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:
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 In many ways, the course was (and is) horribly out of date, and not just because of the fact that students were using open-source Berkeley tools to draw layouts.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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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!
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/
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:
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):
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.
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):
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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?!
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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".
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.
"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."
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]
For those skimming, this is the controversy over J Michael Bailey's book The Man Who Would Be Queen. I highly recommend reading Dreger's article.
Conway (and others, particularly Andrea James) conducted a years-long campaign of harassment against Bailey. This included (among many other things) repeated attempts to get Bailey fired from his job at Northwestern, a series of vexatious complaints to an Illinois licensing board, and infamously posting photos online of Bailey's children suggesting that Bailey had raped them and asking whether his young daughter was "a cock-starved exhibitionist".
Much of this material is still on Conway's University of Michigan-hosted webpage.
> Some saw the book as especially dangerous because it claimed to be based on rigorous science, was published by an imprint of the National Academy of Sciences, and argued that MTF sex changes are motivated primarily by erotic interests and not by the problem of having the gender identity common to one sex in the body of the other.
Yeah, because at the age of 6 when I wanted to be more like mom, it was motivated by erotic interest /s. When my family refers to me as she/her, and I feel an immense amount of joy (as many trans women feel in similar circumstances) it's because of erotic interest /s. When I lose every advantage I have from looking like a good looking cis passing, white passing, straight passing "man" to something society thinks is a freakish abomination, I'm doing so for erotic interests /s.
There are no uncomfortable truths here, just a transphobic agenda being pushed by someone who seems to have never really tried to understand a trans woman in their life. I love the lengths people will go to to listen to anyone except the people that are actually going through it.
She was one of the people who literally built the technical foundation of the world we know. That alone justifies all the upvotes.
The fact that she did that on top of basically starting life over at 30 due to the constraints around transition at that time? That's winning a marathon with a cinder block chained to your ankle.
As far as the concentration of trans people in computing, AFAIK there are two predominant theories: First, survivorship bias involving careers that are often non-customer-facing and well-paying. Second, that there's common cause or comorbidity with other developmental differences (like ASD or 2SD+ IQ) that are unusually common among people who end up in computing.
* Becoming an accomplished professor, a favorite and recognized teacher to many of the "greats" in the field.
* Undergoing (then new and much riskier) gender reassignment surgery despite the legal and social consequences that it might (and ultimately did) entail - losing a prestigious job, losing a family, and having to start life over.... and doing all that quite successfully!
The fact that ALL of them are true of just one person is pretty spectacular. The fact that there are many comments in this thread from people who knew her and respected her for just one of these accomplishments (mostly the tech ones) and are just learning about the rest should answer the question for you about why this is being upvoted.
Heck - either of my first two bullet points is on it's own black-bar worthy. The fact that you feel the need to focus on "the transgender thing" as possibly being the only reason there's attention should give you some pause. The fact that your entire comment is focused on the fact that a major innovator in our field was transgender with only the faintest of acknowledgement that her work underpins most of what we do here is just plain gross.
>> Is this volume of upvotes due to this person being accomplished in their field or because of the transgender thing
Yes.
>> What is it about computing that it has such a high concentration of trans people compared to other fields.
First, prove your thesis: what is this “high concentration” and what “other fields” are you talking about? There seem to be a great deal of trans people in a great many places, and now that they’re less likely to be hatecrimed, they’re more likely to be out.
If I had to guess why there are more (if there are)- computers allow people to exist as they want to be. Female avatar? Go for it. Anonymous shitposting of your most terrible racist/bigoted thoughts? Vent thine spleen.
Also, most nerds are weird, which leads to many of them developing a great deal of empathy and a great distaste for exclusion. As a demographic, “computers” tends to attract a great deal of nerds with very strong feelings of right/wrong. That’s why I’m here: the jocks didn’t want me and the theater kids were too dramatic so I stuck it out with the geeks and weirdos (who also didn’t give a fuck who I wanted to sleep with as long as I could hold my own in the D&D campaign).
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
DonHopkins|1 year ago
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|1 year ago
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.
adapteva|1 year ago
RIP
[ref] https://youtu.be/W_cB8VYunY8?si=9M9QVmBipbKUXxMR&t=1414
dekhn|1 year ago
divbzero|1 year ago
mk_stjames|1 year ago
RIP.
sspiff|1 year ago
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.
zh3|1 year ago
padolsey|1 year ago
haeberli|1 year ago
DonHopkins|1 year ago
joering2|1 year ago
cbanek|1 year ago
ncm140|1 year ago
ncm140|1 year ago
fleetingmoments|1 year ago
jmcgough|1 year ago
DonHopkins|1 year ago
>"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.
mturmon|1 year ago
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
wrycoder|1 year ago
fwip|1 year ago
CalChris|1 year ago
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.
ziyao_w|1 year ago
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.
nxobject|1 year ago
musicale|1 year ago
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.
dyauspitr|1 year ago
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tzs|1 year ago
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|1 year ago
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/
mlsu|1 year ago
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/RetrospectiveT.html
It is amazing, tragic, and triumphant in so many ways.
spencerchubb|1 year ago
"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."
nineplay|1 year ago
meifun|1 year ago
max_|1 year ago
neonate|1 year ago
mean_pigeon|1 year ago
barbazoo|1 year ago
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?!
unknown|1 year ago
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btown|1 year ago
(FYI: Readers should note that content warnings for self-harm apply in Part II.)
Cordiali|1 year ago
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!
Upvoter33|1 year ago
Aloha|1 year ago
amysox|1 year ago
rockenman1234|1 year ago
KennyBlanken|1 year ago
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.
hindsightbias|1 year ago
29athrowaway|1 year ago
We are truly an idiotic species sometimes.
hyperliner|1 year ago
atregir|1 year ago
whoknowsidont|1 year ago
A true giant both for industry and people.
Shame on all of "us" for missing the date.
ncm140|1 year ago
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...
HarHarVeryFunny|1 year ago
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.
HenryBemis|1 year ago
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.
sophacles|1 year ago
shafyy|1 year ago
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amysox|1 year ago
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.)
asploder|1 year ago
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gcanyon|1 year ago
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...
hackernj|1 year ago
pfdietz|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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incomingpain|1 year ago
86 years old! She had a great life.
SnooSux|1 year ago
betimsl|1 year ago
joering2|1 year ago
After the way they treated her, I wouldn't accept it.
meifun|1 year ago
0xbadcafebee|1 year ago
startupsfail|1 year ago
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mrdomino_|1 year ago
canucker2016|1 year ago
see https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-06-11/lynn-conwa...
Syzygies|1 year ago
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.
Lance_ET_Compte|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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valanha|1 year ago
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idkdotcom|1 year ago
We should all be thankful for her contributions and for those who preceded her who were similarly "abnormal" by the standards of their time.
armitron|1 year ago
minedwiz|1 year ago
EDIT: GG, the black band appeared as I sent this
adrian_b|1 year ago
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...
metalliqaz|1 year ago
all this time I thought the CSS was screwed up on my browser. I had assumed it all my anti-ad/privacy plugins.
DonHopkins|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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crosstalkpm|1 year ago
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steveklabnik|1 year ago
EDIT: ah, found it: http://www.myhusbandbetty.com/wordPressNEW/2024/06/11/lynn-c...
RIP.
canucker2016|1 year ago
neonate|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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mattigames|1 year ago
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orsenthil|1 year ago
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".
unknown|1 year ago
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polairscience|1 year ago
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.
nh23423fefe|1 year ago
Everything isn't politics and its ok to have a space where arguments about identity and politics aren't constantly surfaced.
bigstrat2003|1 year ago
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).
skeeter2020|1 year ago
PartiallyTyped|1 year ago
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
poszlem|1 year ago
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.
IntelMiner|1 year ago
A persons right to exist is not political
(This isn't a dig at OP but it's worth restating)
ncm140|1 year ago
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AlgorithmicTime|1 year ago
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AlgorithmicTime|1 year ago
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mattecypress|1 year ago
reducesuffering|1 year ago
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wincy|1 year ago
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pfdietz|1 year ago
The example I think of is the person who built one of the first superoptimizers.
1024core|1 year ago
waterhouse|1 year ago
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renewiltord|1 year ago
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amin|1 year ago
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foreverobama|1 year ago
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bsaul|1 year ago
Maybe working with computers provides a better environment for people with social-related issues ?
lynndotpy|1 year ago
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.
amysox|1 year ago
To summarize: It's a combination of the culture and the way that various overlapping subcultures are viewed by society.
unknown|1 year ago
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Jerrrrry|1 year ago
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seethedeaduu|1 year ago
pcurve|1 year ago
Good grief. Took them long enough.
unknown|1 year ago
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soperj|1 year ago
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dang|1 year ago
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.
fwungy|1 year ago
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peder|1 year ago
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Unbefleckt|1 year ago
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sircastor|1 year ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Horton_Conway
FrustratedMonky|1 year ago
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vt85|1 year ago
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BSDobelix|1 year ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr#Inventing_career
https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/hedy-lamarr-radio-c...
;)
throwaway984393|1 year ago
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cocking|1 year ago
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dang|1 year ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
robjwells|1 year ago
Conway (and others, particularly Andrea James) conducted a years-long campaign of harassment against Bailey. This included (among many other things) repeated attempts to get Bailey fired from his job at Northwestern, a series of vexatious complaints to an Illinois licensing board, and infamously posting photos online of Bailey's children suggesting that Bailey had raped them and asking whether his young daughter was "a cock-starved exhibitionist".
Much of this material is still on Conway's University of Michigan-hosted webpage.
not_alexb|1 year ago
Yeah, because at the age of 6 when I wanted to be more like mom, it was motivated by erotic interest /s. When my family refers to me as she/her, and I feel an immense amount of joy (as many trans women feel in similar circumstances) it's because of erotic interest /s. When I lose every advantage I have from looking like a good looking cis passing, white passing, straight passing "man" to something society thinks is a freakish abomination, I'm doing so for erotic interests /s.
There are no uncomfortable truths here, just a transphobic agenda being pushed by someone who seems to have never really tried to understand a trans woman in their life. I love the lengths people will go to to listen to anyone except the people that are actually going through it.
verticalscaler|1 year ago
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jauer|1 year ago
The fact that she did that on top of basically starting life over at 30 due to the constraints around transition at that time? That's winning a marathon with a cinder block chained to your ankle.
As far as the concentration of trans people in computing, AFAIK there are two predominant theories: First, survivorship bias involving careers that are often non-customer-facing and well-paying. Second, that there's common cause or comorbidity with other developmental differences (like ASD or 2SD+ IQ) that are unusually common among people who end up in computing.
rideontime|1 year ago
sophacles|1 year ago
Each of these by itself is a big accomplishment:
* Inventing super-scalar architecture
* Writing THE book on VLSI
* Becoming an accomplished professor, a favorite and recognized teacher to many of the "greats" in the field.
* Undergoing (then new and much riskier) gender reassignment surgery despite the legal and social consequences that it might (and ultimately did) entail - losing a prestigious job, losing a family, and having to start life over.... and doing all that quite successfully!
The fact that ALL of them are true of just one person is pretty spectacular. The fact that there are many comments in this thread from people who knew her and respected her for just one of these accomplishments (mostly the tech ones) and are just learning about the rest should answer the question for you about why this is being upvoted.
Heck - either of my first two bullet points is on it's own black-bar worthy. The fact that you feel the need to focus on "the transgender thing" as possibly being the only reason there's attention should give you some pause. The fact that your entire comment is focused on the fact that a major innovator in our field was transgender with only the faintest of acknowledgement that her work underpins most of what we do here is just plain gross.
moate|1 year ago
Yes.
>> What is it about computing that it has such a high concentration of trans people compared to other fields.
First, prove your thesis: what is this “high concentration” and what “other fields” are you talking about? There seem to be a great deal of trans people in a great many places, and now that they’re less likely to be hatecrimed, they’re more likely to be out.
If I had to guess why there are more (if there are)- computers allow people to exist as they want to be. Female avatar? Go for it. Anonymous shitposting of your most terrible racist/bigoted thoughts? Vent thine spleen.
Also, most nerds are weird, which leads to many of them developing a great deal of empathy and a great distaste for exclusion. As a demographic, “computers” tends to attract a great deal of nerds with very strong feelings of right/wrong. That’s why I’m here: the jocks didn’t want me and the theater kids were too dramatic so I stuck it out with the geeks and weirdos (who also didn’t give a fuck who I wanted to sleep with as long as I could hold my own in the D&D campaign).
mybrid|1 year ago
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