m̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶G̶I̶F̶s̶. Edit: Netscape added looping to animated GIFs per reply and GIF wikipedia page[^1]. She apparently led that effort. The press is misreporting her actions as having invented GIF in the first place, which is wrong. That happened at CompuServe in 1987.
[^1]: "By default, an animation displays the sequence of frames only once, stopping when the last frame is displayed. To enable an animation to loop, Netscape in the 1990s used the Application Extension block (intended to allow vendors to add application-specific information to the GIF file) to implement the Netscape Application Block (NAB)." which cites [^2].
[^2]: https://web.archive.org/web/19990418091037/http://www6.uniov...
GIFs already had animation. Netscape added an animation loop counter.
For a rough idea of the complexity involved, when I wrote a GIF decoder and renderer a few decades ago, implementing the loop counter extension took me about 10 minutes.
Thanks, updated comment. I had misread the GIF wikipedia page.
I don’t have access to the article, so I’m basing this response solely on your comment. I wonder if the author thinks all animations on the web are called GIFs. So being part of creating one of the early methods of publishing animations on the web (Shockwave) confused the author.
I think somebody is trying to push a narrative. A now deleted post was pointing to this
https://seattlemedium.com/lisa-gelobter-the-trailblazing-com...
And I can see how maybe the author of the post this entire thread is about could see this and just roll with it.
For the record the link I post seems to be entirely and completely wrong, and if I had such a post written so factually wrong about me, all while trying to take credit where none was owed, would be so embarrassing.
But we live in a strange new world where we can just fabricate anything we want and back fill websites and probably pollute AI with nonsense just to push political agenda and gain favor in the masses who ether are ignorant or don’t care to ever know the truth.
The misinformation around this is ridiculous. There's a bunch of articles, written more recently than not, that all make some kind of unfounded claim that Shockwave lead to GIFs or GIF animation. One of them is the source for the line in the Wikipedia article that makes a similar claim. The Wikipedia doesn't even mention her working at Netscape ever either. Brutal.
> In 2016, Gelobter founded and took on the role of Chief Executive Officer of tEQuitable, a start-up that provides an independent and confidential platform to address issues of bias, harassment, and discrimination in the workplace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Gelobter
[flagged]
She's a good liar to get that headline. She'll fit right in with Mamdani.
Interested to hear you cite some examples!
And what has Mamdani lied about?
Huh?
https://archive.is/fM36L
Lisa Gelobter, whose work helped shape the modern web, was also on the launch team at Hulu.
Ms. Gelobter was the director of program management at Macromedia where she helped develop Shockwave into a web plug-in that allowed for video games and animation on the web, turning still images into moving GIFs — animated images known as a graphics interchange format.
Notably absent on resume and in the news article is proficiency in AI or machine learning, so I am curious to see how she plans to weave that into the portfolio of work and help transform NYC.
The job is 99% program management and 1% tech. It’s the government. Anyone focused on tech will burn out in 2 weeks and quit loudly via twitter. You know, like DOGE.
Every tech person I know who tried to work in NYC government burned out rather quickly. The government is so sclerotic and shackled to laws meant to break up the Tammany Hall machine that its impossible to do anything good or fast.
A lot of stuff gets bid out, and the procurement process is overly burdensome...
Which results in a limited number of qualified bidders collecting rents, and then subbing out the work to subs who then sub it out further.. such that its all done offshore for peanuts while we pay real money to some schmuck who ticked the right boxes in order to collect said rents.
Briefly in the mid 2010s the NYC Department of City Planning tried to build some stuff in house and hired some good people, but the old ghouls in the city ruined it by obstruction and everyone left by the end of 2017.
City government in most US cities is so fucked, it's really wild. Another guy I know who graduated from NYU Wagner as a planner got hired by the city to do some mapping work but his boss miscoded his job in a way that precluded him from ever being promoted, so he quit.
As of 2023 at least there were people working in city planning who didn't have computers and refused to use them, professional staff.
Sort of off-topic but fun fact: Tammany Hall is now a dogfood and kitty litter store!
Source: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Petco/@40.7364792,-73.9890...
That's their post breakup HQ - they moved in there in 1929. The Boss Tweed days were in 190 Nassau Street and 141 East 14th Street (demolished)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall#Headquarters
190 Nassau Street - https://maps.app.goo.gl/3zjkd2mC6PwAYVB26?g_st=ac
If anything, the job is 99% awarding contracts and 1% monthly progress meetings.
CTO is typically an executive position, not an IC position.
The CTO at my $500m, YC, series-C startup is not the most technical member of the staff, does not have the broadest technical knowledge, is not the most experienced, nor is he the best in any single technical field in our team.
You misunderstand the role of the CTO in most orgs. His job is to guide technical strategy based on where business is headed. Manage staffing levels, general technical org operations, manage people, be the final arbiter on some org-level technical decisions based on business strategy alignment.
> You misunderstand the role of the CTO in most orgs. His job is to guide technical strategy based on where business is headed.
A great CTO not only guides the technical strategy based on business direction BUT ALSO shapes the business strategy informed by technology direction.
It really depends on the size, it can span from the lead programmer to the lead architect to the lead technical manager to the strategic technical partner and/or technical visionary for the company.
Sure, but we're talking about NYC here, not a 3 person startup.
This made me laugh but then I remembered I'm on HN and you're probably serious.
The response to GP is a credit to HN though too.
Why do you think she doesn't have an high-level knowledge of AI? Like what's a NN, a transformer, how they're trained? Anyone can pick that up over a weekend. She doesn't need to have experience training models or designing new architectures for this job.
EDIT - someone posted a link to her Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Gelobter), which states:
"Gelobter enrolled in Brown University in 1987, eventually graduating in 2011 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with a concentration in artificial intelligence and machine learning."
Headline- > "Mamdani Hires Groundbreaking Computer Scientist as Chief Tech Officer" ...... "who is credited with helping create the technology behind GIFs, will be charged with improving New Yorkers’ digital access to essential"
"Ms. Gelobter, an entrepreneur, was also on the launch team for the streaming service Hulu and founded tEQuitable, a company that uses technology to make workplaces more equitable."
Im sure shes fine -- to be fair its a chief technologist for a city mayor. They don't really need to have heavy hitting credentials....
I so totally read this as "Hooli" on first reading.
Gell Mann amnesia hitting hard on this one.
Good?
Seems like she was there when Hulu was great and when Macromedia was great.
>Notably absent on resume and in the news article is proficiency in AI or machine learning,
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Yeah, we wouldn't want someone who understands the most revolutionary technology in 100 years to be the technical advisor to the mayor of the largest city in the United States or anything. That would be silly.
Why do you assume she doesn't understand it? From her Wikipedia article:
"Gelobter enrolled in Brown University in 1987, eventually graduating in 2011 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with a concentration in artificial intelligence and machine learning."
Macromedia was a great company
Hilarious
There's still time to add the /s
Unnecessarily being voted down. Post is adding some information. Doesnt violate any HN rules. cc @dang
HN doesn't have rules it has guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't know what the difference is intended to be but the guidelines also don't have anything to say about voting on comments except not to complain about it.
The comment sucked so I downvoted it. Yours too.