Lynn Conway has died | Hacker News Reader

Lynn Conway has died

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Lynn Conway co-wrote "the book" on VLSI design, "Introduction to VLSI Systems", created and taught this historic VLSI Design Course in 1978, which was the first time students designed and fabricated their own integrated circuits, including James Clark (SGI) who made the Geometry Engine, and Guy L Steel (MIT) who made the Scheme Microprocessor.

She invented superscalar architecture at IBM, just to be fired in 1968 after she revealed her intention to transition, then 52 years later IBM formally apologized to her in 2020. She successfully rebooted her life, invented and taught VLSI design to industry pioneers who founded many successful companies based on the design methodology she invented, wrote the book on, and personally taught to them, and then she became a trans activist who helped many people transition, find each other, and avoid suicide, fight abuse and bigotry, and find acceptance, by telling her story and building an online community.

Lynn Conway receives 2009 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4Txvjia3p0

I ended up teaching Carver Mead's course in its last year at Caltech, which was quite an experience. In many ways, the course was (and is) horribly out of date, and not just because of the fact that students were using open-source Berkeley tools to draw layouts. The real reason why this course was obsolete was that Mead and Conway so thoroughly won the argument on the idea of creating rigorous abstractions that people don't learn any other way.

It just seems so obvious today that you can create gates, you can create macros, you can create complex designs, and you can define the interface at every level so you can hook them up and they just work. That idea came out of Conway and the early pioneers of VLSI.

The same ideas are the core of how we work with libraries when doing software engineering, too.

In the book, Dealers of Lightning, by Michael Hiltzik, (about Xerox PARC), chapter 21, "The Silicon Revolution", details the work Lynn Conway, Carver Mead, and Doug Fairbairn did with VLSI at PARC.

Excerpts - text in double parentheses provided for context:

"Lynn Conway and I," Fairbairn remembered, "were the ones who said, 'This VLSI is hot shit.'"

For the next year, Caltech and PARC educated each other. Mead transferred his theories about microelectronics and computer science, and Conway and Fairbairn paid him back by developing design methods and tools giving engineers the ability to create integrated circuits of unprecedented complexity on Alto-sized workstations.

...If the computer lab -- particularly ((Butler)) Lampson, who commanded management's respect -- continued to carp at the money being spent on the hazy potential of VLSI, who knew how long she could survive at PARC?...

While discussing this one day with Mead and Fairbairn she realized the problem was not just scientific, but cultural. VLSI had not been around long enough even to generate textbooks and college courses -- the paraphernalia of sound science that, she was convinced, would force everyone else to take it seriously.

"We should write the book," she told Mead. "A book that communicates the simplest, most elegant rules and methods for VLSI design would make it look like a mature, proven science, like anything does if it's been around for the ten or fifteen years you normally have behind a textbook."

Mead was skeptical...

That's where you're wrong, she replied. What was the aim of all the technology that surrounded them at PARC, if not to facilitate just the project she was proposing? They had Altos ((computer workstations)) running Bravo ((word processor)), a network to link long-distance collaborators, and high-speed laser-driven Dover printers to produce professional-looking manuscripts.

Their collaboration that summer on what became the seminal text of the new technology was only one of Conway's efforts to distill and spread the VLSI gospel. The same year she agreed to teach a guest course at MIT (using the first few chapters of the still-maturing textbook), then printed up her lecture notes for instructors at an ever-enlarging circle of interested universities. By mid-1979 she was able to offer an additional incentive to a dozen schools: If they would transmit student designs to PARC over the ARPANET, PARC would arrange to have the chips built, packaged, and returned to the students for testing.

((Jim)) Clark understood at once that the computing efficiency VLSI offered was the key to expanding the potential of computer graphics. That summer he essentially relocated to PARC, taking over a vacant office next door to Conway's and steeping himself in VLSI lore. Within four months he had finished the Geometry Engine chip, the product of that summer's total immersion.

Doug Fairbairn: https://computerhistory.org/profile/doug-fairbairn/

Carver Mead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead

> It just seems so obvious today that you can create gates, you can create macros, you can create complex designs, and you can define the interface at every level so you can hook them up and they just work. That idea came out of Conway and the early pioneers of VLSI.

And you can see the opposite of this in many early microprocessor designs, like the (original, NMOS) 6502 and Z80. There's a lot of highly idiosyncratic designs for gates, heavily customized for the physical and electrical context that they're used in - and I won't deny that they're often very clever and space-efficient, but they were also extraordinarily time-intensive to design, and weren't reusable. It made some complex designs possible within the limitations of the time's fabrication technology, but it wasn't an approach which would have ever scaled to larger designs.

One great example of this is this bit of 6502 overflow logic:

http://www.righto.com/2013/01/a-small-part-of-6502-chip-expl...

> There's a lot of highly idiosyncratic designs for gates, heavily customized for the physical and electrical context that they're used in - and I won't deny that they're often very clever and space-efficient, but they were also extraordinarily time-intensive to design, and weren't reusable.

Is this optimization now something that hardware design tools do automatically?

They optimize on a different level. Instead of trying to optimize the arrangement of individual transistors, you start with a set of standard cells which contain optimized transistor-level implementations of individual gates, and have your design tools optimize the placement and routing of those cells within a grid system.

Does that mean there's an opportunity for increasing performance by bringing collections of gates into scope for optimization? Or does that not actually let you decrease transistors very much?

There is - but given the size of the design space that's mostly done with a library of gates - synthesis/layout pick cells from that library and place them, often putting connected gates together - you could then merge gates in some smart way to save a few percent in area but chances are you wouldn't gain much because you'd have to shuffle all the other gates in that row a bit, and that would mess with timing elsewhere.

Also routing (wires between gates) constrains how close many gates can be, and for everything but regular arrays of gates there may be little point

There is some, but most of that actually gets pulled into standard cell libraries (the gate libraries), which are very big collections of primitives. Most of them have a lot more than just the standard gates you think of - they include many 3-input gates, adder cells, multiplexer cells, flip flops of all kinds, and all sorts of other basic building blocks that are micro-optimized. They tend to use a standard width of 7 or 9 "tracks," where a track is defined by the width of the lowest metal layer, and the optimization comes from reducing the length of the gate. They also have gates of different sizes/strengths, so you can use the weak and small version on paths that are not critical, and the bigger and faster versions on critical paths.

I'm not sure if you are talking about MAGIC for the layout. That is what I used back in the day. I was surprised to find out later in my professional career that this was created by John Ousterhout, the same person who created Tcl/Tk.

It's really amazing to me how versatile these early hackers were.

I am talking about MAGIC for layout, but there is a whole suite of tools from the same lab. IRSIM is a switch-level simulator that's also very useful, and there are a number of other tools for schematic capture, analog stuff, and a whole digital synthesis flow.

It's all open-source, and if you're building a chip with an SCMOS process or another process with lambda-based design rules, it's still a pretty nice set of tools to use.

Incidentally, if you're building open-source silicon, MAGIC is somewhere in that process, and I assume the Berkeley logic placer is still there even though the front-end is usually something else.

Ousterhout (and/or his students) has kept on hacking: Homa, Raft, RAMcloud...

I also like his software design book.

https://cs.stanford.edu/~ouster

Oh no, we have lost another giant! Very few people in the world know the gratitude she is owed. I doubt Nvidia and the other fabless companies would exist without her contribution. I met her through DARPA in 2018 [ref] and I later reached out for advice when I started a company in 2020. She was kind and generous with her time in all of our interactions. Beyond her technical prowess, she really understood people. The community/collabroation aprpach she used to launch the VLSI revolution in the 1970's are worth studying.

RIP

[ref] https://youtu.be/W_cB8VYunY8?si=9M9QVmBipbKUXxMR&t=1414

I met her totally at random at a bio conference in hawaii- I sat down next to her at a bar and we started chatting. I asked what she did and she said VLSI- something I knew nothing about (I was a biologist). She was curious about biology and wanted to learn about how she could help. I looked her name up later and learned she really did work in VLSI :)

When did you meet her at this bio conference? I’m curious what aspect of biology she was interested in and whether she dove into the subject further.

probably Pacific Symposium in Biocomputing around 2000 but I don't think Lynn ever published in the area. I don't recall the specific details of what we discussed, probably something about molecular dynamics.

I am actually part way through reading Mead & Conway's "Introduction to VLSI Systems" right now; I decided to go through it just for history's sake a few weeks ago. It's amazing to imagine that time period, it seemed like they were just creating so many new ideas so fast in a completely new realm; making the tools to build new processors to make the tools faster to make new processors faster... on and on and on. They published the book in 1978. We've been on that roller coaster ever since.

RIP.

I never heard of her before today, despite having been interested and educated, and employed in computer science for so long.

What a truly impressive list of achievements, and achieving such great things before, during and after transition gender in the 60s of all things.

I can't imagine what they would have done without being hampered by the social stigma and discrimination they must have faced.

It saddens me that I have only learned of her existence now, at her passing. RIP.

Indeed. It makes me wonder what living figures – in CS and neighbouring fields – are alive and prolific and I'm completely oblivious of.

A possible example of the "Conway Effect"? (mentioned in the article).

No doubt in my mind it is exactly this.

I worked for / with Lynn at Xerox PARC from 1980 - 1982. She will be missed.

created in 2014 with 54 karma?? You should be posting much more - I am sure you have some great ideas to share with all of us.

Hi, Martin? I saw you speak at Ted Selker's NPUC conference at IBM Almaden while you were working at Netscape, and I'm old friends with your brother Paul from when he was at SGI, and I love the cool Graphica Obscura and data flow visual programming stuff he did. I remember Ted Nelson was kind of brusk with you at NPUC because he didn't approve of Netscape's approach to Hypertext of course, but it didn't seem personal, just his usual ranting about how he got it right and everybody else got it wrong. ;) So did both you and Paul work with Lynn Conway's student James Clark at PARC, Netscape and SGI, who Lynn taught VLSI design and who made the Geometry Engine, right? I'd love to hear any of your and Paul's stories from those amazing times of PARC, SGI, and Netscape, too!

Lynn was a real role model for me over the past 25 years. I'm sad that I never got to meet her, but her technical impact is everywhere.

One of the world's most inspiring people. I had the privilege of getting to know her to write a profile for a University of Michigan alumni magazine more than a decade ago: https://news.engin.umich.edu/2014/10/life-engineered/

My favorite thing she said was "Why not question everything?" It stuck with me ever since.

Reminds me of this classic: https://x.com/pickover/status/1536108795901972480

She was kind, generous and from my limited understanding incredibly influential to modern technology concepts. I was able to spend some time with her in Ann Arbor (2000's) and was included in her Successful Transgender People (as a musician). We talked over lunch, and I was struck by how expansive her knowledge and persona was. She and her husband Charlie, loved the outdoors, hiking and motocross. A giant not only for her scientific contributions, but for the resources and advocacy you did for the transgender community. She had to live 'stealth' for many years until an article was about to come out in the early 2000's where she then had to slowly come out to friends and colleauges. That is when she started her website (still hosted by Univ. of Michigan - lynnconway.com) which contains tons of history on her work and valuable resources for trans folk.

Lenny! Expansive is the best word to describe her mind. She was a wonderer, observer, explorer and connector of ideas. …. I hope you are well! - Nicole, Michigan News alum

She was and remains a huge inspiration to many of us. I remember peering over her pages of "Transgender Success Stories" which chronicled trans people who led lives with some measure of success in the 90s and early 2000s. When I came out to my parents as a EE student and trans woman myself, her story was the one resource I made them read. To no avail, mind you, my father called me brainwashed and told me the journey I was on was the "Con Way". I didn't listen and although I never lived up to her professional achievements, my transition was very successful.

I was a teenager in the early 2000s era of internet trans support groups. Lynn's website was one of like three online resources at the time. The goal back then was to transition, pass, and kind of blend in and live your life with minimal harassment. Conway living out and openly back then (as a very successful researcher, no less) was revolutionary. She made things a bit easier for the rest of us who came after.

Lynn Conway, co-author along with Carver Mead of "the textbook" on VLSI design, "Introduction to VLSI Systems", created and taught this historic VLSI Design Course in 1978, which was the first time students designed and fabricated their own integrated circuits:

>"Importantly, these weren’t just any designs, for many pushed the envelope of system architecture. Jim Clark, for instance, prototyped the Geometry Engine and went on to launch Silicon Graphics Incorporated based on that work (see Fig. 16). Guy Steele, Gerry Sussman, Jack Holloway and Alan Bell created the follow-on ‘Scheme’ (a dialect of LISP) microprocessor, another stunning design."

Many more links and beautiful illustrations of her student's VLSI designs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31758139

Also, Jim Clark (SGI, Netscape) was one of Lynn Conway's students, and she taught him how to make his first prototype "Geometry Engine"!

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/MPCAdv.ht...

Just 29 days after the design deadline time at the end of the courses, packaged custom wire-bonded chips were shipped back to all the MPC79 designers. Many of these worked as planned, and the overall activity was a great success. I'll now project photos of several interesting MPC79 projects. First is one of the multiproject chips produced by students and faculty researchers at Stanford University (Fig. 5). Among these is the first prototype of the "Geometry Engine", a high performance computer graphics image-generation system, designed by Jim Clark. That project has since evolved into a very interesting architectural exploration and development project.[9]

Figure 5. Photo of MPC79 Die-Type BK (containing projects from Stanford University):

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/SU-BK1.jp...

[...]

The text itself passed through drafts, became a manuscript, went on to become a published text. Design environments evolved from primitive CIF editors and CIF plotting software on to include all sorts of advanced symbolic layout generators and analysis aids. Some new architectural paradigms have begun to similarly evolve. An example is the series of designs produced by the OM project here at Caltech. At MIT there has been the work on evolving the LISP microprocessors [3,10]. At Stanford, Jim Clark's prototype geometry engine, done as a project for MPC79, has gone on to become the basis of a very powerful graphics processing system architecture [9], involving a later iteration of his prototype plus new work by Marc Hannah on an image memory processor [20].

[...]

For example, the early circuit extractor work done by Clark Baker [16] at MIT became very widely known because Clark made access to the program available to a number of people in the network community. From Clark's viewpoint, this further tested the program and validated the concepts involved. But Clark's use of the network made many, many people aware of what the concept was about. The extractor proved so useful that knowledge about it propagated very rapidly through the community. (Another factor may have been the clever and often bizarre error-messages that Clark's program generated when it found an error in a user's design!)

9. J. Clark, "A VLSI Geometry Processor for Graphics", Computer, Vol. 13, No. 7, July, 1980.

This book was so good that I bought myself a new copy years after leaving college - the only textbook I've done that for.

Thanks for this context. I hadn't known about the link to Jim Clark but it makes sense.

Here's another one. It's Carver Mead, Lynn Conway's co-author, talking about the genesis of their legendary book, and process.

I was a university student at the time, and this was the way you could get your little custom processor into a fab and get hardware back. It was kind of amazing to go from a digital file through a compiler and verification, and then to hardware.

Carver's description with some backstory (probably helpful):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAZWXX5930M&t=1984s

And skipped ahead to just the book part:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAZWXX5930M&t=2064s

I took a one week industrial course at MIT back in ‘79, I think it was. Sussman, Knight, Batalli, the whole amazing crew. We started from scratch with gates and progressed to finished layout designs by the end of the week. Most everything had been coded in Scheme, including the test simulation software. I walked out with a five inch binder of instruction and a vastly overloaded head. It was one of the most amazing experiences in my life. Shortly thereafter, they did the Scheme chip using those tools.

Lynn Conway, Dynamic Instruction Scheduling

https://web.archive.org/web/20150814232249/https://ai.eecs.u...

This report was issued February 23, 1966 which was close to a year before Tomasulo's An Efficient Algorithm for Exploiting Multiple Arithmetic Units.

I'd never heard of this report before today. It isn't taught in Berkeley's CS152/252. It's not mentioned in Hennessy and Patterson's books.

Wow, 4 citations. I feel happy for Lynn that she ended up doing a lot more impressive work, but definitely this should be restored to its proper place in the history of computing.

Something doesn't quite compute here though - according to Wikipedia after she announced her intent to transition Lynn was fired in 1968, but this paper was from 1966 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40650635 also does not have any information. Maybe at least someone shielded her for some time?

Also Francis Allen seems to have worked on the same project at IBM - she mentioned there were works by other women that other people (Turning award winners IIRC) took credit of - could Lynn's work be one of those? Really hope Fran and Lynn would at least knew each other.

This article says that she corrected her name when she posted the scanned paper to her website around 2000.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-19-tm-54188...

lol thanks! Read probably 80% of the article and missed this:

"Almost before knowing it, she had decided. Lynn copied the most important papers. After carefully eradicating her old name and inserting the new on every title page[...]"

A woman of incredible courage - to be able to rebuild her career after being kicked out of IBM despite her achievements, is inspirational. And, given how even the implementation of superscalar processors confuses me, smarter than I’ll ever be for understanding that AND chip fabbing at the same time, one of humanity’s finest technical achievements.

VLSI and processor design are, like most things in computing, things that you can learn if you have basic logical thinking skills and spend the requisite time.

Mead and Conway's textbook unlocked VLSI design for generations of students. Now you can find videos on youtube, and you can even join tiny tapeout to get your chip design fabricated. And for processor design, you can design something in Verilog or VHDL and run it on an FPGA board.

I also recently discovered Digital, a gate/component-level design tool and simulator for digital circuits (which can also export to Verilog for synthesis), that is similar to the older Logisim.

> When nearing retirement, Conway learned that the story of her early work at IBM might soon be revealed through the investigations of Mark Smotherman that were being prepared for a 2001 publication

That kind of makes it sound like Smotherman was poking around trying to find Conway's secrets. What was actually happening is that he was trying to research an early IBM supercomputer project, but was not having much luck. There was very little published information, and IBM had apparently lost its records. Smotherman asked on the net for help and Conway responded and gave him a massive amount of information.

Here's an article that provides more information [1]. Here's the first few paragraphs:

> Late in 1998, a young researcher delving into the secret history of a 30-year-old supercomputer project at IBM published an appeal for help. As Mark Smotherman explained in an Internet posting, he knew that the project had pioneered several supercomputing technologies. But beyond that, the trail was cold. IBM itself appeared to have lost all record of the work, as if having experienced a corporate lobotomy. Published details were sketchy and its chronology full of holes. He had been unable to find anyone with full knowledge of what had once been called “Project Y.”

> Within a few days, a cryptic e-mail arrived at Smotherman’s Clemson University office in South Carolina. The sender was Lynn Conway, one of the most distinguished American women in computer science. She seemed not only to know the entire history of Project Y, but to possess reams of material about it.

> Over the next few weeks, Conway helped Smotherman fill in many of the gaps, but her knowledge presented him with another mystery: How did she know? There was no mention of her name in any of the team rosters. Nor was any association with IBM mentioned in her published resume or in the numerous articles about her in technical journals. When he probed, she would reply only that she had worked at the company under a different name--and her tone made it clear there was no point in asking further.

> What Smotherman could not know was that his appeal for strictly technical information had presented Lynn Conway with a deeply personal dilemma. She was eager for the story of IBM’s project to emerge and for her own role in the work to be celebrated, not suppressed. But she knew that could not happen without opening a door on her past she had kept locked for more than 30 years.

> Only after agonizing for weeks did Conway telephone Smotherman and unburden herself of an extraordinary story.

> “You see,” she began, “when I was at IBM, I was a boy.”

[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-19-tm-54188...

Thank you for sharing those details, I didn't know that. I learned and grew so much by reading Lynn's autobiography, but there's so much in there and it's so deep and personal, that it's hard to get my head around how amazing and difficult a life she had, and details like that help.

I was researching some of the names that Alan Kay mentioned in his classic paper about the history of Smalltalk and his 1993 interview with Yoot Saito, and discovered another amazingly accomplished trans woman at Xerox PARC, Diana Merry-Shapiro, who co-invented BitBlt, and wrote one of the first systems for overlapping windows for Smalltalk, and the Smalltalk code editor.

https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...

Diana Merry-Shapiro (Xerox PARC):

A member of the Learning Research Group, she significantly contributed to the development, testing, and application of the Smalltalk system, focusing on educational technology and learning methodologies. Her involvement was pivotal in integrating and refining the BitBLT graphics operation, enhancing the system's capabilities in graphical manipulation and display.

Diana Merry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Merry

SMALLTALK AT 50

https://computerhistory.org/blog/smalltalk-at-50/

>The second half of the reunion event reunited members of Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group. After a brief introductory video featuring Diana Merry-Shapiro and her memories of what she worked on at PARC, Dave Robson hosted a discussion with Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, and Glenn Krasner.

Oral History of Diana Merry Shapiro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sTUaO3PNkQ

Casa Susanna:

https://www.hammertonail.com/reviews/casa-susanna/

Review: ‘Casa Susanna,’ starring Katherine Cummings, Diana Merry-Shapiro, Betsy Wollheim and Gregory Bagarozy:

https://culturemixonline.com/review-casa-susanna-starring-ka...

Dr. Vanessa Freudenberg is another amazing successful trans woman programmer in the Smalltalk world who's done all kinds of groundbreaking work with Alan Kay, Smalltalk, Squeak, SqueakJS, Viewpoints Research, Croquet, Harc, OLPC, and is quite open and extremely happy about her transition in 2020.

https://www.freudenbergs.de/bert/

Here’s Yoot Saito’s 1993 interview with Alan Kay, when he was visiting Japan with Douglass Engelbart, and Yoot was working for MacWorld Japan. He also has interviews with Douglass Engelbart, Joanna Hoffman, Steve Wozniak, and Bill Atkinson that I hope to dig up and publish, since they were only published decades ago in Japan.

https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...

Here's Alan Kay's history of Smalltalk paper that Brett Victor put online in html, and I'm working on transcribing and formatting the appendices that are missing from that.

https://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/

Without wishing to categorize all of these important woman into the same story, another key trans figure in early personal computing is Sophie Wilson[1], who co-designed the ARM instruction set (and, as important for many, designed the OS for the BBC Microcomputer, including the font).

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson

It's so cool how so many important women in computing are trans women.

Honestly, yeah -- it's not a cheat code, it's facing two sets of pressures from discrimination, not seeing many like you in your field, what you deal with outside of the workplace, etc. And it helped me to see how many people before me succeeded regardless of all that; learning about Lynn Conway ~15 years ago was really important to me.

We have our own set of giants to stand on the shoulders of.

I recommend reading Lynn's story, written in her own words:

https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/RetrospectiveT.html

It is amazing, tragic, and triumphant in so many ways.

Thanks for sharing!

In case anyone knows, what's the best way to get this to be readable on an e-reader? Haven't found a PDF yet, probably exporting into a PDF is the easiest since it's only a couple dozen pages maybe?!

Save as HTML with images and run through Calibre:

  $ ebook-convert index.html book.epub

Here are the files if you trust a rando on the internet. Since they're just ZIP archives, you can unpack and inspect both to make sure there's no JS there. .mobi looks fine on my Kindle.

https://0x0.st/Xc8M.epub

https://0x0.st/Xc8B.mobi

> if you trust a rando on the internet

Why did you say that, now I have to check the files :)

Thank you

A comment when an upvote would do - this is the kind of small act of generosity that I wish to acknowledge and praise in prose - thank you for taking the couple of minutes to do this. I've been feeling a little bleak about the internet lately as the SNR plummets in the tidal wave of AI seo search results, AI comments, etc. Thank you for taking the trouble. I went to EMFCamp in the UK a couple of weeks ago and had a similar resurgence in enthusiasm about simple things like asking a question of someone and getting an above-and-beyond, going-out-of-their-way response to share their enthusiasm and knowledge about something with you. We must defend these pockets of human interaction. [brought to you after a boozy work lunch but the sentiment is genuine].

A bit meta, but your response is part of boosting that SNR, in the best way possible.

We already saw the front-page discussion about "slop", but we don't have to let it wash over all of us, all of the time. Thank you (and GP) for doing your part!

MediaWiki2Latex can convert to ePub.

https://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/

If you've got a Kobo, Pocket seems to recognize it as an article (it often doesn't) and renders it well enough.

EDIT: Nevermind, Pocket only captures the preface (first four minutes, basically).

Incredible

"The fact that I started a new career all over again, at the bottom of the ladder, after being fired by IBM and rejected by family and friends . . . may also give hope to others trapped in similar situations."

Thanks for calling that out, I'd like to read more about how that went. I'm considering what the best move for me is now, obviously with the terrible market and obscene competition, whether to try and leverage the amalgamation of skills I've built up and just push harder as a contractor, or pivot entirely down the meme path of trying trades. Being in her situation would perhaps be more wildly more difficult, but for different reasons and in different circumstances.

What also struck me about that snippet of the story, is that the context for what a career meant might have been a bit different than now. A career at one single company seems like quite a rarity these days, and we wouldn't necessarily consider it to be a career restart if you're just going to another company, unless you're perhaps of a certain generation.

If you’re changing your name and identity, don’t have a network, and can’t put any previous experience on your CV, I think that would absolutely qualify as a career restart today, even if you’re in the same broad industry and using many of the same skills.

Speaking of changing name and identity, Wikipedia doesn't have any information about her original name. It's strange that this information is missing, from a purely encyclopedic point of view. In fact, I cannot even find this information on the web.

Adressed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40650380

and: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Gend...

Thanks! To be honest I don't agree with that rule, but maybe HN is not the place to discuss Wikipedia's policies on sensitive subjects.

It's really tough. I have worked in an industry where I got credits for a decade in some higher quality productions as well. I had to start at 0, because credits are set in stone, and it would be dangerous to connect these two lifes for me.

Thank you for sharing!! Fascinating and really helpful to those of us who are undergoing our own gender transitions!

Same link without SSL errors: https://archive.is/zVIWu

Interestingly the cert expired just a few days ago.

a fitting epitath?

Here lies xyz; their cert expired without renewal

I appreciate her making the effort to tell her story. I struggle sometimes to understand what it means when people say they feel born in the wrong gender. They way she describes it - not just about wanting to do 'girl' things but wanting to be soft and round and feminine - is eye-opening for me.

I read around reddit of experiences of people who wore VR headsets and played a character of the other gender. The NPCs treated them as such, but they themselves experienced gender incongruence. Their internal identity was at mismatch with how the NPCs treated them, and that helped them understand what gender dysphoria means.

if the NPCs can do this in a non trivial way it could be a really powerful experience.

Can you link to the post about that? Because I’m guessing there’s a selection effect where only those who had profound experiences commented. I’ve done similar things in VR and found it wasn’t any different than when I had a robot body or a cartoon carrot body. Yes the new body is strange and interesting in some ways, but on an emotional level it’s like driving a different car.

It's not about the body itself but about how the universe treated the player.

Unfortunately I don't think VR will ever have enough bandwidth to provide an experience equivalent to Sword Art Online, ie full body immersion.

I will see if I can find them again.

> Can you link to the post about that? Because I’m guessing there’s a selection effect where only those who had profound experiences commented.

They didn't say everyone experienced it.

> I’ve done similar things in VR and found it wasn’t any different than when I had a robot body or a cartoon carrot body.

Did characters treat you as not man and not woman? And not in the way most English is gender neutral? It seems not similar otherwise.

As much as "trapped in the wrong body" is a cliché, the physical aspect of gender dysphoria is profound, and often overlooked. I don't care about competing in women's sports, or what locker room I had to use. I cared about my body becoming grotesque and alien to me, and became overwhelmed with how profoundly wrong it felt. It's not that I want to look like a girl so I can be treated like one - I want to look like a girl, regardless of how I'm treated. My dysphoria is actually worse when I'm alone, because I can't distract myself with socializing. It's hard to empathize with physical dysphoria if you've never felt it, but I appreciate your struggle.

> It's not that I want to look like a girl so I can be treated like one - I want to look like a girl, regardless of how I'm treated.

Same, I figured if I was on a desert island with nobody around and a machine that magically dispensed estrogen, it would actually be easier to transition, since I wouldn't have to justify my decision to anyone. That was part of how I convinced myself to start, way back before COVID.

I think that many struggle to understand because they think something like "how would it feel to want to be a woman", rather than flip it to their gender. So if you're a cis man, try to imagine you were a trans man; born female, raised a girl, expected to conform to your local female beauty norms, be expected to bear children, less body hair and muscle mass, curves in places unfamiliar to you, flirted with by men, etc.

It's always hard to truly understand how another person views the world, but I've heard that approach work for others in the past.

> So if you're a cis man, try to imagine you were a trans man; born female, raised a girl, expected to conform to your local female beauty norms, be expected to bear children, less body hair and muscle mass, curves in places unfamiliar to you, flirted with by men, etc.

Is it weird if I suspect that it wouldn't bother me? I'd have been raised from birth to expect those things so they wouldn't be surprising to girl-me, and the experience of having more body hair and muscle mass would be entirely foreign to me. If men flirting with me was off-putting I'd probably just assume I was gay, and I'm lucky enough to live in an environment where I don't have to buy into or perform traditional gender roles any more than I want to. It's probably easy for me to say, having never a experienced a mismatch, but any intrinsic sense of inner maleness that wasn't 'nurtured' into me ranks pretty low on the list of things that comprise my self-identity.

You have to understand that until extremely recently- and still, not everywhere, as politics is any indication- people very seriously and genuinely believe that being gay or trans is tantamount to being a pedophile in terms of wrongness. It isn't so much about how you feel, but how others are making you feel.

Imagine if you felt fine in your body... but people around you stared and turned up their nose at you wherever you went because there was some kind of rumour that said you were a pedo. Imagine how incredibly harmful that would be, day in and day out, to your psyche, to your mental health, unable to escape it. Imagine if everyone avoided you because- even if they didn't believe you were one- they didn't want to be seen associating with someone everyone thought was one. Imagine if your family believed that. Imagine, no matter how much you tried to say you weren't and prove you weren't, they still believed it, because that's what the culture you're in says it's equal a crime to.

It's no doubt that the people who persist because they know their personal truth are unfathomably strong people. And for those who don't make it, you can understand why. Once you realize this injustice, it's hard not to be on their side and be incensed against that prejudice, seeing the laws being passed in the US specifically to harm them, as ludicrous.

>Is it weird if I suspect that it wouldn't bother me? I'd have been raised from birth to expect those things so they wouldn't be surprising to girl-me

I guess you're making the assumption that "being raised from birth to expect" things is a stronger force than your own innate personality, desires, etc.

You might compare it to people who are "raised from birth to expect" to be attracted to the opposite sex, but that just isn't who they are.

I've heard the phrase "cis by default" used to describe this experience (which I mostly share). Essentially, the intensity of feelings regarding gender can vary widely from person into person and so a lot of people are fine with the gender they were born as not because they strongly feel like a woman/man, but precisely because they don't have strong feelings about it. (And therefore being transgender is the intersection of both "having a strong internal feeling about gender" and "the feelings you have about gender not matching what society categorizes your body as".)

That said, I suspect that at least some "cis by default" people would indeed experience feelings of a brain-body mismatch if they had different parts, it just happens to be something you can't test for.

> And therefore being transgender is the intersection of both "having a strong internal feeling about gender" and "the feelings you have about gender not matching what society categorizes your body as"

I am another cis man who suspects I would have been just as comfortable had I been born a cis woman, and I have independently come to a similar conclusion. I feel no need to emphasise my social or physical "masculinity", but neither do I make any effort towards being non-gender-conforming — I am perfectly happy having a beard, being hairy and wearing "men's" clothes. Conversely, if I had been born a woman with my same congenital personality, I think I wouldn't have made a particular effort to present my "femininity", but I would have been perfectly comfortable being less hairy, having boobs, and dressing and behaving as do some of my female friends (who are cis and hetero, homo, and bisexual) who, without being GNC, are not necessarily super-feminine.

What I would really like to know is whether I'm right in my intuition that certain cis-male and cis-female individuals feel the opposite. I imagine that cis men who enjoy "feeling like a man" or showing manliness (within the non-toxic and healthy range) are pretty sure they would have hated being born a woman. The same goes for cis women who love displaying their femininity; they probably feel they would hate having been born a man if they were to be asked.

That sounds like my experience. I didn't really begin questioning what I really "was" until I got beyond thinking that my desire to dress in women's clothing was more than just a "fetish," and I decided to see what I'd look like with a full feminine presentation. The answer was: I looked like me. And I turned out to be far more "passable" than I thought.

(There's always going to be people that recognize me for what I am. But, for the most part, they don't insult me about it to my face, or even mention it at all.)

Exactly. As a cis man the closest I have experienced was being mistaken for a girl (both as a kid and later when I had long hair) and getting cat-called or receiving unwanted sexual comments from strangers.

Those situations were rapidly defused when the people in question realized I was male (although as an adult I was genuinely worried it might result in violence if I didn't also ensure they understood I was straight) but I can't imagine what it would be like when most people wouldn't and would insist I'm a gender I'm not. Especially if my body also unhelpfully changed through hormone washes in ways that contradict my gender identity.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240309142149/https://ai.eecs.u...

Thank you so, so much for this link. Her creativity and bravery, and the way they're intertwined, is so incredibly inspiring.

(FYI: Readers should note that content warnings for self-harm apply in Part II.)

Better to share the non-ssl link: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/RetrospectiveT.html

> She worked at IBM in the 1960s and invented generalized dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order execution, used by most modern computer processors to improve performance.

I only found out about her a few weeks ago, when I was trying to understand that recent GhostRace exploit. It uses out-of-order execution, which led me to her. There's a fun little cartoon about her somewhere on YouTube, but I can't find it.

Sad that she's now gone!

Great prof. Changed my entire career arc. RIP.

This appears to the the source Wikipedia is citing - http://www.myhusbandbetty.com/wordPressNEW/2024/06/11/lynn-c...

Which is the personal blog of Helen Boyd, author of one of the classic books on crossdressing and transgender, My Husband Betty. I was hoping for something more authoritative...

Also Same.

Wikipedia is now using https://news.engin.umich.edu/2024/06/the-legacy-of-lynn-conw...

There's also now a story from the Los Angeles Times via Yahoo News: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/lynn-conway-leading-computer-scie...

May she rest in peace, her achievements and contributions to the field of computing are unfortunately unknown to those outside of the field - but impacted so much more than just computing.

> Although she had hoped to be allowed to transition on the job, IBM fired Conway in 1968 after she revealed her intention to transition.[19] IBM apologized for this in 2020.

Given that in 2012 there was an entire IEEE magazine issue dedicated to her career and contributions to the field which really brought awareness of all her contributions...it's disappointing it took IBM so long to apologize, especially given they outed her circa ~2000.

But it eventually happened, which is a good thing. Society does not always change fast enough.

agreed. It did happen, but not fast enough, and that should be our motivation to continual push for change, even when we know it's inevitable

Have worked with several trans folks at major legacy corps like IBM and while I'm sure there may have been rank-and-file issues, discrimination was not tolerated by mgmt in the latter 90s. My memory is IBM and HP added non-discrimination policies around that time.

"discrimination was not tolerated by mgmt in the latter 90s"

That's a really nice thought. Having lived as a trans woman in the 90s, it does not match reality though.

Management is, always, a mixed bag. More and more managers indeed do not tolerate discrimination, but even in the face of policies, it exists. It certainly existed in the 90s, in very large patches.

As for corporate policies, IBM added theirs (gender identity specifically) in 2002. HP had GLEN in 1995 - "Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual employee network". You'll note gender identity isn't part of that, though. (And bisexual is a silent B, I guess ;) If anybody knows when they included gender identity, I'd love to hear about it!

Before that, it was patchwork-y, and your best bet was finding a corner of the corporation that was supportive. And never raising your head to far, just in case. (Many of us did anyways, but more often than not, that had indeed the expected outcome)

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy and grateful HP & IBM were at the forefront of these policies. But it wasn't quite as easy a transition.

>discrimination was not tolerated by mgmt in the latter 90s

Talk is cheap.

non-discrimination policies are one thing. Being able to accept and acknowledge you made a mistake and vehemently admit it to the world is a whole other thing.

One day we will be struggling for survival, be it here on Earth or in space, and the years wasted by our species getting in the way of technological advancement by preventing people like Hypathia of Alexandria, Alan Turing, Galileo Galilei, Lynn Conway and many others from fulfilling their full potential could make the difference between collective survival or death.

We are truly an idiotic species sometimes.

What a terribly difficult life and yet with so many great achievements. An inspiration!

I'm ashamed to say I did not know about this person before today; what an interesting life she led.

A true giant both for industry and people.

Shame on all of "us" for missing the date.

It's such a tragedy. She has an explanation, called "The Conway Effect."

She wrote about it 2018.

"When “others” (such as women and people of color) make innovative contributions in scientific and technical fields, they often “disappear” from later history and their contributions are ascribed elsewhere. This is seldom deliberate—rather, it’s a result of the accumulation of advantage by those who are expected to innovate. This article chronicles an example of such a disappearance and introduces the Conway Effect to elucidate the disappearance process."

https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/2018/10/mco2018100...

We covered VLSI design as part of Comp. Sci at Bristol, UK c.1980, based on Conway & Mead's "Introduction to VLSI systems".

Comp. Sci was mostly software, but we also did some 7400 series TTL bread boarding in the lab - building things like traffic-light LED sequencers based on DIY flip flops made out of NAND gates.

VLSI design was a revelation - that there was a different way to designing things than out of TTL "lego bricks", and that you could go full custom instead !

I was never aware of Lynn Conway's personal transgender challenges - more power to her for having had such an amazing career and impact while dealing with this.

How life plays things out...

I was told earlier today that my best friend in this world has died. We haven't talked for the past 4-5 days (we usually catch up on the weekends - but this past weekend he had a packed concert-going-schedule - we live in different countries so I couldn't join).

What sucks the most is that we use(d) Signal, and we have autodestruct every 2 days so apart from some really old emails, I got nothing left from him, and our frequent "correspondence".

I am using the "Henry Bemis" moniker because he was making fun of me and my reading and I was making fun of him and his frequent cinema-going (and we both loved THAT episode of the Twilight Zone - Time enough at last)(great episode btw!!)

And now I got into HN and I saw the black banner on top and I thought "WTF is going on today with the deaths!" and my stomach got a bit tighter.

It sucks when people we love die. It's what Keanu said to Colbert "those who love us will miss us".

My friend also "..would like to live five lives in the course of one life", but alas, he managed to live half of it.

Farewell to those who fade/reincarnate/cross the river Styx/go to hell/go to paradise.. we will miss them.

I don't maintain a blog, so I'll be keeping this bookmarked. Apologies for the 'spam', I wanted to get this out of my system.

Anyway, sorry to hear Lynn Conway has died, looked technology just lost a great contributor.

I'm sorry for your loss!

To lose a friend like that sucks. I'm sorry for your loss.

lots of progress in transgender issues since then because of people like lynn conway. Because of people like her, fewer people will lose their careers (or have to rebuild) or kids just because they corrected their gender.

I’m one of those many who owe her a debt of gratitude. May her memory be a blessing.

As am I

Indeed. I certainly didn't lose mine when I transitioned in July 2017. In fact, I helped my company's HR department figure out how to handle it, as I was also a support group facilitator and had access to information that could help.

Literally, I took a Thursday and Friday off (Thursday being the day my name change was granted) and came back as Amy on Monday. My cubicle nameplate had already been replaced, and someone had taped a "WELCOME AMY!" sign over one of my monitors. There were some bobbles with getting all my accounts changed, but those were quickly resolved. (I left that company two years later, and now work somewhere where I've never been anyone but Amy.)

I am glad you had such a warm welcome :) I too, did not lose my job either; however, my reception was not as nice as yours. I moved on ten months or so later, and getting a "fresh start" where I was not known for anything other than my bona fides and my cv/resume, was wonderful.

What an absolute genius. RIP, Lynn.

How touching to read so many appreciative comments A life well spent RIP Lynn, may the earth be light on you

Since many are focusing on the transgender aspect, I'll mention this thoughtful article (the trans argument starts in section V). It's been years since I first came across it, but it really affected my thinking on trans people.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/trans-woman-and-computer-...

Her life sounds like an interesting one (in good and bad ways). I would like to read a biography, or even see a biographical or dramatized film about it.

IBM did apologize to her: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway#IBM's_apology

86 years old! She had a great life.

She spoke at my commencement a few years back. Her story is an interesting one

Great loss for our community.

"...Lynn was recently awarded the rare IBM Lifetime Achievement Award, given to individuals who have changed the world through technology inventions."

After the way they treated her, I wouldn't accept it.

Thank you for the inspiration as I continue my gender transition. I appreciate your struggles and dedication to living a life that was "for you" and not for anyone else. RIP.

Sad but poignant during Pride month. Even in the US, we still have so many people who oppress those who are different, in gender, sexual orientation, relationship style, etc. Lynn suffered that oppression. Yet despite it, she achieved great things. I'll think of her whenever I see a Pride flag this month.

>> Yet despite it, she achieved great things.

correction: achieved great things TWICE.

Way more than that: two professional achievements, and innumerable personal achievements of all the people she reached and helped, many of whom have posted here, but also so many more. And not just helping trans people live, but helping cis people understand.

Here's an important point that Lynn makes in her retrospective, about how LGBTQ diversity benefits everyone, especially outstanding women:

https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/Retrospective6.html

>Not only that, but many companies are now sensitive to the fact that locations known to be "GLBT friendly", such as Austin, TX and the Research Triangle, NC are able to attract outstanding employees (especially outstanding women employees) who are not GLB or T, but who want to work in an environment that is welcoming of diversity. More and more bright young people are recognizing that conformist environments that are not welcoming of diversity may not be welcoming of new ideas either, and do not want to work at such places.

>[Note: This concept has gotten a lot of attention recently in high-tech circles, especially due to the work of Richard Florida, founder and director of the Software Industry Center at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University. Florida is Professor of Regional Economic Development at CMU, and is a pioneering cartographer of talent. The January 2001 issue of the on-Line magazine Fast Company described Florida's work, including the significance of the so-called "Gay Index" in an article entitled Where Are You on the Talent Map (https://web.archive.org/web/20010331103840/https://www.fastc...). For more information this important work, see https://web.archive.org/web/20030112122356/http://www.brook....]

Very sad. Do we know how she passed?

The LA Times article says "Conway died Sunday, according to her husband, Charles Rogers, at home in Jackson, Mich., of a heart condition."

see https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-06-11/lynn-conwa...

n the 1980's, Lynn Conway gave one of the two best talks I've heard in my life. She used sociology to understand how to spread radical ideas, starting with the example of birds in England teaching each other how to poke the foil in milk deliveries, to drink the cream. She applied this to teaching a revolutionary approach to VSLI chip design, in schools across the country.

I had no idea she was trans. When I figured this out, it became part of my spiel to students: If being different doesn't destroy you, it'll make you stronger. It's not simply that one can be just as good a scientist while being gay, for example. No, we live in a country so stupid it may reelect Trump, and there are still issues with being different. If the experience can teach you that many people are crippled by convention and full of shit, that revelation can liberate you to do more original work.

R.I.P.

James Conway.

I know it was already suggested in previous comments, but I do not see the black bar? Was it removed already?

never mind, I answered my own question :) I just realized it is only so long as the article/news of the death of the individual is at the top of HN.

RIP. A great reminder that great achievers tend to be idiosyncratic people, not necessarily "by the book, SAT 1600, GPA 4.0, Ivy League Plus" people.

We should all be thankful for her contributions and for those who preceded her who were similarly "abnormal" by the standards of their time.

Idiosyncratic with a genius-level 155 IQ (which is something that the prevailing cultural zeitgeist does its best to bulldoze)

In my view, the lesson of Lynn's life and contributions is twofold:

- California continues to be a necessary place for America and the world. By this I mean not just the geography, but a place that welcomes people from all walks of life seeking new beginnings.

- Never give up. Seriously. She was in her late 30s, early 40s -an age many would have considered "old" in the 1970s- when she made the breakthrough that made her famous.

If this is verified, I think a black band is 100% warranted. As I understand it, she was a real innovator in VLSI, which I think we all agree is somewhat important :)

EDIT: GG, the black band appeared as I sent this

omg is that what that is?

all this time I thought the CSS was screwed up on my browser. I had assumed it all my anti-ad/privacy plugins.

Yep, loss of a prominent HN-relevant person.

and list of past black bars: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37018825

While her contributions to the VLSI design methodologies are the best known and the most influential, that is because at that time she worked in academia, in plain sight.

She had another extremely important contribution much earlier, when working at IBM, at the Advanced Computer System project.

She invented the first methods that could be used for designing a CPU that can initiate multiple instructions in the same clock cycle and also out of order in comparison with the program. Such a CPU will be named only 2 decades later as a superscalar CPU (also inside IBM and by people familiar with the old ACS project). (The earlier CDC 6600 could initiate only 1 instruction per clock cycle, in program order, even if after initiation it could execute the instructions concurrently and complete them out-of-order, depending on the availability of execution units.)

Her work on superscalar CPUs did not become known until much later, because it was written in confidential internal reports about the ACS project, which was canceled, unlike the later and much less comprehensive work of Tomasulo, which was published in a journal and which was used in a commercial product, so it became the reference on out-of-order execution in the open literature, for several decades.

At the time when she worked at IBM, her legal gender was still male, and when she announced her intention of gender change, she was fired by IBM, which is likely to have contributed to the obscurity that covered her ACS work at IBM.

Her "Dynamic Instruction Scheduling" report from 1966 is mandatory reading for anyone who is interested about the evolution of the superscalar and out-of-order CPUs.

https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/ACS/Archive/ACSarchi...

Fascinating. It wasn't long ago I did a high performance computer architecture grad class. They covered Tomasulo but no mention of Conway's contributions. TIL.

You might also, then, appreciate her IEEE article introducing the Conway Effect: https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/2018/10/mco2018100...

Is there a citation for this, or an announcement somewhere? The Wikipedia page was changed, but with no link backing it up, and I can't find any.

EDIT: ah, found it: http://www.myhusbandbetty.com/wordPressNEW/2024/06/11/lynn-c...

RIP.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240611172823/http://www.myhusb...

Wikipedia has updated to use the following U.Mich announcement: https://news.engin.umich.edu/2024/06/the-legacy-of-lynn-conw...

There's also now an article from the Los Angeles Times via Yahoo News: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/lynn-conway-leading-computer-scie...

Why does Wikipedia not list the first spouse or children?

No confirmed sources. This was discussed on the talk page.

RIP, Lynn Conway.

For those had a doubt like me, it is different Conway than another computer scientist,John Horton Conway (26 December 1937 – 11 April 2020) famous for "Conway's Game of Life".

For those of you who are inclined to say "HackerNews doesn't deal with politics", I hope that Lynn's story reminds you that any work you do is intertwined with politics. While I appreciate that it's a difficult line to walk, to have productive and relevant political discussion in a forum like this, politics and social acceptance are a part of every aspect of our lives. Brilliant, kind, impactful people are kept from leading the life they want to lead every day because of societal intolerance for who they are. Incredible people like Lynn who have overcome that intolerance to lead a remarkable life should remind everyone of the suffering that others go through. There are uncountable other people who are not allowed to be themselves and who are suffocated in our society, with the lives of transgender people often ending in ostracisation or murder. One of the remarkable things about technology is that it enables trodden people to escape this tyranny to an extent once impossible. It enables marginalized people to be themselves in our world. Let us continue to enable that.

Such "political" discussions and the impact technology has on them are an important part of the discourse here. I'm sad she is gone but I'm glad to see that this post is high up the front page. If you're inclined to denigrate transgender people, I encourage you to consider that they are trying to lead an honest life. I encourage you to consider what you're taking away from them and from the world by dehumanizing them. No matter why they are who they are.

Anybody who conflates human rights as "politics" are someone I simply cannot respect

A persons right to exist is not political

(This isn't a dig at OP but it's worth restating)

Human rights are intimately woven into International Law and state sovereignty. The work of the TWAIL scholars is relevant, especially as regards how human rights are deployed to undermine the sovereignty of the global south following the rapid “decolonisation” of the mid 20th century.

I’m afraid it’s almost impossible to divorce politics and human rights.

Politics are intertwined in every facet of the human experience, because they're effectively the net result of a social group

Some people however strive to "live above" politics, or to breathlessly demand things be "apolitical" based on their own biases. That bias in of itself being as "political" as anything else

Politics follow ethics in democratic societies. However, our understanding of ethics is always developing. We now understand that homosexuality is ethical. We understand that transgenderism is ethical. There will be more things in the future where politics has to bow to our improved understanding of ethics. Ethics is always a foundation for democratic politics, because politics needs to govern how we as a society live together in peace.

>I’m afraid it’s almost impossible to divorce politics and human rights.

It is, example?

Nord Korea signed it, the US and Canada just ratified it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_th...

> the US and Canada just ratified it

Canada ratified it years ago (if we're not counting optional protocols), but according to https://indicators.ohchr.org/, the US hasn't. Do you have a source?

https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/MTDSG/Volume%20I/Cha...

According to that document, the US _signed_ it in 1995, but has yet to _ratify_ it (notice the blank space in the third column).

First time I heard about TWAIL. Ok, now human rights are controversial? The one ideal, that whoever you are, wherever you are, you hold universal rights because you are a human. This are Western ideas and are not true for the global south? This belief is weaponized?

I cannot believe this. Simply outrageous. I never understood the religious people before - to me this is a sacrilege.

Universal human rights are the hill I will literally die on.

human rights in spirit are not. but in practice (see the the argument below) they are used more as a rhetorical shield. they are toothless paper tigers, they are extremely easy to co-opt and corrupt the spirit. (eg. see how Putin loves harping on about self-determination of people in the annexed regions; how proudly democratic North Korea is.)

I hope my extreme summarization is not completely useless.

https://www.philosophizethis.org/transcript/episode-191-tran... // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiE5rBLrIgM

First: very nice podcast.

Second: the biggest straw man I have ever seen. Rage bait Philosophy.Just because human rights are violated does not mean, that they are useless or non existence.

It's a good word of caution specially the normalizing states of emergency and dehumanizing people.

Civil libertys and democracy are fragile achievements, that need to be protected by the citizens. Human rights are rights against an overbearing state.

All the examples given are valid points, that violate human rights. And for every issue there is a human right group, that fights against the violations.

I dont buy his conclusion about potential either... Another magical force.

Regarding organisations and corporations he should really read up on Luhmann.

So maybe I am a fanatic - none of his arguments strike true for me.

Thanks for exposing me to this ideas!

Yeah, I had the exact same sentiment. (As in "sure we don't live in a perfect world, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to set goals as a bare minimum baseline".)

Oh, here's one more video on human rights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhRBsJYWR8Q (by Jonas Čeika - CCK Philosophy, a collectivist/Marxist?)

> A persons right to exist is not political

I don't think anyone is saying anyone else should not exist.

While I agree that everything is inescapably political, I think the subtext of quoted comment was not just exist as in "be alive", but exist as in "be alive with dignity + autonomy". Which (going by the wiki on Lynn) was clearly a strong point of contention / friction between them and greater society.

The Alan Turing comparison springs to mind.

I think an important distinction people are looking for is:

It's not the mere existence of a person that's an issue, but rather the coercive, punishing activism that takes place around a false idea that human rights are at risk, while these personal choices are simultaneously being celebrated by nearly every government institution and major corporation in existence.

The same activism requires full acceptance by parents, families, and children who do not want these choices influencing their personal lives.

To say these rights are at risk is an outright lie.

It's one thing to have a significant voter base opposed to those choices and still be fully able to live and express those choices freely and publicly — while it's a whole different issue to have governments actively enforcing a different private life against their will (specifically LGBTQ folks).

(Edits: re-word for clarification)

While I agree that institutions and corporations are more actively participating in human rights issues in the recent past, something I think is a really good thing, I don't see the aspects of that coverage that are coercive or punishing. Your argument disingenuous on two points:

1) Nowhere, in history, does "government actively enforcing a different private life against one's will" mean "you are forced to live or participate in a transgender life". For the entirety of history government and corporations have actively forced "different" people like Lynn to conform to your expectations of them. See Lynn being fired from IBM.

2) "To say they are at risk is an outright lie". The rhetoric and social norms around the existence of transgender people enables violent people to murder them. They are absolutely actively at risk. What other phrase, besides "at risk", would you use to explain that transgender people are 4 times more likely to be murdered. They are literally killed for being different and because we dehumanize them.

I look forward to the day that what you say is true. That there are people who oppose those choices but that transgender people can live a free and public life without being murdered for being themselves. I think what you're putting forward sounds great.

> these personal choices are simultaneously being celebrated by nearly every government institution and major corporation in existence

This is very incorrect, and an indicator that you should broaden the sources you get information from. Your other comments corroborate this, you have skewed view of the world that is based on looking at a small slice. It's not that they're fabricating things, it's that they do not give you an accurate view of the magnitudes of the forces and movements in the world.

> A persons right to exist is not political

It is, both in the literal sense of political as “relating to government or public affairs”, and also quite often in the frequently used sense of “controversial between political parties or factions”.

The fact that your political view is that it should not be political (in presumably the latter sense) does not change the fact that it often factually is.

Thirty years almost everyone believed that a person's sex is determined at conception and is immutable, and most people on earth probably still believe that today.

You're using the word sex. There is a known, massively complex, relationship between sex and gender but it's not 1:1. For anyone. Or, if you think that's not true, then please describe to me how they're identical. In a group of men, in any place in the world, you'll find wildly varying accounts of what the male gender "is" all the way down to how their bodies should look.

And, gender aside, the most important thing to consider is the existence of intersex people, the diaspora of their bodies, and to consider how you think we should talk about them. Sex is, even outside gender, in fact not immutable. It's biology. These people are also historically denigrated.

Please imagine how ~150 years ago we collectively thought (and some people still think) that a person's race determined their intelligence. Historically "fundamental truths" usually end up with people being thought of as subhuman. The "fundamental truth" of sex, as it's presented by those who consider trans folks not people, is the same sort of truth. Biological sex is a spectrum, demonstrably. Gender is also demonstrably a spectrum. I don't care what people believe sex is or isn't. I care that we treat everyone, no matter how "weird" with respect.

> There is a known, massively complex, relationship between sex and gender but it's not 1:1

You could argue though that it's only complex because we (collectively) decided to complicate it in order to accommodate the preferences of small subsets of society. In some other country, society might collectively decide not to accommodate said wishes and instead treat sex and gender as immutable and indistinguishable. Such a course would result in a simpler classification system: XX = female, XY = male, anything else = unclassified (genetic defect handled on a case-by-case basis).

The classification you've described is not valid for use with Homo sapiens, neither today nor in the future. It's based on the assumption that our genes control our organs, when they're merely a weighted suggestion at best. And, the Y chromosome is gradually withering away in humankind and is expected to disappear someday. Human beings can develop fertile male reproductive organs without it (see below), and evolution abhors exceptions that have no benefit and many drawbacks (such as colorblindness).

> a simpler classification system: XX = female, XY = male

This would, as with all other such systems that refer to X/Y chromosomes, be invalidated immediately upon contact with reality. I estimate that a couple million people worldwide have one set of fertile reproductive organs that do not match the binary view described – that is: men without, and women with, a Y chromosome.

> it's only complex because we (collectively) decided to complicate it in order to accommodate the preferences of small subsets of society

None of these people selected a "preference" at birth, and may go their entire lives and have children without ever realizing that their chromosomes and their reproductive organs do not match the XX/XY binary you've presented.

> anything else = unclassified (genetic defect handled on a case-by-case basis)

This would mislabel XXX, XXY, XYY people as "defects" for genetic circumstances that do not necessarily have any visible presentation, that people may not be aware of at all.

It also mislabel some, but not all, intersex people as "defects". Intersex people span the entire spectrum of known chromosome combinations in human beings: Human bodies produce one or more sets of (often) fertile reproductive equipment regardless of what chromosomes are or are not present.

Ironically, then, focusing on XX/XY classifications while disregarding the realities of human biology always results in an invalid classification system that is more likely to harm cis people than intersex people.

Prior to Mendel, sex and gender were both based on primary sex characteristics. One could argue that's an even simpler model.

And trans people still existed, just had impossibly harder lives than now. Why do we want to return to that?

I think it's possible to have a simpler social classification system without treating trans people poorly. There are many other rare mental issues that we can't treat well and that we don't bend all of society to try to alleviate for the victims. That doesn't mean we have to hate on the victims or treat them poorly.

There are a a few pretty big upsides I can think of to using a simpler social gender classification system: less social friction/discord/controversy (too much of this and your country falls apart and everyone is worse off), less social confusion/cognitive burden (pronouns, as one example, have basically become a third name that you have to memorize in addition to first and and secondary names whereas they used to just be a derived property that you didn't have to memorize).

Simpler than "treat people how they look and act, update your assumptions if corrected"?

This system can break down for some trans people (although I bet most make excessive effort to present as their preferred gender), but it also breaks down for effeminate males and masculine women (and I bet this is the larger category). Despite these difficulties, it's worked for literally all of history until people started pretending they don't know how pronouns work. Test it yourself by taking a look at Lynn's picture and asking which pronouns you'd use.

I'm not sure how invoking genetics simplifies anything. Have you had your sex chromosomes checked? I haven't, and triple-X and KS are often undiagnosed! I'd hate to have to update my drivers license to "unclassified" in my 30s.

Yes, it's simpler because it's immutable. It's the mutability of identity that causes so much confusion and complexity. In Lynn's case she was a man the first 30+ years of life and even married and had kids. Then later switched genders, names, and pronouns. That's anything but simple since now every person and computer database that ever knew her now has to track and reconcile 2 identities. It's incredibly confusing when people change their identities later in life, especially if you are out of the loop. Even more confusing if people change identities multiple times.

I actually don't really care too much which classification system is used (chromosomes vs. observable genitalia at birth vs. something else), I just think the pros of collectively treating certain aspects of identity as immutable such as gender, race, and possibly even name, outweigh the cons of making a tiny fraction of the populace slightly more uncomfortable.

You're arguing that somebody who wears dresses and has breasts should be referred to as male? That pronouns shouldn't be based on appearance or preference like we've done throughout history, we should instead invent new classifications based upon unobservable characteristics like genetics or genitalia at birth? And that this is all being done to reduce confusion?

I'll be honest. I'm confused.

I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree. I personally think it's simpler to continue to refer to "Chelsea Manning" as "Bradley Manning" with he/him, even if they decided later to completely change their identity. Close friends can call them "Chelsea" out of respect, but society should not rewrite history to erase all traces of "Bradley" in order to accommodate one individual's mental health struggles. I find (the history rewriting) to be extremely confusing and, frankly, Orwellian. That said, if I'm interacting with a trans person that prefers some name/pronouns, I will use them out of respect, even if I fundamentally disagree with a lot of trans activism.

Do you hold the same views about marriage? That changing one's last name is is confusing and Orwellian? That close friends might humor the individual out of respect, but society at large should refuse to allow history to be rewritten?

I personally am against changing of last names at marriage and encouraged my wife not to change hers.

But to directly address your point... the main difference here is that "dead names" and "dead pronouns" are considered harmful and/or offensive and are therefore actively hunted and scrubbed from history by activists, unlike maiden names which are considered benign.

Or because the the original basis we used to determine this was overly simplistic, and based on incomplete data and assumptions at the time.

Evidence and data seems to support this as we learn and discover more.

It's a lot more complicated than that. What constitutes a human right is deeply tied up in questions of ethics that are not settled and have no universal acceptance even within a single culture. Any given person will have deep feelings about the human rights that their ethical framework demands, but those deep feelings will often contradict the deeply held feelings of other people.

This means that which ethical framework we as a society use to decide what counts as a human right is an inherently political question: it's a decision that we try to make as a society in as nonviolent a manner as possible.

And before we get too far off the deep end, I want to note that both sides of the aisle firmly believe that the other side ignores fundamental human rights that their side respects. This is what happens when good people operate with completely opposite ethical frameworks, and we won't get anywhere by just shouting that our framework is the only valid one.

> A persons right to exist is not political

I don't think anyone disagrees with that, I think the disagreement comes from the way that activists insist that the best solution for treating [gender dysphoria, etc] is to "socially and heavy handedly force everyone to complete the illusion by treating transgender individuals as indistinguishable from their biological counterparts in every way". That's not the only solution for treating [gender dysphoria, etc], just the current (and perhaps uniquely) American one, and it comes with a variety of problems the obvious of which stem from significant biological factors that make the illusion impossible to complete (sports, etc).

> sports, etc

Just going to keep pointing out that human beings have very little sexual dimorphism compared to the other great apes, and that any difference is any sport that does not actually employ the genitals is probably more down to food access and/or training disparities than actual “significant” biological factors.

> probably more down to food access and/or training disparities than actual “significant” biological factors.

I'm not really going to defend the other side here because sports are (by definition) fundamentally arbitrary, but is this really borne out by reality? To use an easy comparison, elite adult womens' track and field athletes might be competitive against high school boys, but not at any higher level. Compare, for example, the international womens' records [0] to the records from this random high school nationals track meet [1]. What food access and/or training advantage are high school kids going to have over the most capable athletes in their sport?

[0] https://trackandfieldnews.com/records/womens-world-records/

[1] https://nbnationalsout.com/results-and-records

You’re asking the wrong question… what we’d need to do is take a girl with the same height and muscle mass as a boy and give them both the diet and training (and societal and economic incentives and rewards) of a Usain Bolt from birth, then look for sexual dimorphism’s effect on their sports performance. Looking for support for your confirmation bias in stats that already are influenced by thousands of years of your confirmation bias doesn’t exactly make decent scientific inquiry. Again, when compared with the other great apes (never mind less closely related primates) we humans have relatively minimal sexual dimorphism, and no obvious biological reason to simply assume that two adult peers that had the same dietary and exercise and skills training regimes would have vastly different athletic performance characteristics, especially across a wide range of sports.

> You’re asking the wrong question… what we’d need to do is take a girl with the same height and muscle mass as a boy and give them both the diet and training (and societal and economic incentives and rewards) of a Usain Bolt from birth, then look for sexual dimorphism’s effect on their sports performance.

The unequal distribution of height and muscle mass is part of sexual dimorphism.

> no obvious biological reason to simply assume that two adult peers that had the same dietary and exercise and skills training regimes would have vastly different athletic performance characteristics

Imagine you convinced someone this was true. They could say trans women should be banned from women's sports because boys receive superior training.

The effects of hormones are not assumptions.

What is your explanation for trans men gaining athletic advantages and trans women losing athletic advantages during transition?

> The unequal distribution of height and muscle mass is part of sexual dimorphism.

No, it’s potential evidence for sexual dimorphism. It’s also potential evidence for systemic dietary sexism. You’d need to establish that the latter doesn’t exist to establish that the former does.

> Imagine you convinced someone this was true. They could say trans women should be banned from women's sports because boys receive superior training.

At that point we’d have shown that sexual dimorphism was not at play and that gendered sports were inherently discriminatory, so that hypothetical person would now be an idiot arguing against reality. The obvious solution would be to redirect better training at the now know equally capable athletes.

> The effects of hormones are not assumptions.

Actually they largely are… we really don’t have more than minimal and crude knowledge of precisely how hormones work or what their actual effects are.

> any difference is any sport ... is probably more down to food access and/or training disparities than actual “significant” biological factors.

Citation definitely needed. The gap is large, and consistent, across different nations and sports.

I'm sorry, but this is demonstrably not true.

We would not have this in the year 2024 otherwise: https://boysvswomen.com/

Of course we would have and expect exactly that same (extremely cherry-picked, confirmation bias serving) result if it were true that female athletes had similar innate physical capacities — and they do, sexual dimorphism in humans is quite minimal compared to the other great apes, especially the gorilla and the orangutan — but were neither as well fed nor as well trained as male athletes.

In other words the (very circular reasoning) chart your source provides doesn’t obviously show sexual dimorphism when confounding variables of food and training (and the funding and social incentives that provide both) exist.

The sports claim still deserves a lot of research. People seem to continue to parrot this "impossible" view point but it really doesn't seem to be the reality. Instead organizations get pressured into making choices based on political views rather than data.

For an example of results see https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/58/11/586. A lot of the papers I see trying to support the opposing views try to use data of cis men which have not undergone hormone therapy to stand-in for trans women as if there was no difference but again it's quite apparent that this is not the case.

For many other areas, often people will use one incident to collectively label an entire group as deviant. This happened the same way with gay rights over the years and I've got many friends who got labelled all sorts of things because of it. As far as that's concerned, people love to arm-chair what is and isn't an effective course. None of these things are new, just American, or ignoring biological factors but it seems like those who would like to restrict acceptance of transgender people like to paint it as such.

Many of my friends have taught me a lot just by being bold enough to be seen as themselves. I don't think it's actually unreasonable to extend the benefit of the doubt to how trans people choose to affirm themselves.

>I think the disagreement comes from the way that activists insist that the best solution for treating [gender dysphoria, etc] is to "socially and heavy handedly force everyone to complete the illusion by treating transgender individuals as indistinguishable from their biological counterparts in every way".

Here we see that the term 'illusion' is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the background, and implies some kind of bias or preconceived notion of "real" vs "fake" or "imaginary". If this is what you get from advocates and activists, then I think you either receive this through a filter of some kind, or carry said filter within.

>That's not the only solution for treating [gender dysphoria, etc], just the current (and perhaps uniquely) American one, and it comes with a variety of problems the obvious of which stem from significant biological factors that make the illusion impossible to complete (sports, etc).

This is the treatment method that has consistently demonstrated the best outcomes for the people concerned over time. It is not uniquely American, as it was pioneered in Europe before taken to the next level in the US, among other countries/regions. Again, furtherance of the idea there is an 'illusion that must be completed'. This is not the case. Trans people are very aware just how much they do or do not fit in compared to the average population at large. No one needs to point this out to them, nor does anyone need to coddle them. By far, just being treated as how one wishes to be treated goes a long, long way.

In regards to sports, if the person in question has medically transitioned and has done so with HRT for some year(s) (I think 2 is the baseline minimum from studies?), then their overall performance in sports will be measurably less then their peers of the same gender in most instances. The few that excel are not statistically more significant than the few natural athletes who excel due to some developmental advantage (larger heart/lung capacity, etc) due to early or sustained training, genetic factors, etc. At least this is what the preliminary data is showing us so far. On average, the distribution remains about the same and on par with other athletes. This is almost always a talking point/dog whistle that is, once you peel the onion, much ado about nothing. Just like most all other contentious talking points about transgender folks, which do not vary significantly from the same points about gay rights, marriage equality, racial segregation/integration debates, or equality in voting and women's rights, etc, etc.

A persons right to exist is not political.

There are however a bunch of things which is political like: Laws governing universal health care, laws governing minors rights to make decisions as minors, laws that makes distinctions between genders, cultural norms around bathrooms (which is mostly a stupid cost-cutting measure), and norms around cultural sports (which are fairly arbitrary).

Out of those, the first two should likely remain being political, while the two last ones should be resolved, and the middle one should just not exist.

But its still completely orthogonal. I don't see how "the work [I] do" ... "enables trodden people to escape this tyranny"

Everything isn't politics and its ok to have a space where arguments about identity and politics aren't constantly surfaced.

> any work you do is intertwined with politics.

That simply is not true. Apolitical topics do exist, and it is incredibly annoying when people try to force politics into an apolitical topic (looking at you, Rust community).

I mean, treating people with a modicum of respect shouldn’t be a political position, and it’s hardly the Rust community’s fault that it is.

no kidding - even if politics exist in the subject you are always free to not accept it and rise above.

Can you give an example of an apolitical topic?

EDIT: unfortunately I can’t reply to the comments as I have been banned

EDIT 2: I have been banned to reply to the commenter, dang told me

EDIT 3: dang has now wiped all the upvotes on this message and given me 2 extra downvotes and suddenly another comment I made mentioning him in a totally different thread has been mass downvoted

There isn't one. It's the very nature of politics that it affects everything we humans do.

Almost everything can be discussed in an apolitical way - you just don’t talk politics. It isn’t a logic puzzle.

Yes you can decide not to mention the politics inherent in the thing but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. I’m wondering if the person I’m replying to can produce a thing where it truly isn’t there

But you can say that about anything. There are people whose whole expertise is one area of, say, film production.

You can talk about films and critically analyze them without doing a deep dive into how props are made. It’s OK to have separate contexts.

It isn’t a “gotcha” that “everything is political” - it just doesn’t matter when trying to do most things. It’s distracting and pointless; it’s a null statement.

You can talk about anything without having to include politics the same way you can discuss literature without examining types of paper.

It’s not null, it’s true and profound

In the “I’m 14 and this is deep” way, maybe. Nothing more.

Providing memory safety in computer languages?

You are making governments secret agencies work harder. So, not apolitical.

I don't think you've been banned. There's some mechanism to rate limit replies in HN to prevent flamewars so maybe that's what you're seeing?

I don't believe I told you that, because our software doesn't work that way.

Your account is rate-limited though. We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments and/or get involved in flamewars. That's probably what I told you.

While I agree that a community needs to focus on its central goal (developing the rust programming language in this case), I think I have a very good litmus test for what you think "apolitical" means:

Let's say Lynn were a rust developer and felt as though the the tone of the community and the discussion of her work made her feel unwelcome. Let's say Lynn spoke out against that. Would you entertain that conversation? I imagine that is not too far from what happened at IBM when Lynn was fired. When is it "allowed" to be political in your mind?

Intentionally addressing the ability of marginalized people to be a part of a community, in my mind, is precisely apolitical. If it's clear that anyone is welcome then you don't really need to talk about politics, do you.

In that example, it seems politics were already allowed, if people were saying things to make Hypothetical Lynn uncomfortable.

Presumably that kind of talk was about transgender issues and not some technical topic about rust which would make her uncomfortable.

So, in that circumstance, it seems only fair that if a person can express their political opinion, so can another person.

But,maybe the leader of the project should have shutdown whatever was making Hypothetical Lynn uncomfortable before she was forced to mount a response to it?

Topics yes. Work is much more than a topic. Mathematical equations and solutions are apolitical (in the abstract). Teaching math and working in any communal research setting will be political, for example can you teach these things to that age group/population, how do you test, etc.

Open-source projects depend on their community and contributors, and community management is inherently political. No matter what "neutral" thing you do, some contributors will approve of that, and some will see it as a red flag.

Even saying "no politics!" will be seen by some people a political stance — as an approval of the status quo (which may be unfavorable to some groups of people), or even as a denial that certain social problems exist, and a red flag that you won't help them if someone discriminates against them.

Even in a "no politics" environment the you will end up having to decide what is "political" and what isn't, and that is a political stance! Someone will have a Bible quote in their email signature — is that neutral or political? Then is Quran okay too, or rainbow emoji? And when you tell people to stop this circus, the "no politics" policy itself will be questioned as a political stance against free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom of association, etc.

> Open-source projects depend on their community and contributors, and community management is inherently political. No matter what "neutral" thing you do, some contributors will approve of that, and some will see it as a red flag.

There's this saying some people have, "there's three things you don't talk about at work: sex, politics and religion". (I think an older version had "money" instead of "sex"–from the days when sex wasn't talked about so much that we didn't even talk about the fact that we didn't talk about it.)

And it isn't necessarily bad advice. Do we really want heated workplace arguments about Israel-and-Palestine, Biden-vs-Trump, etc? We have to work with people who have completely different views from us on big picture political issues. Sometimes it is better we just agree to disagree and focus on what we have in common – airing those disagreements in detail can just produce negative feelings and disruption.

But of course, every office, every open source project has politics. But that's the thing, people traditionally draw a distinction between "micropolitics" (the politics of our workplace) and "macropolitics" (national politics, geopolitics). You cannot escape micropolitics, it is everywhere, it is inevitable. But macropolitics, yes, we should avoid it at work whenever possible.

Of course, people will then bring up "the personal is the political", and it is true. Transgender issues, for example: a big political controversy, but obviously for transgender people a very personal one.

However, even there, I think there is a useful distinction. A transgender employee isn't breaking the "no macropolitics at work" rule by being transgender, or talking about their personal experiences, or so on. But, consider Lynn Conway's public campaigns against the psychologist J. Michael Bailey and the sexologist Ray Blanchard – even though that was obviously very personal for her, it wouldn't have been appropriate for her to carry it on at work. Well, she actually did use her UMich web page for those campaigns, but the norms about this are different in academia than in your average workplace.

And politics is personal for all kinds of people: I remember back in 2010 when the Israeli military intercepted the "Gaza Freedom Flotilla", the team I was in at the time had some very heated discussion over it. Afterwards, a Jewish team member talked to me privately, and I could tell the whole discussion had made him feel rather uncomfortable, because it felt personal to him. And one of the other participants in the conversation was Palestinian, so it was obviously personal to him too. But still, in hindsight I wish the whole discussion had never happened, and I regret my own (rather peripheral) role in it. We broke the "no politics at work" rule, and it did pointless harm to our cohesion as a team.

I don't think it's feasible to separate technology from the people themselves. What we do, in some way or the other touches people, real people, people with feelings, dreams and aspirations.

To ignore where such contributions to humanity come from, is to ignore a person's existence, their struggles and what makes them, well, them.

I recently stumbled on [1],

> I’m on the board overseeing Linux graphics. Half of us are trans.

which is a reminder that so many years later, the same issues, vitriol and discrimination that Lynn dealt with still plague us. What are we, if we can not show empathy to people who struggle with something as fundamental as their gender identity? Who are we to deny them the life they want to lead every day? Who are we to dehumanize others?

[1] https://rosenzweig.io/blog/growing-up-alyssa.html

I didn't know much about Conway but read the wikipedia page after seeing this post. My take-away was the thing to celebrate was that someone could accomplish so much & have such a meaningful impact despite the politics and environment - wow! These contributions stand on their own regardless of how/when or where they were accomplished. This is an amazing piece of evidence in support of equality in origin and opportunity.

"Any work you do is intertwined with politics."

This thought-terminating cliché is bafflingly popular on HN. It's a classic example of the motte-and-bailey fallacy, where the strong claim (the motte) is "everything is political," and the strong claim is "therefore, it's okay to bring politics into everything." (the bailey).

Sure, you can MAKE anything appear political, but not everything is intertwined with politics. Many activities are driven purely by personal interest, scientific curiosity, or artistic expression, without any direct political implications.

Not to be mistaken with John Conway, known for Conway’s game of life.

Nor the Melvin Conway, of Conway's law.

Honestly considering Lynn Conway’s Wikipedia profile mentions being a transgender activist and not knowing much about either of them, I thought maybe I’d just missed that John Conway had transitioned at some point, and had now died.

John Conway died over 4 years ago.

Yup. During the big initial wave of Covid. He was living in New Jersey at the time after retiring from a career at Princeton.

It really doesn't help that the Wikipedia page doesn't currently appear to state the former name anywhere, like it often does for other people (like celebrities) who legally change their names at some point in their lives.

This is in keeping with their gender identity guidelines.

> Former, pre-transition names may only be included if the person was notable while using the name; outside of the main biographical article, such names should only appear once, in a footnote or parentheses.

> if the person was notable while using the name

ACS was a notable project and her involvement in it, pre-transition, was notable.

I guess the point is that she, herself, was not notable at that point, since her work was not widely and publicly known. Otherwise we'd already know her pre-transition name.

A notable project where her work was confidential.

Her deadname did not have achievements publicly associated with it in the way wikipedia requires.

she had to go to significant pains to conceal her former name because it revealed her former sex, and trans women are at significant risk of getting lynched, even more so 50 years ago

Obviously homicides are bad, and life isn't yet a bed of roses for the trans community but ... as far as I know the trans homicide rate in the USA is lower than the cis one, unless you make strong underreporting assumptions [1]?

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5551594/

yes, in the usa right now things are not bad; they have improved dramatically, especially in the last ten years. still, even within the usa, i think the statistics you're looking at are skewed by a variety of demographic factors

There's a whole set of criteria for when Wikipedia will and will not list former names for people who transition, which boils down to whether they achieved notability under the old name. Which Lynn did not.

There's a conversation to be had about whether the decisions Wikipedia has made about prior names and consistent use of pronouns in the biography of trans persons is the correct one for an encyclopedia. But this is definitely not the place or time to have that conversation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:DEADNAME says:

> If a living transgender or non-binary person was not notable under a former name (a deadname), it should not be included in any page (including lists, redirects, disambiguation pages, category names, templates, etc.), even in quotations, even if reliable sourcing exists. Treat the pre-notability name as a privacy interest separate from (and often greater than) the person's current name.

So, now she has passed away, it is allowed by policy to add her birth name to the article (assuming it can be reliably sourced, etc)

Although https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:BDP also says:

> Generally, this policy does not apply to material concerning people who are confirmed dead by reliable sources. The only exception would be for people who have recently died, in which case the policy can extend for an indeterminate period beyond the date of death—six months, one year, two years at the outside.

So some might argue that, due to WP:BDP, WP:DEADNAME still applies in the period immediately after her death – but in 2027 it won't (assuming Wikipedia leaves its policies unchanged)

That’s what I thought.

i have some questions. if an academia transitions after their graduation, what would be written in the papers? the deadname or the current name? or one can ask the authoritative institution to issue new papers with the current name on it? also, what would happen to their publication? i genuinely have never thought of it before.

Colleges will issue updated paperwork after any kind of legal name change. Keep in mind, for most of recent history approx. half the population has been changing their legal last name when they get married, so institutions have had to deal with this on a broad scale for quite a while. Probably not for publications though, except in rare circumstances

ah right bro. forgot that on that part of the world, half of that people change their name when they're getting married. thanks for the answer.

I believe the deadname stays on old publications, although in today's electronic publications it could be updated.

The example I think of is the person who built one of the first superoptimizers.

Why does the Wiki page say "citation needed" for calling her a "computer scientist, electrical engineer"?

If you were looking at the same revision I saw, the "citation needed" was on the word "was", and on mouseover said "Please add credible news of death".

Seems to be fixed now, and I had a go at fixing the other "citation needed" on leaving MIT. This stuff all relies on volunteers getting around to it.

Is it an impression , or are computer people overly represented amongst trans people ?

Maybe working with computers provides a better environment for people with social-related issues ?

I wrote a Quora answer about this, based on some material I found from HN commenter "amyjess": https://www.quora.com/Why-do-many-transgender-women-work-in-...

To summarize: It's a combination of the culture and the way that various overlapping subcultures are viewed by society.

These kids from hackers are quite welcoming of weirdness as long as you've got the skills to hang.

https://i.imgur.com/w1mNGHZ.png

I'm not trans, but I have to imagine that sort of acceptance is the goal. I wonder the degree to which our media portrayal of hacker subculture has influenced the desire among certain demographics / subcultures to gravitate towards those jobs.

I think so, but especially since the advent of the internet.

I think a mixture of being (1) a small minority (~1%), (2) which is ostracized, and (3) exists roughly homogenously in the population meant the internet provided an opportunity for community that didn't exist before.

The big thing is the super low-risk and anonymous environment. If you're gay but feel shame about it, or that you might suffer violence for coming out, then your computer might be the first place you don't feel alone.

For ~1980 through ~2010, community meant having a sysadmin to host a bbs / usenet / email list / irc / phpbb, and community meant having the technical knowledge required to join one of those. So, lgbt people and trans people especially have a good reason to become computer people.

I think this pattern applies to other groups which meet the same criteria. E.g. people at far ends of the political spectrum, the extremes you might have found under alt.sex, fans of specific media like TV shows, or people talking about weird alternative operating systems.

Let this thread be a lesson that no matter how nice you are and no matter your achievements, as long as you are trans you can't even die in peace.

"Although she had hoped to be allowed to transition on the job, IBM fired Conway in 1968 after she revealed her intention to transition.[20] IBM apologized for this in 2020."

Good grief. Took them long enough.

Did Conway's Law originate with Lynn Conway?

No, Conway's Law[1] is attributed to Melvin Conway, a different computer Scientist. Also unrelated to either Lynn Conway, or Melvin Conway, is Conway's Life, which is named for John Conway[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Horton_Conway

But she coined "The Conway Effect"

When “others” (such as women and people of color) make innovative contributions in scientific and technical fields, they often “disappear” from later history and their contributions are ascribed elsewhere. This is seldom deliberate—rather, it’s a result of the accumulation of advantage by those who are expected to innovate. This article chronicles an example of such a disappearance and introduces the Conway Effect to elucidate the disappearance process.

https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/2018/10/mco2018100...

#1 Most Talented Female Engineer

Stop putting peoples on #1 there are surprising examples, there is no #1 in any field, tesla, einstein or:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr#Inventing_career

https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/hedy-lamarr-radio-c...

;)

Einstein wasn't even the best Einstein, that was that Super Dave Osborne!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Dave_Osborne

I hope that at some point she could reconnect with her kids from her prior marriage.

She did. This was from 2000: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-19-tm-54188...

Some more of Lynn's recollections with her kids/nieces at https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/Retrospective5.html#..., https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/Retrospective5.html#..., and https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/Retrospective6.html

Thanks - glad she found closure and also happiness in the end.

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