Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

science.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

681–690 of 877 posts

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

#681

Post by rsfern »

roenxi wrote: post #660
bitmasher9 wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a bit of a bias in advocating more for enabling excellence than accommodating average. I will concede we have done a terrible job at sharing the harvest, but it’s often the excellent that are responsible for our harvest being so plentiful to begin with.

I agree with the perspective, the part I have trouble marrying it back to is the taxpayer funding and the NSF. The excellent & the people who benefit from their work tend to have lots of money and earning opportunities and are more than capable of just funding the research themselves. If there is a large group of people who aren't benefiting they don't need to be involved in the funding and the organising either. It…

I’ve served as a reviewer for a couple of NSF panels, and one of the things I really liked about the program I reviewed for is that a lot of the proposals included collaborations with local trade and vocational schools to involve and train future technicians and operators in addition to researchers and scientists. I think that’s really important for actually succeeding at the technology transfer goals of NSF, and if I’m reading your comment it does at least partly address delivering direct value for a broader chunk of the population

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

#682

Post by xmasotto »

streptomycin wrote: post #484
lostdog wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could have ended the diversity statements, but kept all the research. They decided to end all the research too.

Yeah that's what I would have done. Don't get me wrong, I am very anti MAGA! Which is kind of crazy... I'm here on the Internet ranting about DEI, and the MAGA movement is still toxic enough to completely alienate me. MAGA is probably worse than DEI.

[flagged]

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

#683

Post by taurath »

bitmasher9 wrote: post #554
Frost1x wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you’re being facetious, but I think there’s some nugget buried in this sarcasm. One issue with our ever increasingly intellectual focused economy is that it leaves behind people who may just not be cut out for these such careers. I’m not against having these economies (I too used to work in supercomputing, with national labs), they’re very necessary, but we need to find a way for people who might not fit very…

I have a bit of a bias in advocating more for enabling excellence than accommodating average. I will concede we have done a terrible job at sharing the harvest, but it’s often the excellent that are responsible for our harvest being so plentiful to begin with.

Expand your definition of "responsible". Not all stories are the Heroes Journey. Its just the one that gets people to accept the most exploitation and work the hardest.

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

#684

Post by Ray20 »

bilbo0s wrote: post #671
Ray20 wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Still monumentally irrational behavior, but I just wanted to offer some explanation of the national psychology driving these kinds of non-sensical actions. I don't quite understand what is irrational and non-sensical in such behavior. It is quite expected, rational and natural.

Demanding other nations follow our laws is “rational”? And “natural”? Uh.. yeah.. Agree to disagree. In fact, I think our entire unhealthy fixation on minorities is irrational. But hey, obviously enough voters believe in this trump nonsense that it will continue unabated.

>Demanding other nations follow our laws is “rational”? And “natural”?

From a political point of view, in the current circumstances - yes.

>unhealthy fixation on minorities is irrational

Who has unhealthy fixations? The current administration? This "fixation" brought it popular vote win. The Voters? They were voted exactly against unhealthy fixation on minorities.

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

#685

Post by cmontella »

TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #517
cmontella wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The charge is that Tesla can't do self-driving successfully. If they could, you wouldn't need to supervise, as is the case with e.g. a Waymo taxi. That they require you to supervise is an admission that their system is not sufficient for self driving, i.e. they're not doing it successfully.

Waymo taxi's are always in geofenced areas with full HD maps down to the centimeter. I can't take it to tahoe like i can with my Tesla. my point is... my tesla drives itself... all the time and never have to disengage. People can shout technicalities all the time, and regulations where tesla fails because it "Doesn't have an operator that can take over" but for all intents and purposes, my car drives itself from my d…

> for all intents and purposes

What you mean is for your intents and purposes. Others in the thread have pointed out specific intents and purposes for which Tesla's approach fails -- driving when you don't have to pay attention. Which is the core function of self-driving, so not being able to do it is kind of whole thing.

> If that's not full self driving, but waymo's geofenced, $45 for a ride down the street is, we just disagree.

Geofenced or not, self driving is about not having to pay attention while the vehicle is in motion. If you have to supervise it, that's a very different thing from a system that will all you to looking at your phone or sleep.

Tesla's approach of trying to drive everywhere instead of a geofenced area is part of why their system is failing to deliver self driving.

Trying to do one thing well before expanding the performance envelope is good systems engineering practice. But Tesla has been widely testing their systems on the greater public, which has tragically resulted in deaths. This is why at the end of the day Tesla requires you to supervise their system while you operate it.

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

#686

Post by NoahKAndrews »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #619
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…

is this type of research really at risk? I thought the feds were after research with an ideological bent. Rather than speculate about how the feds might see certain research as ideological, can we have some concrete examples of the type of research projects that have been discontinued?

A few examples focusing on climate change, which I hope we can all agree is extremely critical.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/05/climate-disasters-th...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/trump-admin-may-be-t...

https://www.propublica.org/article/noaa-contracts-seattle-la... (damage is being done even when programs aren't explicitly cancelled)

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

#687

Post by joquarky »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #510
Dakizhu wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No this is what most of their supporters genuinely believe. They think people working in a factory generate more real economic value than people working in offices.

Yep. There are strong Cultural Revolution vibes coming from that direction.

That would explain the initiative to create a list of people on the spectrum.

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

#688

Post by [deleted] »

pinko wrote: post #379
lokhura wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the one that made the original claim. The 25% is the government's figure. Whether some of it was classified incorrectly is up for debate. I haven't personally double checked every claim, but it is not hard to believe that money is being siphoned via those grants into DEI programs, and it is the government's position to not fund these programs anymore.

Even the word "siphoned" is loaded with bias. Is research aimed at understanding why kids choose to participate in high-school science classes or not, and whether certain teaching approaches lead to better outcomes for boys vs girls, not legitimate NSF research? We can't make improvements to science education without that kind of data. That's not siphoning anything away from science -- it is science. Completely aside…

[deleted]

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

#689

Post by camdenreslink »

absolutelastone wrote: post #617
heylook wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think their point is the billions in private investment which preceded those millions. But the "billions" didn't precede the "millions". They're just completely incorrect, and anyone that knows even a tiny amount about the actual history can see it immediately. That's why these comment sections are so polarized. It's a bunch of people vibe commenting vs people that have spent even like an hour researching the ind…

You seem to be arguing that the second government touches anything then everything it does gets credited to the government funding column. Seems simplistic to me, but you can believe what you like. Go back far enough and there was only private industry, and no government funding until the space race basically. Either way the fact remains that the billions spent developing GPU's preceded the millions spent to use thos…

Many industries are uninvestable in their early days. How many get to the point where private funding makes sense without initial government funding for fundamental science and research? Where will we be in 15 years if the government starts pulling funding like the NSF? We might find the private money at that time is funding those future industries in other countries instead.

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

#690

Post by phonon »

lokhura wrote: post #365
pinko wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So after the first simple question, we're already at less than half the original claimed figure of 55% (a bad sign for its credibility, if you're a Bayesian!). But more importantly, I'm familiar with the linked document, and it's garbage. It was thrown together practically overnight to justify a political decision that had already been made, and in its incompetent haste, flagged proposals that had phrases like "diver…

I'm not the one that made the original claim. The 25% is the government's figure. Whether some of it was classified incorrectly is up for debate. I haven't personally double checked every claim, but it is not hard to believe that money is being siphoned via those grants into DEI programs, and it is the government's position to not fund these programs anymore.

They literally categorized research as DEI ("Status") if it had the keywords "HISTORICALLY", "EXCLUSIVE", "INSTITUTIONAL", "STATUS", "BARRIER" and on and on...these are not serious people.
Post reply on HN