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Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

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Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

#201

Post by mandevil »

The National Science Foundation funded the original research that became Google: https://www.nsf.gov/news/origins-google

That grant in the area of library science led directly to one of the most valuable companies on the planet, creating far more value (2.2 trillion is today's market cap) from that one Digital Library Initiative grant to Stanford Professors Hector Garcia-Molina and Terry Winograd (plus a NSF Graduate Student Fellowship that paid for Brin to be at Stanford in the first place) than everything that NSF has spent over it's entire history.

This is why funding research is incredibly important, and incredibly unpredictable. No one would have looked at the DLI in 1994 and said "Ah yes, this one is the big payoff!" But it was.

Basic research is like VC funding, it's a portfolio with a huge amount of misses (in the sense that the research doesn't change the world), but the winners pay off for all Americans and everyone in the world far more than the losers cost. And, unlike VC's and start-ups, basic research has less investment than is socially optimal, because most of the payoffs are far more diffuse and are much harder to capture inside a company that returns profit to investors (the Google example is unusual in how direct the link was between the research and the company). Which is why the NSF (and other agencies like DARPA, NIH, etc.) were created, to fill a hole that exists in a pure market.

This really feels more and more every day like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_stripping

Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

#202

Post by _heimdall »

scarface_74 wrote: post #136
bruce511 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bearing in mind that this administration won the election and a lot of what they are doing is more-or-less what they campaigned on, I'm not sure democracy is at risk. One can pick around the details, but for example with regard to the firings, voters clearly approved of the concept of smaller, cheaper government. Which is basically what's happening. This is essentially democracy in action. Yes, the voters may come to…

Trump specifically disavowed Project 2025 when he ran and now is embracing it. He never said he was going to put an unelected billionaire in charge and disregard the Constitution. > And the lack of reaction by Republicans in congress suggests that they feel the best way to be reelected is to go along with it. They are worried about getting primaried and their primary opponent being financed by Musk.

Wasn't Doge floated before the election, with Trump embracing the idea?

Regardless, Trump has made a living as a (slimy) business man. No one should have heard his campaign speeches and taken them at face value.

He didn't even have to be lying at the time, he could have simply changed his mind. The man seems to be driven only by two motivations: his family and making deals. The first one is often seen as admirable or honorable, the second means you'll do whatever it takes to negotiate a situation where you're better off by whatever metrics matter to you (usually money and status).

Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

#203

Post by Mathnerd314 »

greycol wrote: post #177
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the only way to know something is important is to shut it off and see if anyone complains. For example, lots of stories in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629714 . Now certainly the Trump administration could have been more careful, but they only have 4 years so the Facebook motto of "move fast and break things" applies.

To be rather abrasive in my response: I believe your view is a waste of air. In case I'm correct how about we cut you off from air for a week and if there's a problem we'll restore it then.

That is how a large portion of the internet works, e.g. in most subreddits certain viewpoints will be instantly banned without any discussion. HN is kind of strange in that respect.

Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

#204

Post by [deleted] »

polairscience wrote: post #28

This is true for many programs for reasons that will be hard to understand if you aren't a scientist. The NSF program managers are often pulled out of academia for brief periods of their career to do various tasks as experts. This means they are often probationary. This is the only way to hire people with deep expertise on the topic-du-jour. The trump administration fired in wide swaths many probationary employees at…

[deleted]

Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

#205

Post by digitaltrees »

sneak wrote: post #50

Consent matters. There is no worse tyranny than to force someone to pay for something they do not want to buy, simply because you think it would be good for them. I am vehemently pro-research and pro-education, but these tax-funded programs are not it. There must be some meaningful connection to the delivery of value, otherwise this stuff is just public-private wealth transfer. This seems obvious to me. Why should th…

Congress passed laws allocating the spending. That by definition is consent.

Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

#206

Post by hayst4ck »

polairscience wrote: post #28

This is true for many programs for reasons that will be hard to understand if you aren't a scientist. The NSF program managers are often pulled out of academia for brief periods of their career to do various tasks as experts. This means they are often probationary. This is the only way to hire people with deep expertise on the topic-du-jour. The trump administration fired in wide swaths many probationary employees at…

> This is true for many programs for reasons that will be hard to understand if you aren't a scientist.

It is a decapitation strike. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decapitation_(military_strateg...

Ukraine is more or less a proxy war between America and Russia, which is also between John Locke's Social Contract and Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, which said simply is whether rules are made in respect to reason (law) or in respect to power (order). It's also a fight over who are the final enforcers of law. Are citizens the last line of enforcers of the law or is "law" always enforced by the strong against the weak?

America has the world's largest military and a world ending nuclear arsenal, so direct conflict is unconscionable. That means what's left is high leverage asymmetric warfare. Russia corrupted America's elites (and German elites to a significant degree, too), either through money, compromising material, or the promise of power. Some of those elites are people like Peter Thiel, who are absolute power houses of the American surveillance capitalist state. Private intelligence companies were leveraged to divide the American public and then conquer it.

America is experiencing a decapitation strike. By compromising our leadership, our economy and technological flywheel is being destroyed, our ideology is being corrupted, and trust in us has been decimated. Our closest allies now see us as someone who must be weakened and defended against. We abandoned Ukraine. There is no argument that Trump's America is good faith in any way.

It's a decapitation strike.

The point is to damage us and our future, and we're letting it happen. Our military that took an oath to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic have failed their obligation. Now America at large is rejecting the evidence of their eyes and ears. Americans are obeying in advance.

https://snyder.substack.com/p/decapitation-strike (https://archive.is/1xkxK)

Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

#207

Post by vel0city »

bruce511 wrote: post #135
trhway wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We're looking at the US wilfully letting go of the possibiility of remaining the most powerful nation in the world. many here see it way (me too, though i'm well aware that many times whenever i was critical of Musk, he happened to be right, and in this case - Musk is naturally not anti-science guy, so i'd guess there must be some other reason for him doing that which i'm just not able to see). I wonder whether some…

Musk's motivations are simple; the rich have been promised tax breaks, which means deep spending cuts. So gutting the parks service means no parks open to the public, but balances a tax break to billionaires. Same for "science". That's a long term investment with long term returns. Kill that now for immediate tax breaks. Let someone else worry about the fallout 10 years from now. Then there's direct interest. The CFB…

> So gutting the parks service means no parks open to the public, but balances a tax break to billionaires

That's the stupid thing in the end. Gut the parks service, here's your $500 tax break on your several hundred million+ income.

Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

#208

Post by acdha »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #126
Kindra wrote: post #32

Notwithstanding the other awful aspects of all of this, there’s a certain vibe of, “people who don’t understand how a system works attempting to act like they know how the system works and are too cowardly to admit they are breaking everything.” This just reads like “Character Limit” except replace Twitter with the federal government.

Sometimes the only way to know something is important is to shut it off and see if anyone complains. For example, lots of stories in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629714 . Now certainly the Trump administration could have been more careful, but they only have 4 years so the Facebook motto of "move fast and break things" applies.

> the Facebook motto of "move fast and break things" applies.

That’s seriously begging the question of whether a website started to rate the attractiveness of Zuckerberg’s classmates has the same consequences for society if it fails as the government. When you work on something which actually matters, there are virtues other than speed. What the Republicans are doing is like clearing your lawn by setting it on fire, saying they didn’t have time to do anything slower.

It’s estimated that just the USAID cuts alone are on the order of hundreds of children being born HIV positive every day, not to mention the impact of food aid disappearing during a famine, or shutting down the last option for afghan women to get educated:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/opinion/hiv-usaid-freeze-...

The science funding has a lower death toll, of course, but it profoundly disrupts careers and pushes people out of the country. Someone educated in the United States who returns to their home country ends up competing with us and probably won’t come back. The grad student getting cut now will probably end up leaving science entirely (people need to make rent and student loan payments) so we’ll be missing out on their lifetime achievements and also the later-career guidance they would have given the next generation.

The federal government as a whole becomes less efficient because fewer top people will be willing to work for lower pay without job security and every contractor will be pricing in future disruption.

Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

#209

Post by bruce511 »

jltsiren wrote: post #161
bruce511 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bearing in mind that this administration won the election and a lot of what they are doing is more-or-less what they campaigned on, I'm not sure democracy is at risk. One can pick around the details, but for example with regard to the firings, voters clearly approved of the concept of smaller, cheaper government. Which is basically what's happening. This is essentially democracy in action. Yes, the voters may come to…

This is based on a too literal interpretation of democracy. Democracy had a bad reputation in the ancient world, because unconstrained majority decisions often led to terrible outcomes. In the modern world, democracy usually means liberal democracy, which includes things like the rule of law and constitutional protections. As a rough approximation, a constitution exists to prevent the government from doing what the v…

Ultimately the checks and balances are also elected. Directly in the case of congress, indirectly in the case of the judiciary. (Mitch McConnell obstructed merrick garland and was rewarded for it.)

Of course unrestrained majority decisions lead to terrible outcomes. This is well understood, and has been demonstrated over and over recently (think Brexit.)

Democracy is objectively a flawed system for this reason. It has never promised to deliver the best, or even good, government. It is what it is.

I agree, this is a literal interpretation of democracy. It is "the will of the people". I'm not sure that anything else could still be even called a democracy.

Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

#210

Post by hackyhacky »

cyberax wrote: post #170
digitaltrees wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not far away from dying. I would argue that it’s already too late. The trump administration has shown that it can seize the power to control spending which is constitutionally an exclusive power if congress and courts can’t and won’t do anything about it. We are past a constitutional crisis, republicans had a theory of a unitary executive and prove they can stream roll other branches. Now trump and others are ta…

The US is a strong federative country. Individual states are almost literally _states_ (as in "country") and have a lot of power. They can impose their own carbon taxes, net neutrality rules, fund research, etc. And more importantly, their local democracy is going strong.

> And more importantly, their local democracy is going strong.

I guess you never heard of gerrymandering.

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