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NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

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Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#421

Post by gitremote »

inverted_flag wrote: post #189
bilbo0s wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought HN User burnte was being hyperbolic in the assertions that post put forth. Then I read a few articles. sigh. I mean, I guess we'll try to find competent and sane leaders again in 4 years. I don't know? There's not much else we can do at this point if this is the level of irrationality you're dealing with. I'll add in way of explanation to non-US citizens that in the US, we've always had a fixation on certai…

> I mean, I guess we'll try to find competent and sane leaders again in 4 years. I don't know? There's not much else we can do at this point if this is the level of irrationality you're dealing with. There are absolutely not going to be free and fair elections 4 years from now. People really need to start preparing for this reality.

In April 2025, Trump called for investigations into pollsters who determined that Trump has a low approval rate, calling the pollsters "criminals".[1] If Trump criminalizes publishing data that shows disapproval for his party, then there would be no public data that works as a checksum to detect rigged election results.

1. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-me...

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#422

Post by jpeloquin »

ponow wrote: post #334
cmontella wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the entire DARPA "challenge" series has been about jumpstarting the US robotics industry. People who were involved in those went on to found driverless car companies, which then went on to create a market for driverless cars, and now America is a leader in the industry. And it needed to happened because the state of American robotics was sad in 2004; the very first challenge was a disaster when all the cars ran…

It's ironic that the much more significant ultimate success of deep learning happened despite a lack of government funding, if Hinton is to be believed. The 90s were a neural net winter, and success required faster computation, a private success. I lose zero sleep at the prospect that there would be zero government robotics research funding. If the advantages are there, profit seekers will find a way. We must stop de…

Once something has a predictable ROI (can be productized and sold), profit seekers will find a way. The role of publicly funded research is to get ideas that are not immediately profitable to the stage that investors can take over. Publicly funded research also supports investor-funded R&D by educating their future work force.

The provided examples do not clearly support the idea that industry can compensate for a decrease in government-funded basic research. Bell Labs was the product of government action (antitrust enforcement), not a voluntary creation. The others are R&D (product development) organizations, not research organizations. Of those listed, Xerox PARC is the most significant, but from the profit-seeking perspective it's more of a cautionary tale since it primarily benefited Xerox's competitors. And Hinton seems to have received government support; his backpropagation paper at least credits ONR. As I understand it, the overall deep learning story is that basic research, including government-funded research, laid theoretical groundwork that capital investment was later able to scale commercially once video games drove development of the necessary hardware.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#423

Post by trhway »

overfeed wrote: post #385
zhivota wrote: post #295

I worked at two National Laboratories, Argonne and Idaho, on NSF funded internship grants. The second one turned into a full time job, again on an NSF grant. The first one was on supercomputing, writing proof of concept code for a new supercomputing operating system (ZeptoOS). The second was on the automated stitching of imagery from UAVs for military applications (at a time when this was not commoditized at all, we…

>$10k to give people who otherwise didn't have a road into science, exactly what they need to get their foot in the door. The current admin thinks those $10k grants are better spent by giving them to some billionaire via tax cuts. Impoverishing the many to enrich a few is a 3rd-world, banana-republic mindset, and unfortunately is not self-correcting. The politically-connected will see the pile of money controlled by…

That $10K breeds a Democratic/progressive voter. The actions of the current admin are pretty logical if one considers the goal of increasing political power of the conservative populist mass (i don't say "voters" here as making voting meaningless is among the end-games here)

I'm waiting for an analog of my "favorite" AETA laws to be made into federal law (FETA - Federal Enterprise Terrorism Act) criminalizing any anti-government speech/protest into terrorist/extremist hell. Note about the First Amendment - AETA doesn't seem to be affected by it, and so FETA would be safe from it too. Would be pretty similar to the Russia's discreditation laws and those China' security laws being used against democratic opposition in Hong Kong for example.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#424

Post by kevinventullo »

sneak wrote: post #291
AdamN wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

True libertarians are disgusted by authoritarians. A reduction in the size of the US federal government (and its budget) is long overdue. Both of these things can be true. It isn’t anti-intellectual to say that most of what the US federal government does would be better performed by private industry. If understanding is your goal, it may be a useful intellectual exercise to internally steelman the counterargument to…

It isn’t anti-intellectual to say that most of what the US federal government does would be better performed by private industry.

The problem is that industry is inherently narrowly focused in short-to-medium term profitability, and cannot be relied on to carry out work which benefits society as a whole, including many conventionally “intellectual” pursuits such as: educating the populace, or fundamental research with no clear path to monetization.

Yes, private schools do both of these things, but in both cases they are only doing so by means of public funding.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#425

Post by regularization »

ponow wrote: post #334
cmontella wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the entire DARPA "challenge" series has been about jumpstarting the US robotics industry. People who were involved in those went on to found driverless car companies, which then went on to create a market for driverless cars, and now America is a leader in the industry. And it needed to happened because the state of American robotics was sad in 2004; the very first challenge was a disaster when all the cars ran…

It's ironic that the much more significant ultimate success of deep learning happened despite a lack of government funding, if Hinton is to be believed. The 90s were a neural net winter, and success required faster computation, a private success. I lose zero sleep at the prospect that there would be zero government robotics research funding. If the advantages are there, profit seekers will find a way. We must stop de…

Hinton and his students studied for years on US (and then Canadian) government grants. The year Alexnet came out, Nvidia was awarded tens of millions by DARPA for Project Osprey.

It's an odd historical revisionism where from Fairchild to the Internet to the web to AI, government grants and government spending are washed out of the picture. The government funded AI research for decades.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#426

Post by borski »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #237
borski wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some witting, some not. I am not convinced all of DOGE are actual Russian assets. That would be too conspiratorial. But that they’re all compromised? That’s much more likely. We know for a fact that at least a couple are pwned.

In a lot of cases it's just simple conflict of interests.

To be clear, I meant literally compromised. As in, their machines are pwned. The whistleblower indication of Russian IPs logging in immediately after creation of usernames/passwords is a clear indication of that.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#427

Post by vkou »

asdsadasdasd123 wrote: post #360
beej71 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every DEI program I've ever been involved in has been 100% about selecting people _purely_ on merit. Not race, not gender, not whether or not they're trans. The DEI trainings are about completely ignoring those factors when hiring. I'm curious what they call your trainings on the matter.

Every DEI program I've been involved in has had target quotas which put pressure on hiring managers to reach those quotas, but still "hire on merit". And then they hire a viz minority engineer who thinks translating a js file to python means renaming the file extension.

I'm glad you took the time to point that out, because, as we all know, in the history of the universe, they have never made a non-viz minority hire who also happens to be completely incapable of doing the job.

---

When a viz-minority hire sucks, it's clearly DEI's fault, we shout from the rooftops.

When a non-minority hire sucks, crickets.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#428

Post by tristor »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #381
guywithahat wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Must be why you pay for college right, no demand otherwise they’d be paying you!

In some ways, actually yes. College has gotten more expensive over time, partly because demand for college has outweighed the benefits of college on the other side. It is a shift in the education market away from the cost profile being aligned with outputs, to being focused on prestige/experience as the primary selling point. It's also largely related to the glut of paying foreign students nearly outnumbering Americans.

Prior to these shifts, college was much much much less expensive.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#429

Post by stevenwoo »

jhp123 wrote: post #333
chairhairair wrote: post #43

The NSF budget is ~$10billion. That's about half of NASA's, 1.2% of the DoD's, 0.5% of the discretionary budget ($1.7 trillion). Why is this the focus of the admin? Science is one of the few things the US is doing well.

I'm not the first one to see parallels to the Cultural Revolution. Policies like purging the intelligentsia and sending educated urban people to go work in the fields weren't motivated by any thought out plan, but by an irrational sense of resentment against "elites" and a desire for "purity".

Arts/academia/sciences are being disciplined for thought crimes and will learn one way or another through this coercion to bend the knee, it explains the crackdown on student protests against Israeli genocide, science funding, the arts takeover, using all the federal levers of funding and immigration.
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