[HN Gopher] Lynn Conway has died
___________________________________________________________________
Lynn Conway has died
Author : kevvok
Score : 1068 points
Date : 2024-06-11 16:44 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| steveklabnik wrote:
| 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.
| neonate wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240611172823/http://www.myhusb...
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| 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| course was (and is) horribly out of date, and not just because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.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| 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 school: 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.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Doug Fairbairn: https://computerhistory.org/profile/doug-
| fairbairn/
|
| Carver Mead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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.
| fwip wrote:
| This book was so good that I bought myself a new copy years
| after leaving college - the only textbook I've done that for.
| mturmon wrote:
| 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
| minedwiz wrote:
| 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
| metalliqaz wrote:
| 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.
| minedwiz wrote:
| Yep, loss of a prominent HN-relevant person.
| swyx wrote:
| and list of past black bars:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37018825
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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...
| nvarsj wrote:
| 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.
| mattecypress wrote:
| Not to be mistaken with John Conway, known for Conway's game of
| life.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Nor the Melvin Conway, of Conway's law.
| wincy wrote:
| 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.
| dexwiz wrote:
| John Conway died over 4 years ago.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| Yup. During the big initial wave of Covid. He was living in
| New Jersey at the time after retiring from a career at
| Princeton.
| someperson wrote:
| 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.
| amysox wrote:
| 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.
| mlyle wrote:
| > if the person was notable while using the name
|
| ACS was a notable project and her involvement in it, pre-
| transition, was notable.
| LukasMathis wrote:
| 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.
| skyyler wrote:
| A notable project where her work was confidential.
|
| Her deadname did not have achievements publicly
| associated with it in the way wikipedia requires.
| kragen wrote:
| 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
| throwaway72638 wrote:
| 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/
| kragen wrote:
| 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
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| skissane wrote:
| 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)
| thedynamicduo wrote:
| It's Wokepedia, of course they aren't going to mention it.
| wiseowise wrote:
| That's what I thought.
| nxobject wrote:
| 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.
| mlsu wrote:
| 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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| 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?!
| lye wrote:
| 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
| barbazoo wrote:
| > if you trust a rando on the internet
|
| Why did you say that, now I _have to_ check the files :)
|
| Thank you
| ballooney wrote:
| 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].
| disqard wrote:
| 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!
| michaelmior wrote:
| MediaWiki2Latex can convert to ePub.
|
| https://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| 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).
| spencerchubb wrote:
| 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."
| brailsafe wrote:
| 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.
| meifun wrote:
| Thank you for sharing!! Fascinating and really helpful to those
| of us who are undergoing our own gender transitions!
| max_ wrote:
| Same link without SSL errors: https://archive.is/zVIWu
| nerdponx wrote:
| Interestingly the cert expired just a few days ago.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| a fitting epitath?
|
| Here lies xyz; their cert expired without renewal
| nineplay wrote:
| 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.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| 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.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| if the NPCs can do this in a non trivial way it could be a
| really powerful experience.
| chroma wrote:
| 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.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| 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.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > 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.
| sterlind wrote:
| As much as "trapped in the wrong body" is a cliche, 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.
| delecti wrote:
| 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.
| neonate wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240309142149/https://ai.eecs.u...
| kstrauser wrote:
| What an absolute genius. RIP, Lynn.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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 :)
| divbzero wrote:
| 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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.
| betimsl wrote:
| Great loss for our community.
| electriclove wrote:
| Why does Wikipedia not list the first spouse or children?
| amysox wrote:
| No confirmed sources. This was discussed on the talk page.
| mattigames wrote:
| Or her name at birth.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| Wikipedia has a reference manual which describes this
| scenario[1]. Lynn was prominently and publicly known for her
| post-transition work - though her IBM achievements are
| included, they are the minority of her career's work. She
| wasn't in the public eye at the time, so her former name is
| considered a privacy interest & not eligible for publishing
| to Wikipedia. If a person is notable & in the public eye
| before transitioning, their former names are then eligible to
| be listed.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/G
| end...
| xereeto wrote:
| little matter called respect
| Upvoter33 wrote:
| Great prof. Changed my entire career arc. RIP.
| meifun wrote:
| 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.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| 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.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> Yet despite it, she achieved great things.
|
| correction: achieved great things TWICE.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > 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.
| hyperliner wrote:
| But it eventually happened, which is a good thing. Society does
| not always change fast enough.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| 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
| hindsightbias wrote:
| 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.
| groby_b wrote:
| "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.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| 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.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| I hope that at some point she could reconnect with her kids from
| her prior marriage.
| ksenzee wrote:
| She did. This was from 2000:
| https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-19-tm-54188...
| 1024core wrote:
| Why does the Wiki page say "citation needed" for calling her a
| "computer scientist, electrical engineer"?
| waterhouse wrote:
| 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".
| tim333 wrote:
| 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.
| SnooSux wrote:
| She spoke at my commencement a few years back. Her story is an
| interesting one
| mk_stjames wrote:
| 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.
| cbanek wrote:
| 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.
| polairscience wrote:
| 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.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| 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)
| nsomaru wrote:
| 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.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| 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
| vaylian wrote:
| 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.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| >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_t
| h...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _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?
| number6 wrote:
| 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.
| pas wrote:
| 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-t
| ran... // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiE5rBLrIgM
| mminer237 wrote:
| > A persons right to exist is not political
|
| I don't think anyone is saying anyone else should not exist.
| soganess wrote:
| 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.
| docmars wrote:
| 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)
| polairscience wrote:
| 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.
| docmars wrote:
| 1) On your first point -- I think you misunderstood what
| I meant by government enforcement. I'm talking about
| governments that actively force people not to be LGBTQ.
| The point I'm making is that this is very different from
| having a significant population patently against this
| lifestyle, which cannot be construed as government
| enforcement.
|
| It's the desire towards widely accepted societal norms,
| and a pushback against disrupting long-established
| acceptable norms.
|
| 2) The same applies to Black on Black crime, except
| hundredfold. The same applies to violence against
| straight White people. Every group suffers from targeted
| violence -- and no amount of data to prove how
| disproportionate it is makes any instance more
| right/justified than another.
|
| Similar to your wishes, I hope there's a day when random
| White people on the street aren't mobbed by dozens, if
| not hundreds, of people who aren't White. I've lost count
| how many videos I've seen of this happening. I'd love to
| see a world where transgender teenagers and young adults
| aren't motivated to shoot up Christian schools. I'd love
| to see no discriminatory violence at all someday -- but
| it cannot come at the cost of marginalizing majority
| groups who are just trying to live normal lives too, and
| too often, it does.
| appalp wrote:
| Exactly. Although they are often erroneously conflated,
| this is the key point that distinguishes gay rights
| activism from trans activism.
|
| For the former, we campaigned for equal treatment under the
| law. Like when we said we want to get married, we made the
| point that this doesn't affect in any way the marriage that
| heterosexual people have, because the rights are actually
| the same.
|
| The trans activists don't want that. Equal treatment and
| tolerance isn't enough for them, they demand dominance
| above all else.
| docmars wrote:
| Agreed. This is evidenced by the existence of boards
| enforcing ESG standards, and management enforcing DEI
| programs throughout most corporations and businesses, in
| order to protect against even the slightest perceived
| threat against discriminatory hiring decisions made
| entirely around immutable traits, rather than skill and
| merit.
|
| Disney's leaked hiring standards document earlier this
| year is a smoking gun, and it's a safe assumption most
| other corporations towing the same line have the same or
| similar reprehensible hiring standards.
|
| DEI is patently anti-white and anti-straight, and its
| rhetoric and materials (everything from training to
| editorials) are not shy about expressing it in plain
| terms that it is a revenge campaign masked by good
| intentions and a smile. All in a way that mirrors the
| beginnings of 20th century atrocities around the world,
| that were also rooted in hatred towards specific groups
| perceived as threats to society on the basis of immutable
| traits.
| not_alexb wrote:
| > The trans activists don't want that. Equal treatment
| and tolerance isn't enough for them, they demand
| dominance above all else.
|
| Equal treatment and tolerance.. Ever since I started
| transitioning, people have treated me much worse, and I
| live in a so called liberal city. My pharmacist looks at
| me like I'm a freak. I've had slurs thrown at me several
| times while I'm just out minding my business. Half my
| family wont even... I don't know what parallel universe
| you live in where people are treated like this equally..
|
| Where do you find all this time to hate on a group you
| don't even remotely understand? I'm happier than I've
| ever been and it seems like all of yall are making it
| your business to make that as miserable as possible.
| docmars wrote:
| Outside of calling it hate, why do you think people even
| in the most "allied" places respond to you in that way?
| Do you think perhaps they're afraid they may be helping
| an activist who may deem their services unacceptable? The
| track record has it that in these situations, service
| providers are at a major disadvantage, if anything
| remotely goes wrong during their interactions.
|
| If activists belonging to protected classes are creating
| such enormous fear, do you feel misrepresented by them?
| What are you willing to do to help remove that fear? Do
| you think it creates an unfair imbalance?
| not_alexb wrote:
| This writing has a lot of parallels with the writings of
| men who are scared of women after the metoo movement.
|
| Anyway, you're conflating fear with disgust. I haven't
| seen much fear, if at all; what I have seen a lot of is,
| hate that looks the exact same as before trans activists
| had _any_ platform.
| docmars wrote:
| Do you think that reaction is natural, given the patterns
| and preferences of most of human society?
| not_alexb wrote:
| This has little to do with human society. Western
| society, maybe. Plenty of other societies don't assert a
| distinct binary for gender (which doesn't even exist in
| sex; intersex people exist at the same rates as people
| that are red-headed, and you wouldnt call red heads
| unnatural).
|
| Even if it was "natural" you're making the choice to
| treat someone like shit. You can backpedal onto what all
| your peers are doing all you want, but that doesn't
| change how you as an individual are making another human
| being, who has done nothing to you, feel
| flFlflFl wrote:
| > intersex people exist at the same rates as people that
| are red-headed
|
| Not true.
|
| > the choice to treat someone like shit
|
| Telling a man he's a man and that he's not allowed in the
| women's locker room or whatever isn't treating him like
| shit, it's treating him like any other man.
| docmars wrote:
| > you wouldnt call red heads unnatural
|
| I'm not aware of anyone trying to alter their own genes
| to be red-headed, and for those who dye their hair, I
| don't see them holding parades exposing their genitalia
| to minors. I also don't see anyone getting fired from
| their jobs for openly disliking red hair, out of personal
| preference.
|
| > who has done nothing to you
|
| Not personally, no, but fads widely supported by
| institutions and corporations have major consequences.
| Parents are choosing their children's gender and
| following through with irreversible transition surgery in
| order to gain status among their peers, politically. This
| surgery is not only costly, but potentially lethal, given
| how necessary it is for long-term use of antibiotics and
| resistances that develop as a result.
| sophacles wrote:
| Why do service providers who provide inadequate service
| need protection? They choose to be shitty service
| providers and they suffer the consequences. Basic free-
| market right there bud - either the market wants the same
| thing as the activists and money, prestige, etc flow to
| those who agree with the activists, or the market doesn't
| want it and those service providers who the activists are
| happy with fails.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > Like when we said we want to get married, we made the
| point that this doesn't affect in any way the marriage
| that heterosexual people have, because the rights are
| actually the same.
|
| > The trans activists don't want that. Equal treatment
| and tolerance isn't enough for them, they demand
| dominance above all else.
|
| Gay rights opponents said the same about you. A gay man
| and a straight man had the same right to marry a woman.
| You denied it was equal. And a separate but mostly equal
| status wasn't enough for you. You demanded they call it
| marriage.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| > 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| Bostonian wrote:
| 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.
| polairscience wrote:
| 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.
| demosthanos wrote:
| 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.
| umvi wrote:
| > 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).
| yawpitch wrote:
| > 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.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > 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
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > 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.
| poszlem wrote:
| I'm sorry, but this is demonstrably not true.
|
| We would not have this in the year 2024 otherwise:
| https://boysvswomen.com/
| cararemixed wrote:
| 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.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > 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).
| moomin wrote:
| 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.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| no kidding - even if politics exist in the subject you are
| always free to not accept it and rise above.
| bowsamic wrote:
| 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
| dpkirchner wrote:
| There isn't one. It's the very nature of politics that it
| affects everything we humans do.
| analognoise wrote:
| Almost everything can be discussed in an apolitical way -
| you just don't talk politics. It isn't a logic puzzle.
| bowsamic wrote:
| 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
| tim333 wrote:
| Providing memory safety in computer languages?
| darkwater wrote:
| You are making governments secret agencies work harder.
| So, not apolitical.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| 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?
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| polairscience wrote:
| 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.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| 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?
| quantified wrote:
| 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.
| pornel wrote:
| 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.
| skissane wrote:
| > 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.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| 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
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| 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.
| poszlem wrote:
| "Any work you do is intertwined with politics."
|
| This thought-terminating cliche 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.
| rockenman1234 wrote:
| 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.
| tzs wrote:
| > 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...
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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/
| dannyobrien wrote:
| 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
| tylersmith wrote:
| It's so cool how so many important women in computing are
| trans women.
| hackermatic wrote:
| 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.
| atregir wrote:
| What a terribly difficult life and yet with so many great
| achievements. An inspiration!
| oldgregg wrote:
| #1 Most Talented Female Engineer
| BSDobelix wrote:
| 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...
|
| ;)
| astrodust wrote:
| Einstein wasn't even the best Einstein, that was that Super
| Dave Osborne!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Dave_Osborne
| HenryBemis wrote:
| 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.
| shafyy wrote:
| I'm sorry for your loss!
| sophacles wrote:
| To lose a friend like that sucks. I'm sorry for your loss.
| fwungy wrote:
| When people try to say that women are not as good in technical
| pursuits as men I always pointed out Lynn Conway. Truly an epic
| career and woman!
| sspiff wrote:
| 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.
| Aloha wrote:
| This appears to the the source Wikipedia is citing -
| http://www.myhusbandbetty.com/wordPressNEW/2024/06/11/lynn-c...
| bradneuberg wrote:
| Did Conway's Law originate with Lynn Conway?
| sircastor wrote:
| 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
| ncm140 wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| orsenthil wrote:
| 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".
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| 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.
| ncm140 wrote:
| 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...
| ncm140 wrote:
| 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/
| ncm140 wrote:
| My favorite thing she said was "Why not question everything?"
| It stuck with me ever since.
| chaosmanorism wrote:
| Don't forget Rule 30!
| soperj wrote:
| I feel like in this instance, IBM actually did us all a favour.
| Instead of being stuck in IBM, she went on to do many great
| things. They really check all the boxes though, helping Nazi
| Germany, Apartheid...
| dang wrote:
| We detached this comment from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40649014.
|
| I'm sure you didn't intend to post yet-another flamewar tangent
| but that's what this would lead to in the limit case.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| 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.
| haeberli wrote:
| I worked for / with Lynn at Xerox PARC from 1980 - 1982. She will
| be missed.
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