PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program • Hacker News Board

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#661

Post by qcnguy » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 8:59 AM UTC

convolvatron wrote: post #192

qcnguy wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's definitely not the requirement! The requirement is to avoid doing certain kinds of "research" that the government disagrees is valid research to fund, characterized by the principles underlying it. They may have started by using certain keywords to find examples of such grants to terminate, but the requirement itself has nothing to do with words and everything to do with the intentions.

I know someone whose grant was cancelled for studying genetic diversity in animal populations.

And maybe they'll get that back eventually, but academia can't complain about rough handling when it steadfastly refused as a bloc to fix its own ways for so long. Outsiders trying to fix them will always create a lot more collateral damage than insiders fixing the problems, but when insiders refuse, outsiders will take over.

Also, frankly, I heard a bunch of such stories and very often the grantees were misrepresenting their work. It actually did have DEI content in it and they were pretending it didn't. You can see how many people in this thread are arguing that all you have to do to comply with the requirements are use a thesaurus or misrepresent their work and then continue anyway. For as long as academics insist on total warfare and malicious compliance, expect universities to be blowtorched.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#662

Post by charcircuit » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 9:02 AM UTC

henearkr wrote: post #607

charcircuit wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The following antidiscrimination laws part was the part quoted in the article linked here. The part they said was recently added. What part are you referring to?

Nope, you cherry-picked around the part where they say no to DEI.

You misread it. It says no to DEI, that violates nondiscrimination laws.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#663

Post by qcnguy » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 9:03 AM UTC

flufluflufluffy wrote: post #592

qcnguy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I should have been clear that it’s particularly with respect to word choice. All of the research we’re doing is accurately described by the proposal. It’s just codified in this weird new way of speaking where you can’t say certain trigger words which offend the snowflakes up top. For me personally, I really don’t care if it’s grant fraud or not. We’re doing research into how to improve the healthcare and quality of l…

> I really don’t care if it’s grant fraud or not.

Right, academics think they're above the law and that it's OK to lie to conservatives to advance their agendas. So why should anyone believe you, when you say it's all above board? If you don't care about engaging in financial fraud you don't care about misrepresenting things on Hacker News either, for sure.

The culture of dishonesty and extremism in academia is why it will eventually be liquidated. Expect to see academic funding driven to zero and university property seized in future. There will be no more academics. It'll take years, but mass lawlessness of that kind won't be tolerated forever.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#664

Post by qcnguy » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 9:06 AM UTC

VerminOctopus1 wrote: post #209

qcnguy wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Do you have any suggestions for how the PSF could fulfill its mission of being more inclusive in a non-immoral way?

Sure. Is it doing anything to push people away? Yes, it pushes away people who disagree with far left ideological ideas, like when it purged Tim Peters who worked on Python for 20 years.

Stop leftists waging ideological war against long term Python contributors and it will be a more inclusive place, whilst acting in a moral way.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#665

Post by qcnguy » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 9:09 AM UTC

VerminOctopus1 wrote: post #210

hn_shill_202510 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you were to poll this very forum, you would find out that it is too almost entirely comprised of (biological) men. shall we apply the DEI principles here and give female posters +100 free karma on every comment/submission?

This is called a strawman argument and is functionally worthless for this discusson

Wrong fallacy. A strawman argument is where you claim someone else said something that they didn't, you put words in their mouth. hn_shill didn't do that.

machomaster says it's reducto ad absurdum. It's not that either. There's nothing absurd about the proposal, it's exactly the same idea as many other DEI policies like female-only shortlists, which are found in politics or female only bonus/prize pools found everywhere.

It's no fallacy! What they did was pose a hypothetical designed to test people's commitment to their stated principles. Does a minor change in context cause someone to recoil from their own ideas? If yes, the ideas are bad and they haven't thought it through.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#666

Post by qcnguy » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 9:11 AM UTC

LexiMax wrote: post #281

aalimov_ wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at the comments left by that profile. I don’t think that they would be able to understand what you are saying here, all they see is red. A partial recent comment “qcnguy” made: “DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology. Requiring the PSF to dump DEI if they want the money is good for everyone, because DEI is bad for people”

It's worth pointing out that this profile has been around for three months and already has enough karma to have access to the "flag" and "vouch" tools.

It's also worth pointing out that despite this thread being full of ridiculously low quality posts, I haven't flagged any of them. That's the sort of thing DEI leftists do, not everyone.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#667

Post by bluecalm » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 9:23 AM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #634

MoltenMan wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there are really enough details on the parent comment to judge it either way, but can't you at least see how weird it is that 'Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly? Whether or not white men have hidden advantages over non white men (and I'm not saying that they don't! Simply that they are not clearly visible), it should be very clear that there are large non hidden…

> that 'Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly That's because, in general, STEM itself is already a "Men in STEM" program. We men don't need a program to get us excited about pursuing STEM education & careers; that pursuit is already there, and already common. It goes back to innocuous-seeming things as young boys being given chemistry kits for their birthday, while young girls ar…

Your argument is based on the fact that more men naturally gravitate towards STEM than women do. This doesn't mean there aren't still men who could go into STEM but lack motivation/opportunity/some other push. Maybe there are more of them than there is women like that, maybe not. You are saying it's ok to ignore all those men just because already bigger % of men naturally go into STEM. This is just discriminatory. Just because some people sharing some characteristic with me do better (in this context) doesn't mean I am in position to do better.

This is the mistake DEI proponents make. There is no "we men", there are individuals and discriminating towards them is not ok and also illegal.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#668

Post by LauraMedia » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 9:28 AM UTC

paulsutter wrote: post #458

nicole_express wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current administration has taken, shall we say, a broad approach to what they consider "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws", this clause is suddenly interpreted very differently than in past administrations despite the laws in question not changing. Therefore, I can definitely see why the PSF's lawyers encouraged giving this clause an extremely wide berth and pulling the grant entirely.

Then the brave thing is you accept the grant and let them take it to court. Get a court ruling against them, which in our common law system establishes case law The administration can try to press charges, but they don’t control the courts

According to recent events of this US administration, there are two things that could follow after a court decides in favor of the PSF:

* They will ignore it and still claw back the money, with force if needed

* They go higher and higher through the courts until it lands on the table of the supreme court that conveniently sides with the administration.

You can't win a fight in the system. Law is broken and not reliable anymore.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#669

Post by lou1306 » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 9:29 AM UTC

belorn wrote: post #397

jkelleyrtp wrote: post #320

In high school, I ran a robotics team that did lots of STEM outreach. We went to community centers, after school programs, and worked with other similar orgs like "girls who code." I think we played an important role in the community. In our mission we stated we wanted to help bring "equity to STEM education." In 2025, according to the current admin's stance on "DEI," my robotics team would not be able to receive gra…

Around 2019, Guido official stated that he would not longer mentor any white male, and that there was enough white males around that any white male who wanted to learn developing python would have to do it on their own. The community in general seemed to follow the same policy back then, but now seem to have relaxed a bit. Reducing complex individuals into two bits of information, skin and gender, will never be a sta…

It's not like a white male cannot get mentored in Python by anybody. By 2019 Python was already one of the most popular languages in the world. Surely any dev on Earth who wants to learn Python has plenty of people and resources at their disposal, and it would take a very good set of reason to turn to the language inventor himself.

I agree that DEI often acts as a fig leave over a whole bunch of other systemic issues, and the European vs American cultural and historical landscapes are already so different as to make any cross-the-pound discussion on DEI extremely hard to navigate, but I still commend the PSF for not taking clearly ideological orders from a funding body. That road would have lead to nothing but trouble.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#670

Post by philipallstar » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 9:29 AM UTC

belorn wrote: post #313

latexr wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else. You often don’t know who the “best” person is for a role until they’re in it. Diversity is good because it allows for different perspectives and catching your own blind spots. Because we don’t understand different backgrounds as well as our own, we can fail to un…

Diversity is good when it is either applied in a neutral and identify-agnostic way, or if we as a society all agree on which groups deserve getting benefits and which ones don't. The first one is sadly horrible disliked and tend to lose support as soon the "wrong" demographic get benefits. If you have a diversity program to benefit minority X, and then later X become majority, then the program get canceled rather tha…

Any system that tries to not hire for competence has a known, conscious blind spot. That's much worse than a system that arrives for the best but has accidental blind spots.