I think projects like Apollo are important in a way that they let extraordinary people to use their capabilities.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[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
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.<p>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.
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.
Related:<p><i>Margaret Hamilton Led the NASA Software Team That Landed Astronauts on the Moon</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36720448">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36720448</a> - July 2023 (32 comments)<p><i>Margaret Hamilton oral history (2017)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30668338">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30668338</a> - March 2022 (7 comments)<p><i>An interview with Margaret Hamilton</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20453737">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20453737</a> - July 2019 (12 comments)<p><i>Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12991524">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12991524</a> - Nov 2016 (70 comments)<p><i>Profile of Margaret Hamilton, programmer of the Apollo software</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10379904">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10379904</a> - Oct 2015 (58 comments)<p><i>Margaret Hamilton, lead software engineer, Project Apollo</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8735912">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8735912</a> - Dec 2014 (94 comments)
I will forever keep the image in my mind of her standing next to the Apollo program code books.<p><a href="https://news.mit.edu/2016/scene-at-mit-margaret-hamilton-apollo-code-0817" rel="nofollow">https://news.mit.edu/2016/scene-at-mit-margaret-hamilton-apo...</a>
Margaret Hamilton actually coined the term "software engineer" IIRC. Rest in peace
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: <a href="https://catskull.net/interview-with-margaret-h-hamilton.html" rel="nofollow">https://catskull.net/interview-with-margaret-h-hamilton.html</a>
out of curiosity, how'd you get your hands on the textbook?
This is incredible, thanks a lot for making it available for us.
Little did she know, the term would be co-opted by guys changing the color of a button on a web site.
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.
And then other guys made frontend dev tooling so complicated that it <i>does</i> actually require a software engineer to change the color of a button.
... 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...
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It becomes engineering when the software is flying to the moon and back.
Grace Hopper would like to show you her collection of nanoseconds.
IMO social engineering is not engineering because it has nothing to with the physical sciences.<p>IMO reverse engineering is not engineering because it has nothing to with the physical sciences.<p>That's not how language works.
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.
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
Well, Meta just settled with states to the tune of 17 billion dollars for harm caused by its algorithms.<p>Air Canada, a few years back, was found liable when its ai bot promised discounted fares to a customer.<p>Companies are getting hacked and held to ransom regularly so bad software is getting punished alright.<p>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.
Now please show me the consequences from the Hugging Face incident. The company or the engineers individually apparently have nothing to be worried about.
> Meta just settled with states to the tune of 17 billion dollars for harm caused by its algorithms.<p>Those were working as intended, unlike a bridge that collapses because of bad design.<p>> Air Canada, a few years back, was found liable when its ai bot promised discounted fares to a customer.<p>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.<p>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.
I hope you don’t write your own crypto.
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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.
There is a very nice oral history the Computer History Museum produced: <a href="https://computerhistory.org/blog/margaret-hamilton-in-her-own-words/" rel="nofollow">https://computerhistory.org/blog/margaret-hamilton-in-her-ow...</a><p>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.
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.
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).<p>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?
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That page is 403, but I was able to get it at <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20161220114912/http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting-new-hacker-ethic/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20161220114912/http://opentransc...</a><p>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.
On Margaret Hamilton from Chapter 5 of Hackers by Steven Levy<p>"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."
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.
Certainly that could be described as "error handling", but I would describe what saved the landing as priority scheduling combined with restart protection.
You are misremembering something you read. Software written in 1950s already had error handling in it.
I wonder if that was just an outgrowth of NASA's "plan for failure" ethos.<p>But, I also wonder if that ethos was apart of early NASA before they had failures to learn from... Hmm...
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Her story and her work is so inspiring. And I feel a bit sad reading about it...<p>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.<p>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.
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".
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
May I recommend Caleb Hearth's <i>Don't get distracted</i> ?<p><a href="https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted" rel="nofollow">https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted</a>
Unfortunately often the problem seems to be how a government can do more evil.
I mean there are better ways to help society if you are smart and like challenging software projects.
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.<p>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.
Dang. She was a remarkable stand-out, in fields full of remarkable people.<p>The pic here is often people's first intro to her <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2016/scene-at-mit-margaret-hamilton-apollo-code-0817" rel="nofollow">https://news.mit.edu/2016/scene-at-mit-margaret-hamilton-apo...</a>
“There was no choice but to be pioneers” is a great line.
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.<p>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.
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.
They were standing on the shoulders of giants too.
First thing I thought of, too. "Who? ...Wait, not the cool book chick!"<p>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: <a href="https://www.eng.auburn.edu/~kchang/comp6710/readings/They%20Write%20the%20Right%20Stuff.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.eng.auburn.edu/~kchang/comp6710/readings/They%20...</a>
The term she coined for it was "man-rated". Meaning that it had been tested rigorously enough to be trusted to keep humans alive.<p>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.
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.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer#1201_and_1202_program_alarms" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer#1201_...</a>
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.<p>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”
At that time running that many concurrent tasks on such anemic hardware was a small miracle. This wasn't your average linux kernel.
> “No. Too many jobs running. Please kill one to continue”<p>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.
It is infinitely harder to be first. Once it is known that viable path exists, the task becomes a lot easier
You’re forgetting this had never been done before.
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?
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.<p>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.<p>It was like having an Apple II in mid 1960s with double the word size.
I used san RTOS written in assembly for the Atmel AVR. AvrX (by John Barello)<p>You can look at the code here.<p><a href="https://github.com/kororos/AvrX" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kororos/AvrX</a><p>Compiles down under 2k.<p>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.
Yes.<p>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).
And it ran at 0.043 MIPS. Each task would get maybe 5000 instructions per second, minus scheduler overhead.
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 <i>modern, far less robust</i> software.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>> Handling an expected error condition under normal operation<p>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).<p>This kind of robustness in the face of unexpected misuse is required if you want to qualify your hardware as "man-rated".
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 <i>anyways</i>, then that’s man-rated thinking.<p>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)
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?
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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.<p>also, she should not be confused with the other Margaret Hamilton you might recall<p><a href="https://facts.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/35-facts-about-margaret-hamilton-1730762709.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://facts.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/35-facts-about-...</a>
> The pic here is often people's first intro to her<p>Why link to an article instead of an actual picture?<p>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: <a href="https://www.thetechoutlook.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Margaret-Hamilton.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://www.thetechoutlook.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Ma...</a>
I previously made a short comic about Margaret Hamilton and her work on the Apollo flight software:
<a href="https://fosscomics.com/posts/5.%20The%20Beginning%20of%20Software%20Engineering/#comic-panel-hire-math-major" rel="nofollow">https://fosscomics.com/posts/5.%20The%20Beginning%20of%20Sof...</a>
Sharing it again in her memory. May she rest in peace.
Also the name of the actress who played Wicked Witch of the West in Wizard of Oz, who died in 1985.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(actress)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(actress)</a><p>I am pleased to have now learned more about the Margaret Hamilton of "software engineering."
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. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr</a>
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!
"Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust."<p>If only!
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.
her pic with the stack of printed code will always be iconic.<p>rest well pioneer.
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.<p>Edit: this may or may not be true. From what I can find it's probably a combination of both.<p>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.
These computers didn't have much program or data storage space. The source code can be found on GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/chrislgarry/apollo-11" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/chrislgarry/apollo-11</a>
thanks for the correction. learnt something new.
RIP. I'll always remember her iconic pic with the stack of printed code
May her memory be a blessing
Weird, I was thinking about her monumental achievement just a few hours ago.
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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?
An absolute titan, a true pioneer. RIP.
Vale.<p>One of the founders of our industry.
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.
Is any of the original Apollo code available to read?
<a href="https://github.com/chrislgarry/apollo-11" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/chrislgarry/apollo-11</a>
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).<p>It reads like a lead engineer walking a new hire through the codebase.
RIP<p>Why didn't they add her most famous photo in the article!
According to Wikiquote, she coined the phrase "software engineering": <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton</a><p>> 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.<p>found another retelling: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/13/margaret-hamilton-computer-scientist-interview-software-apollo-missions-1969-moon-landing-nasa-women" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/13/margaret-...</a><p>> 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.
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.
RIP legend.<p>Noting Ada Lovelace Day was a few days ago also <a href="https://findingada.com/" rel="nofollow">https://findingada.com/</a>.
mission critical software: plan for the impossible to keep the possible running smoothly
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.<p>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.
This feels like a black bar event. RIP Margaret Hamilton.
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.
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:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50000624">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50000624</a><p>AFAICT the comment is spreading false claims about Margaret Hamilton at about the worst possible moment, so no surprises that it's been flagged.
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Rest in peace, Ma'am.
RIP, what a fantastic person she was.
Rest in peace, Margaret.
Oh so that's were Hamiltonian graph are coming from?
Rip legend
Sad!
It is Dr. Margaret Hamilton, she has earned it.
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.
NYT obit: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/07/obituaries/margaret-hamilton-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.HFE.bVG-.OwVq-XaHSVRs&smid=url-share" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/07/obituaries/margaret-hamil...</a>
NXVI
The word legend is used too much. She absolutely qualifies.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_engineer)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_en...</a><p>Threads:<p><a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=Margaret%20Hamilton&sort=byDate&type=story" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...</a>
This definitely asks for a black ribbon on top of HN.<p>What a loss!
100%<p>Tangent: Her LEGO minifig next to the Apollo code is one of my, and my daughter’s, favorites.
<a href="https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/women-of-nasa-21312" rel="nofollow">https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/women-of-nasa-21312</a>
This feels like the top honor.
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.
Yes please,
This is absolutely necessary
Cannot agree more! What a loss for all CS!
Good Lord yes
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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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>She did accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom, so she was willing to accept some accolades.
Guess it's no surprise hackernews has forgotten what a hacker is. Hint: Margaret Hamilton was a hacker.
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.
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.
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.<p>Let your weird fixation on the word stop you from honoring her here if you want. It won't stop me.<p>Rest in peace, Margaret.
What's your definition of "hacker"<p>In the Hacker News sense, its those of us who use tools to "hack" together solutions, not in the "hack" systems to gain entry
<a href="https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html" rel="nofollow">https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html</a><p>> <i>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><p>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.
I shudder to think of Stallman’s idea of “playful cleverness”
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.<p>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.<p>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.
> In the Hacker News sense, its those of us who use tools to "hack" together solutions, not in the "hack" systems to gain entry<p>You may not realize this depending on what computer culture you fell into / timeframe, but they're often the same people.<p>I know a staggering number of CEOs, CTOs, CISOs that were "messing around" with everything from FBI, NSA, etc sites in their teenage years.
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.)
Your point? Whatever her opinion, her contributions are undeniable.
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.
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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.
It is not appropriate and downvoting those comments is how one indicates this.
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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.)<p>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)
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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).
wow, that's a lot of hate and presumption.
on the twitter thread:<p>"I'm not paying Elon $8 to edit the above tweet."<p>but they have a verified badge. ok.
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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
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.
The linked Twitter thread <a href="https://x.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/1629315139169075200" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/1629315139169075200</a> 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.
And they're always shocked when they're called out for their misogyny. Because how dare <i>you</i>, I guess?<p>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 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.
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.
Your reaction is far more aggressive than the original comment, what's up with that?
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You got some sources there or are you just condescending for the sake of it?
Don Eyles has a book, "Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir". It has a footnote:<p>> 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, <i>after</i> 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) <i>originated</i> the concepts of "asynchronous software" and "priority scheduling," to which Hamilton was additionally honored for <i>contributing</i>.<p>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.
what would you constitute as a source here? source control logs, or lack of thereof?
I think they might have meant "dissenting" views.
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.
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.<p>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.