In my opinion, this was decades in the making. Most Americans are sick of the two party system that can't seem to get anything done, as well as with a political system owned by the elite. As odd and bizarre as it is, Trump was able to channel that disgruntlement into a voting bloc. And it certainly doesn't help that the Democratic party has been unable to put forth a charismatic candidate since President Obama.
Are Americans really that shallow that they'll take borderline autocracy / actual-kakistocracy / full-on corruption over dull and possibly mediocre competence?
If so, as I said, the US people own this.
OWN IT. This isn't the Dems fault.
I don't say that to blame you. I say it in the sense that taking responsibility is not sitting back in your arm chair and blaming the Dems, it's recognising the issue and doing something about it.
Iran is on the tariffs list because of Trump's maximum pressure policy (an official National Security Memorandum) against Iran. This is coupled with Trump's willingness to get Russia to cooperate in the ceasefire.
I'm not claiming his administration's logic is 100% sound, only that there is an explanation that doesn't assume the rather farfetched theory that Trump is an agent for Russia.
I'm not particularly well-versed in this area, but searching for the topic on Google easily found this information on sites such as Wikipedia, WSJ, Newsweek, and whitehouse.gov.
Systems don’t remain constant, though, and every system gets “gamed” once the incentives are well understood. I’m 100% for investment in scientific research, but I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds. We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions, and a publish or perish model that encourages that bad behavior as well as junk science that will have minimal impact on their fields. We pay taxes to fund science so that universities or corporations can claim ownership and make us pay for the results.
>>> We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions
Can you define "many"? 100k reports? 10k reports? 1k reports? 150 reports? 15 reports? What's the incidence? What's the rate compared to the public and private sectors? What's the rate for defense contractors? Are we talking social sciences, hard sciences, health sciences? What's the field?
"many" is just intellectually lazy here. The reality is you read a few stories in the media and now have written off the entire model of research funding.
Failures (ethical or otherwise) are an everyday occurrence at scale, and the US research and funding model is at a scale unparalleled in the world.
This is precisely why Ted Cruz, etc. go on TV and read out the titles of silly-sounding research about beehives and condoms. Because they know that most Americans have no sense of very low-N statistics. A few examples out of hundreds of thousands proves the point!
Of course it doesn't.
Do you understand that? If so, then why are you casually throwing around those talking points that are contributing to the destruction of scientific infrastructure and human livelihoods? This isn't a game.
Even if it's a few. Imagine if honest researchers start chasing the fraudulent results. Now you have several people's time wasted. If the honest researcher is junior (PhD or Postdoc), their career is almost certainly over. Worse, assume the junior researcher is dishonest or marginal. The incentive is to fudge things a little bit to keep a career. The cycle begins anew... inherent in our system there is positive selection (in the 'natural selection' sense) for dishonest researchers.
This should give you pause.
Without claiming that any given administration is taking any action with deliberateness or planning... What is even more counterintuitive is that if the dishonesty hits a certain critical point, defunding all research suddenly is net positive.
I would also suggest you keep your ear to the ground. Almost every scientific discipline is in a crisis of reproducibility right now.
You might think crisis of reproducibility means everyone is faking data. No, that does not mean that. There are many factors to a crisis of reproducibility. One is fake data. A bigger one is a lack of incentive and a lack of complete data gathering details on some metric. Generally even if there is a crisis is subjective.
There's also usually a mismatch between what older scientists and younger scientists think are the right approach to studying something.
But generally, science is pretty good. You're reading small slices and assuming it actually represents all of science. It doesn't. Please give me a better sense of what ground your ear is on. I don't think it's generally representative of most science fields. Science has a cool thing where you could post totally fake data, but there are enough actors that also would question it if it's entirely unreproducible. Most issues are small nudges or selective data (e.g, retesting when data doesn't support your expectations), not blatant lies. The blatant lie stories you hear are not actually common and I'd love to hear where you think they are.
> Most issues are small nudges or selective data (e.g, retesting when data doesn't support your expectations), not blatant lies.
Yeah you missed it. When you do small nudges or selectively report data that's even worse than faking data. Not all villains twirl their mustaches. It's the ones that don't that are the most dangerous, these are the ones that are going to suck time and effort away from the collective endeavour the worst. Everyone knows that leclair can't do synthesis. But how certain are we that Phil Baran's Xenon oxidation really worked?
> I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds
I think everyone would be. There's a lot of bad science that gets funded. The point, though, is that you can't pick the good science from the bad without DOING THE SCIENCE.
The easiest thing in the world is to sit back and pretend to be an expert, picking winners and losers and allocating your limited capital "efficiently". The linked article shows why that's wrong, because someone comes along to outspend you and you lose.
Ok... If it's not the most efficient way to allocate funds, it's now your job to design a more efficient way. Good luck and let us know what you come up with!
Sure, but what has that to do with the administration's attack on funding and independence? As someone whose lost a grant award under the current administration's attack on science, I can tell you with assurance that this is more about political power and revenge than it is about improving scientific rigor. If we continue on this path, we will only get worse at science as a nation.
There are reforms that should be pursued: restructuring grants away from endless and arduous begging for money through the tedious grant process of today towards something more like block grants
Echoing this. I've had two grants pulled in the last admin, and one in this one, and all of them were very sweeping - and wildly inefficient, killing projects during the phase of ramping up, rather than productively working.
> As someone whose lost a grant award under the current administration's attack on science, I can tell you with assurance that this is more about political power and revenge than it is about improving scientific rigor.
I'm sorry to hear this, but curious what makes you certain of this? Revenge for what? I ask, because I hear this same template over and over with this administration. eg. DOGE isn't about government efficiency its about revenge.
Literally nothing about their approach resembles an attempt at efficiency. Efficiency is a ratio of input resources to output. No part of the DOGE program I've seen or heard of even considers that relationship. Simply firing people at best results in reduced output, or hiring more expensive contractors. And you've flushed institutional knowledge down the toilet. It's like turning a car off and pretending you've boosted its fuel efficiency because nothing is burning. Except that the car saved you time on other tasks, oops. Firing people and then immediately having to rehire them is hilariously inefficient. Rewriting legacy software like they're attempting at Social Security is a classically inefficient blunder.
I don't know if it's all about revenge, but it's absolutely not about efficiency. It's an edgy teen's idea of tough governance. It's the epitome of penny wise, pound foolish. It's false economy all the way down.
How much more straightforwards do you need it to be? How about this?
> “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
You don't have to be paying that much attention to get the vibe that a lot of these guys do, in fact, enjoy cruelty for its own sake. Trump and Vance enjoy humiliating Zelenskiy in the Oval Office and insulting the entire country of Canada, threatening to annex them etc. They enjoy making heads of companies and nations come to them and beg (https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1086367432957...)
Noticing these things isn't an "emotional crutch", it's understanding the actual reality of the situation.
> I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds
Probably. But the solution almost certainly doesn't involve the federal government policing what is and isn't researched, discussed and taught. We had a system that worked. We're destroying the parts of it that worked, while retaining the parts that are novel. (Turning conservatives into a protected class, for instance--not even the CCP explicitly reserves seats for party members.)
Why would the people paying for the research not control what it can be spent on? Letting the people who spend the money decide is typically not a good system.
They do control what it's spent on. There are volumes of compliance about how you can spend the money. For example, can't use the funds on food, alcohol, paying rent, bribing people (yes, seriously, some idiot tried it and then they had to make a rule about it), you have to fly US carriers where possible, etc.
There are also reports you submit showing your progress and how you spent the money, to check that you are spending it on things you said you would.
This thread (not just the person I'm replying to) demonstrates a lot of misconceptions about why we have research funding, how it works, and what the results have been in practice. Please, everyone, don't rely on stereotypes of how you think research funding works.
Pure science may not be a typical case, though, because the people who control the funds don't really have any idea whether the work they are funding is ultimately going to turn out productive or not. The work involved is far from routine and basically a jump into the unknown.
I get the risk of fraud and nepotism, but in some other situations (Bell Labs etc.), "choose very good people and let them improvise within certain limits of a budget" turned out to be very efficient. The devil is in the "choose very good people" detail.
The system isn’t really designed to be perfectly efficient at funding research. The inefficiency typically corresponds to scientists doing weird un-proposed research that produces new breakthroughs in other areas.
It’s not surprising to me that this post ends with an unsupported “so many reports” coda about research fraud. Research fraud is not zero but it’s extremely rare. It’s unsurprising to me that the “we really care about research integrity” crowd has joined forces with the “let’s defund all research institutions with no replacement” crowd, because it was always obvious that was where this would end.
Whether or not it's efficient isn't as much of a concern as if it's being gamed. Reports of growing university administrations, increase in the cost of an education, and biases in the publish-or-perish model show the old model is no longer effective.
People are reflexive. In a different context, driven by someone else, many of the people currently defending Harvard would instead be pointing out that Harvard and the other elite institutions are part of "the problem". In general this year, it's been interesting to me to see Republicans become protectionists and Democrats become neoliberal free traders, both parties flipping their talking points to either align or disagree with Trump.
People in HN have been complaining about university admin bloat for many years. In this thread, the problem is it’s political and people struggle with the cognitive dissonance about that stuff.
Yeah, his reasoning is suspect to a lot of folks, but I’m not sure why everyone is so comfortable with the consolidation of wealth at these elite institutions.
There's definitely a conversation we can have about the cost and accessibility of higher education in this country. I don't think that conversation should include an administration that is unilaterally and arbitrarily canceling international student visas, threatening to withhold research funding that was already allocated by congress, and turning back foreign scientists at the border for things they said in private conversation that the government only knows about after a warrantless search.
I've led startups running Rails and Python/Flask, but I do all my side projects in dotnet. And I haven't had a Windows machine in years, fwiw.
Deployment and Cost: For solo projects, I do 1-click deploys to a load-balanced Azure App Service. I was using GitHub Actions for a while, but it was slow and I kept pushing up against the need for a paid plan. I keep things local.
Dotnet is dramatically more scalable than Rails or Django, which means much simpler infrastructure for a lot longer. Poor performance leads to the need for more complexity. More servers, caching, queueing, etc. Then you need things like docker and k8s to manage all that infrastructure. For me, I can scale up or out by changing a single flag, and entire apps are just single dotnet apps (aside from the DB), so there's no need for docker.
Batteries Included: My team that ran Rails was burned by the magic, repeatedly. Over the years, developers made decisions that turned into maintainability nightmares. With Python/Flask, the lack of structure was like a Wild West after several years of rotating contractors. In some of my older solo-dev work with Flask, it was nearly impossible to come back to because all the disparate dependencies wouldn't play nicely any longer. And in both Ruby and Python, the lack of static typing was also a source of inscrutability (so please use type annotations in your Ruby and Python projects - your future self will thank you).
As for why people don't use it more, I think it's largely due to "resume driven development". It's the same reason every startup thinks they need k8s or they need to be using React. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Choosing dotnet is definitely not going to lead to job opportunities in the startup world. But, in my opinion, any startup that chooses dotnet will have a competitive advantage over those that choose Rails, Node.js, or Python because of simplicity and maintainability.
As for the argument that "time to market is faster with rails or python", I disagree. The biggest factor will be using what you know. The second will be the complexity of your infrastructure, which will be much simpler on dotnet. Avoid analysis paralysis as much as possible.
Other folks may have very different opinions, but as someone who has worked on several major platforms, each for years at a time, I have found dotnet to be the best option. However, no choice will be perfect, and dotnet has many warts. My recommendation if you do choose dotnet, is to go with MVC + HTMX. It's not sexy, but it's stable and mature. I don't recommend Blazor, yet. I think it needs another version. Last note: I've never bought any third party libraries/controls to do anything in my dotnet projects.
This looks great. There have certainly been times in my life where all I had was my phone, and I needed to check on a few things. I could see having an app like this handy "just in case" (assuming secure connectivity, of course). Good luck!
And absolutely the same logic can and should apply for universities - there can be private exclusive institutions, but the majority should be affordable and mostly paid for by taxes.
This already is the case. 75% of student debt is private universities and colleges.
If you get into Stanford but can't afford it, a loan seems like a good idea, but in reality the loan eligibility should consider the degree and future earning potential (along the same lines of how banks qualify other types of loans).
If we simply cancel student debt or remove private colleges' ability to charge a market rate the result will be no more private colleges (similar to other countries with fully publicly funded education). In these countries you typically have a national exam that determines where you go, or you have to lottery in to a school if it isn't in your district.
The amount of complexity people are introducing into their infrastructure is insane. At the end of the day, we're still just building the same CRUD web apps we were building 20 years ago. We have 50x the computation power, much faster disk, much more RAM, and much faster internet.
A pair of load-balanced web servers and a managed database, with Cloudflare out front, will get you really, really far.
Even worse, this feels like the goal was actually about reclaiming their resumes, not the stack. I expect these two guys to jump ship within a year, leaving the rest of the team trying to take care of an entire ecosystem they didn't build.
