I think this is the first time I've posted an article that has been flagged, especially given that the source is the journal Science.
As a professor working in AI, I'll probably be fine, but if I cannot get funding it will be challenging to stay in academia. Then again, both of my last major NSF proposals (which are in review) had either a required Institutional DEI Commitment Statement (that was for an NSF MRI proposal), and the other was a major AI proposal which required about 1/3 of the proposal to be aimed at broader impacts that were largely aimed at increasing diversity in AI. I do care about increasing the number of women, black, and Hispanic people in AI research, although I also had a section about how we need to increase our domestic production of AI scientists given that 70%+ of the PhDs produced in AI in the USA are non-citizens.
Both are still in review. I'm not optimistic, but the work required hundreds of hours to create those proposals....
It is a shame also that this topic is deemed too hotly political for HN and hence the flagging. We are lacking in good forums for measured discussion of what is happening in this country right now.
HN has had a huge number of political threads in recent months, including quite a few about funding cuts along the lines of the present story. These submissions don't end up with specific discussions about the specifics of a given story; they end up with generic discussions repeating how people feel about the larger topics. Those topics, and those feelings, are of course important—but it makes the threads largely interchangeable, and therefore even more repetitive.
Thanks for the note. I definitely understand your reasoning. I will say that to me (a) finding out that NSF has blocked funding is a new and different point than that DOE has blocked overhead (or that NIH review panels were on hold). And (b) this news would not have reached me as soon if I hadn’t noticed it in the /active front page. And (c) that I come to the discussions partially in hope that I’ll learn more “secret” details about what is happening. (d) I recognize that much of the discussion is repetitive, but mixed in there is useful analysis and even more actual news reporting. (e) I understand that people get overwhelmed by the continued raging and conflate new news with seeming opinion. (f) I recognize that your job is hard but know that I really appreciate HN!
There is an elephant in the room. When an article comes up about the elephant's tusks or the elephant's trunk or the people the elephant has just stepped on, the discussion ends up being about the whole elephant. I know what you're saying about these threads being repetitive and interchangeable. Its just that the elephant is so big and its parts so connected, its hard to have a limited discussion about only one part of the elephant. But nevertheless that elephant is very important to the larger set of topics that this site is dedicated to! It would be good to have a solution besides not talking about the elephant.
This feels unreasonable to me. It isn't like these are all the same political story. A lot of politics is legitimately happening very fast and "we can't talk about the next thing because we just talked about the last thing" is a structural weakness, not a benefit.
Are there other topics besides politics that regularly get flagged for being repetitive?
It's a structural necessity for a 30-ish things a day site vs an infinite-scroll-feed site. The world can definitely move a lot faster than a nerd messageboard that's closer in design and spirit to a crusty pokemon (or, dunno, planespotting) phpbb forum than to the news notification stream on your phone. But that's a desired feature for such places.
Right now I see one political thread on the front page. If the alternative to flagging is political threads dominating the front page then this suggests that 90%+ of political threads are flagged.
What do you find not right about it? In time of political turmoil, people start posting regular news stories to HN because there's a glut of big, activating political stories. They're still mostly offtopic so other people flag them. They seem like straightforward consequences of each other and the outlier cause driving it is the political climate itself not some particular weirdness of HN.
When I look at the number of flagged political topics on /active (often which have clear connection to the software industry) I still only see a couple. Going from one such post on the front page to three doesn't seem like it would ruin the front page.
The site's moderation system needs to change. There's near infinite power to suppress & deny. That's unhackerly in extreme.
There should be some skin in the game for suppressing. If you want to participate in moderating things away, at the very least you should be willing & able to put your name on that act of denying the public.
The flagging has become de facto censorship for HN and I really thought this is the last place I'd see it. Why is this OK except that some people with influence don't want topics hitting the front page? Should we forgot that PG is yet another tech billionaire who probably is pretty happy with the way things are going right now.
Everyday my paranoia increases, every day I become more of a conspiracy theorist. It's us vs. the people who can outspend us a million times over and we can't fight back. Why should any news organization tell the truth if lying gets them a fat paycheck. Why should anyone in charge of any public forum allow controversial topics to get posted when they can make a fat paycheck by blocking them?
I feel sorry for all these agencies and (aspiring) scientists. I hope they find a safe place elsewhere.
I'm left wondering if this administration and its henchmen will manage to do the opposite of what the Apollo program left the US in its wake: A giant leap for the U.S. economy. It sure is creating a lot of long-lasting damage.
this seems like it's all theater right? these aren't the huge drivers of the federal budget, but they're too scared to go after military or entitlement spending so enormous effort is put into these things that aren't even big fractions of the budget
They need to continue to feed the republican base stories such as "We're fixing SCIENCE which the Dirty Liberal's have been RUINING for DECADES! CHINA!"
I don't think it's theater, I think it's ideological napalm. Christopher Rufo said "Yes, we are going to crush the academic Left, abolish DEI, and salt the Earth beneath it", and I think this is an example of that mission.
It's just absolute lunacy.
If that's the stated goal (and it sure looks like it), the 'academic left' is at least partially responsible for a large majority of the prosperity of this country over the last few decades. How can you have a successful, rich country when you're antagonizing your allies and roughly half of your citizens?
These people will burn down their own house and wealth to make sure others don't feel welcome. How hard is it to just learn to live with people that don't agree with you?
A small percentage will, yes. The vast majority won't. Plus there's the issue of the stranglehold Trump seems to have over GOP members (ie. they're pushed, even threatened into compliance, especially GOP congress members). An easy way of vilifying any group is to point out how bad their most extreme members are.
It also doesn't even matter. The Trump situation will end. At that point MAGA people won't be gone, and it'd be a pretty sad outcome if they were or felt repressed, or we'll simply end up right here again. The point is not to win, the point is to make things better.
Also they're demanding universities such as Harvard install a contingent of their hand picked ideologues, party official vetted academics basically, to insure viewpoint diversity & to be able to snitch & propogandize within universities.
The right has plenty of very strong hard right institutions of its own. Very very strong. But they're very rarely academically or scientifically notable, across the whole world (with notable exceptions of the Koch brothers & Federalist Society funded George Mason School of Economics). The right has enormous influence, their own schools & control within schools that they pay for! https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/us/koch-donors-george-mas...
I think we find very few examples going the other way, having such large scale divisional control & top down left control.
Its because of who the right is, what their priorities really are, and how they bias themselves against science, how they let their efforts be steered explicitly by money & funding that they are largely irrelevant: they are not, imo, unfairly denied opportunity or the chance to do their work. There's opportunity abundant, if they want to do genuine & reasonable research, they could do it in real universities. But as comedian & faux-conservative Stephen Colbert polemicizes, the right is sworn to forever fight 'reality's well known liberal bias', in the name of defending winner takes all amassed capitalism & pro monarchy pro feudal ideology, that alas is well represented by loud voices in Silicon Valley.
As if review timelines aren't already way too long. I'm currently waiting 9 months for a small $250k grant (edit: waiting to hear if I've even gotten it. I barely remember what the proposal was about now).
I can tell you most scientists are just trying to do their jobs, studying hard stuff. Unfortunately, we do not really have the resources to fight anything.
Tough situation, and lots of scientists are pretty frightened. Many junior scientists (myself included) are looking at leaving the country.
Science organizations operate on shoestring budgets and can little afford disruptions of this sort for grants that have already been approved. Not to mention the fact that the new review criteria may have little to do with scientific merit but on keyword hunting or other opaque processes. As has been mentioned many times in the last few months, government investment in science and technology is critical for the US to remain an economic and military leader, and has garnered broad bipartisan support in the past. Scientific leadership is one of the factors that has made the US a great nation. (Edit: grammar).
Yes. That's exactly what elections are about.
People vote on what they want the direction of the country to be and what policies and projects receive funding. Same as it ever was.
> The National Science Foundation (NSF) has put a cork in its grantmaking pipeline after BILLIONAIRE Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) set up shop at the agency this week.
Really, "billionaire", that's what you're going with (emphasis mine)?! Isn't it more relevant that he founded and runs 2 biggest startups (as in, high velocity, high growth companies) in the world (Tesla & SpaceX) that run circles around both legacy companies and government agencies? So, yeah, if you want things to radically improve fast, of course you call someone like Elon.
It's sad that "unbiased news" basically no longer exists.
It's obvious if you see measures like web pages getting deleted because they contain the word "privilege". You know, as in "privilege escalation". I'm sure the people at NSA who wrote these pages are happy about their work being in vain.
One person blogged about `git master` and many people agreed that it may be needlessly antiquated. So private companies chose to take a few hours to change a dumb default string under no external pressure and certainly not under duress of government action.
The fact you conflate these two demonstrates either a clear lack of earnestness or common sense. Take your pick.
Not really, I've been opposing sexism, racism, political correctness, science denial (yes, burn it all down!) and supporting meritocracy and freedom of speech since early 2010s, way before it became big in the media.
Well you are doing a poor job of conveying it if your two biggest pain points are "git master" and "quantum supremacy".
God help us this is the way all of these conversations have gone over the last 8 years.
Group A: "You are gutting our scientific research infrastructure, a entity that has provided tremendous benefit to scientific progress worldwide and has been a source of national pride!"
Group B: "Yea well some tech companies voluntarily changed the name of their git branch from 'master' to 'main' so you all had it coming."
There's nothing I can do with that, except hunker down and hope all the horrors of this are felt by someone else.
I didn't know Tesla ran circles around legacy car companies. Well other than P/E ratio. I was under the impression that they made fewer and worse cars that are currently not very popular.
What would the unbiased version of this report look like? "...after SUPERMAN Elon Musk's...", "...after NATIONAL HERO Elon Musk's..."? In what way would you like journalists to show their deference to this great man?
Billionaire is incredibly relevant. It highlights the inherent conflict of interest in the moneyed class demolishing the state that is meant to protect the rest of us from them.
I think this is the first time I've posted an article that has been flagged, especially given that the source is the journal Science.
As a professor working in AI, I'll probably be fine, but if I cannot get funding it will be challenging to stay in academia. Then again, both of my last major NSF proposals (which are in review) had either a required Institutional DEI Commitment Statement (that was for an NSF MRI proposal), and the other was a major AI proposal which required about 1/3 of the proposal to be aimed at broader impacts that were largely aimed at increasing diversity in AI. I do care about increasing the number of women, black, and Hispanic people in AI research, although I also had a section about how we need to increase our domestic production of AI scientists given that 70%+ of the PhDs produced in AI in the USA are non-citizens.
Both are still in review. I'm not optimistic, but the work required hundreds of hours to create those proposals....
> if I cannot get funding it will be challenging to stay in academia
I assume this is the goal
It is a shame also that this topic is deemed too hotly political for HN and hence the flagging. We are lacking in good forums for measured discussion of what is happening in this country right now.
That's not the issue; the issue is repetition. Avoiding too much repetition is a core principle here, especially when it's a repetition/indignation combo: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
HN has had a huge number of political threads in recent months, including quite a few about funding cuts along the lines of the present story. These submissions don't end up with specific discussions about the specifics of a given story; they end up with generic discussions repeating how people feel about the larger topics. Those topics, and those feelings, are of course important—but it makes the threads largely interchangeable, and therefore even more repetitive.
Since frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), we can't have too many of these, or HN would turn into a current affairs site, which is definitely not what it's supposed to be (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
Btw I took a look at the users who flagged the current submission and I didn't see any evidence of political motivation.
Hi Dang!
Thanks for the note. I definitely understand your reasoning. I will say that to me (a) finding out that NSF has blocked funding is a new and different point than that DOE has blocked overhead (or that NIH review panels were on hold). And (b) this news would not have reached me as soon if I hadn’t noticed it in the /active front page. And (c) that I come to the discussions partially in hope that I’ll learn more “secret” details about what is happening. (d) I recognize that much of the discussion is repetitive, but mixed in there is useful analysis and even more actual news reporting. (e) I understand that people get overwhelmed by the continued raging and conflate new news with seeming opinion. (f) I recognize that your job is hard but know that I really appreciate HN!
There is an elephant in the room. When an article comes up about the elephant's tusks or the elephant's trunk or the people the elephant has just stepped on, the discussion ends up being about the whole elephant. I know what you're saying about these threads being repetitive and interchangeable. Its just that the elephant is so big and its parts so connected, its hard to have a limited discussion about only one part of the elephant. But nevertheless that elephant is very important to the larger set of topics that this site is dedicated to! It would be good to have a solution besides not talking about the elephant.
The elephant is the most discussed set of topics on this site in the last few months, by an elephant-sized margin.
This feels unreasonable to me. It isn't like these are all the same political story. A lot of politics is legitimately happening very fast and "we can't talk about the next thing because we just talked about the last thing" is a structural weakness, not a benefit.
Are there other topics besides politics that regularly get flagged for being repetitive?
It's a structural necessity for a 30-ish things a day site vs an infinite-scroll-feed site. The world can definitely move a lot faster than a nerd messageboard that's closer in design and spirit to a crusty pokemon (or, dunno, planespotting) phpbb forum than to the news notification stream on your phone. But that's a desired feature for such places.
Right now I see one political thread on the front page. If the alternative to flagging is political threads dominating the front page then this suggests that 90%+ of political threads are flagged.
Doesn't sound right to me.
What do you find not right about it? In time of political turmoil, people start posting regular news stories to HN because there's a glut of big, activating political stories. They're still mostly offtopic so other people flag them. They seem like straightforward consequences of each other and the outlier cause driving it is the political climate itself not some particular weirdness of HN.
What would "glut" mean to you?
When I look at the number of flagged political topics on /active (often which have clear connection to the software industry) I still only see a couple. Going from one such post on the front page to three doesn't seem like it would ruin the front page.
Why is "activation" bad?
Calling something "controversial" or "political" is a useful tool for those who support the status quo to suppress conversation and dissent.
The site's moderation system needs to change. There's near infinite power to suppress & deny. That's unhackerly in extreme.
There should be some skin in the game for suppressing. If you want to participate in moderating things away, at the very least you should be willing & able to put your name on that act of denying the public.
The site's moderation isn't going to change because it's in no one's best interest except a bunch of us posters who don't bring in any money.
just drop the flagging by users -- moderators can flag, but not users
Welcome to reddit
It is not about being too political. Only factual anti Trump articles get flagged.
Political articles are accepted, ignored or there is a redirect to duplicate discussion
> Only factual anti Trump articles get flagged.
I don't know what data you're looking at, such that you'd only see such a distinct subset of the total, but this is not true.
Non-factual and pro-Trump articles also get flagged—probably more heavily, in fact.
The flagging has become de facto censorship for HN and I really thought this is the last place I'd see it. Why is this OK except that some people with influence don't want topics hitting the front page? Should we forgot that PG is yet another tech billionaire who probably is pretty happy with the way things are going right now.
Everyday my paranoia increases, every day I become more of a conspiracy theorist. It's us vs. the people who can outspend us a million times over and we can't fight back. Why should any news organization tell the truth if lying gets them a fat paycheck. Why should anyone in charge of any public forum allow controversial topics to get posted when they can make a fat paycheck by blocking them?
I feel sorry for all these agencies and (aspiring) scientists. I hope they find a safe place elsewhere.
I'm left wondering if this administration and its henchmen will manage to do the opposite of what the Apollo program left the US in its wake: A giant leap for the U.S. economy. It sure is creating a lot of long-lasting damage.
Yea, but a bunch of people they don’t like for (reasons) aren’t feeling safe so it’s totally worth it! /s
Just for reference, the NSF funds nearly all research thats not biomedical in the US: engineering, physics, material science, etc. Its budget was $9B.
The NIH, which accounts for nearly all biomedical research, had a budget of $48B.
Lockheed Martin, a single defense contractor, received more than $60B in government contracts in 2024.
this seems like it's all theater right? these aren't the huge drivers of the federal budget, but they're too scared to go after military or entitlement spending so enormous effort is put into these things that aren't even big fractions of the budget
Yeah it's just headline seeking.
They need to continue to feed the republican base stories such as "We're fixing SCIENCE which the Dirty Liberal's have been RUINING for DECADES! CHINA!"
I don't think it's theater, I think it's ideological napalm. Christopher Rufo said "Yes, we are going to crush the academic Left, abolish DEI, and salt the Earth beneath it", and I think this is an example of that mission.
It's just absolute lunacy. If that's the stated goal (and it sure looks like it), the 'academic left' is at least partially responsible for a large majority of the prosperity of this country over the last few decades. How can you have a successful, rich country when you're antagonizing your allies and roughly half of your citizens?
These people will burn down their own house and wealth to make sure others don't feel welcome. How hard is it to just learn to live with people that don't agree with you?
It’s happened before, it’ll happen again https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22301484/america-rac...
“These people will burn down their own house and wealth to make sure others don't feel welcome”
Yes
A small percentage will, yes. The vast majority won't. Plus there's the issue of the stranglehold Trump seems to have over GOP members (ie. they're pushed, even threatened into compliance, especially GOP congress members). An easy way of vilifying any group is to point out how bad their most extreme members are.
It also doesn't even matter. The Trump situation will end. At that point MAGA people won't be gone, and it'd be a pretty sad outcome if they were or felt repressed, or we'll simply end up right here again. The point is not to win, the point is to make things better.
Also they're demanding universities such as Harvard install a contingent of their hand picked ideologues, party official vetted academics basically, to insure viewpoint diversity & to be able to snitch & propogandize within universities.
The right has plenty of very strong hard right institutions of its own. Very very strong. But they're very rarely academically or scientifically notable, across the whole world (with notable exceptions of the Koch brothers & Federalist Society funded George Mason School of Economics). The right has enormous influence, their own schools & control within schools that they pay for! https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/us/koch-donors-george-mas...
I think we find very few examples going the other way, having such large scale divisional control & top down left control.
Its because of who the right is, what their priorities really are, and how they bias themselves against science, how they let their efforts be steered explicitly by money & funding that they are largely irrelevant: they are not, imo, unfairly denied opportunity or the chance to do their work. There's opportunity abundant, if they want to do genuine & reasonable research, they could do it in real universities. But as comedian & faux-conservative Stephen Colbert polemicizes, the right is sworn to forever fight 'reality's well known liberal bias', in the name of defending winner takes all amassed capitalism & pro monarchy pro feudal ideology, that alas is well represented by loud voices in Silicon Valley.
> How can you have a successful, rich country when you're antagonizing your allies and roughly half of your citizens.
You do it by defining 'success' as 'people in the top get complete control, everyone else gits nothing'.
Quick, what's a synonym for "biodiversity" that won't trip the DOGE grep?
Increasing "gene yield" or bioalpha should pass the LLM filters.
Biological variety.
They're pretty bad a grep, so I'd just do:
biod iversity
How is creating a new government department that introduces a bunch of arbitrary rules and reviews not adding to bureaucracy?
As if review timelines aren't already way too long. I'm currently waiting 9 months for a small $250k grant (edit: waiting to hear if I've even gotten it. I barely remember what the proposal was about now).
I can tell you most scientists are just trying to do their jobs, studying hard stuff. Unfortunately, we do not really have the resources to fight anything.
Tough situation, and lots of scientists are pretty frightened. Many junior scientists (myself included) are looking at leaving the country.
[flagged]
Yes, let’s see how well the research kowtows to the party line. A careful, scrutinizing second review should do no harm, right?
You don't think the scientists, who had their grants approved and were depending on receiving the money to do their work, are harmed by this?
Science organizations operate on shoestring budgets and can little afford disruptions of this sort for grants that have already been approved. Not to mention the fact that the new review criteria may have little to do with scientific merit but on keyword hunting or other opaque processes. As has been mentioned many times in the last few months, government investment in science and technology is critical for the US to remain an economic and military leader, and has garnered broad bipartisan support in the past. Scientific leadership is one of the factors that has made the US a great nation. (Edit: grammar).
It IS a harm that SCIENTIFIC STUDY can only be undertaken if it meets new POLITICAL standards.
This is research that has already been evaluated by an extremely competitive process for scientific merit. Political slant should be irrelevant.
Politics is never irrelevant, it bleeds into everything. That is why elections are so important
This is not a review for quality and the new standards are not about scientific rigor. That's the harm.
You think all research should adhere to what the current administration likes? Does that seem like a good idea to you?
Yes. That's exactly what elections are about. People vote on what they want the direction of the country to be and what policies and projects receive funding. Same as it ever was.
[flagged]
These days it's genuinely required to put "/s" - can't even tell what's a joke anymore.
huh? HN is full of science articles
> The National Science Foundation (NSF) has put a cork in its grantmaking pipeline after BILLIONAIRE Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) set up shop at the agency this week.
Really, "billionaire", that's what you're going with (emphasis mine)?! Isn't it more relevant that he founded and runs 2 biggest startups (as in, high velocity, high growth companies) in the world (Tesla & SpaceX) that run circles around both legacy companies and government agencies? So, yeah, if you want things to radically improve fast, of course you call someone like Elon.
It's sad that "unbiased news" basically no longer exists.
The emperor is not wearing any clothes.
It's obvious if you see measures like web pages getting deleted because they contain the word "privilege". You know, as in "privilege escalation". I'm sure the people at NSA who wrote these pages are happy about their work being in vain.
were you equally opposed to leftwings deleting concepts such as "git master" and "quantum supremacy"?
Were there directives from the Biden administration to defund all CS research done by people who used "main" instead of "master" as a branch name?
One person blogged about `git master` and many people agreed that it may be needlessly antiquated. So private companies chose to take a few hours to change a dumb default string under no external pressure and certainly not under duress of government action.
The fact you conflate these two demonstrates either a clear lack of earnestness or common sense. Take your pick.
[flagged]
Not really, I've been opposing sexism, racism, political correctness, science denial (yes, burn it all down!) and supporting meritocracy and freedom of speech since early 2010s, way before it became big in the media.
Well you are doing a poor job of conveying it if your two biggest pain points are "git master" and "quantum supremacy".
God help us this is the way all of these conversations have gone over the last 8 years.
Group A: "You are gutting our scientific research infrastructure, a entity that has provided tremendous benefit to scientific progress worldwide and has been a source of national pride!"
Group B: "Yea well some tech companies voluntarily changed the name of their git branch from 'master' to 'main' so you all had it coming."
There's nothing I can do with that, except hunker down and hope all the horrors of this are felt by someone else.
And when did you abandoned it? Fact is, it was never about freedom, it was using the word freedom to help fascist agenda.
Elon did not found Tesla. SpaceX's financials are private so we don't actually know if it's doing well.
Two companies which are massively dependent on government handouts to function.
I didn't know Tesla ran circles around legacy car companies. Well other than P/E ratio. I was under the impression that they made fewer and worse cars that are currently not very popular.
I really hope your views do not represent the majority of those watching this unfold from outside America.
What would the unbiased version of this report look like? "...after SUPERMAN Elon Musk's...", "...after NATIONAL HERO Elon Musk's..."? In what way would you like journalists to show their deference to this great man?
I doubt that would be unbiased.
The answer would be, any description that doesn't lean right nor left. Maybe "technologist", "entrepreneur", "startup founder", "industrialist" etc.
Explain how "billionaire" is anything but an accurate, unbiased, term.
Billionaire is incredibly relevant. It highlights the inherent conflict of interest in the moneyed class demolishing the state that is meant to protect the rest of us from them.