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Comment by TheCleric | Hacker News Reader

It can probably become a science heavyweight simply by being here at the moment when science funding in the USA is about to collapse.

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Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents. (This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)

It's clear why this happens and of course it's not ill intended. The mind naturally follows the most-traveled association path from a new stimulus back to something familiar.

Unfortunately, that is the anticurious direction. Swapping out a specific new topic for the nearest familiar one means replacing a potentially new and interesting discussion with a repetitive old one.

These large generic themes are like black holes: if you fly too close to one, you get sucked in there instead of going wherever else you might have explored, and then no new information emerges.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

The US is literally cutting funding now for science and letting politics get in the way of science.

We can’t have an honest discussion about this without addressing the elephant in the room.

Japan or some other nation has a chance to step up and fill the void that the US is creating. Some other countries universities could even partner with the US universities.

Sure, but there have been many threads about that*, there can and will be others, and those threads are the place to discuss it.

Not allowing large/important/hot/generic/divisive topics to drown out smaller/quieter/marginal/curious/specific ones is one of the core principles here.

* Edit: here's a partial list:

What's happening inside the NIH and NSF - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42940257 - Feb 2025 (1519 comments)

CDC: Unpublished manuscripts mentioning certain topics must be pulled or revised - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42905937 - Feb 2025 (719 comments)

CDC data are disappearing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897696 - Feb 2025 (589 comments)

NSF starts vetting all grants to comply with executive orders - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42886661 - Jan 2025 (488 comments)

'Never seen anything like this' – NIH meetings and travel halted abruptly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42817910 - Jan 2025 (111 comments)

NIH hit with freezes on meetings, travel, communications, and hiring - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42798960 - Jan 2025 (440 comments)

I do get your point, and generally think it makes sense, but in this case it seems extremely relevant: There is a global competition for intellectual capital, and at the moment, the US' position here seems at the very least uncertain, given all that is happening.

> I do get your point, [...] but in this case it seems extremely relevant

Not sure you do.

At a minimum, they could rephrase for better discussion v. a snarky, low effort claim that the sky is falling.

The sky is indeed falling. You not wanting to look up doesn't change that.

You're still not taking a hint [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43018477

dang knows HN better than anyone. I was coming here to discuss it and don't remember seeing much of it. I don't know how you moderate a forum, in this sense, where each person sees only a small segment of it. It will be overdone to some and novel to others.

(Some things are probably overdone for everyone.)

> each person sees only a small segment of it. It will be overdone to some and novel to others.

You've said concisely what I just spent an hour saying verbosely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43019507.

The USA did quite well in applied research before the federal government became the dominant source of funds. That said, it would probably take some time (and some pain) to readjust, and theoretical/arts research would likely be dramatically reduced.

Arguably, the USA did even better with the feds funding research. I don't know of any program that had a higher ROI than DARPA's VLSI Project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Project

> The VLSI Project is one of the most influential research projects in modern computer history. Its offspring include Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix, the reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processor concept, many computer-aided design (CAD) tools still in use today, 32-bit graphics workstations, fabless manufacturing and design houses, and its own semiconductor fabrication plant (fab), MOSIS, starting in 1981.[2] A similar DARPA project partnering with industry, VHSIC had little or no impact.

Wow that's insane, I never knew that

Can you share any pointers on this topic about applied research success, I'm guessing in the pre-WW2 era? I have not heard anything about that and have not been able to locate supporting resources by a web search just now.

Edison, Bell, IBM, Morse, US Steel, Wright, Sikorsky, Westinghouse, Marconi, Dictaphone, Goodyear...there's a lot, any many of the companies are still household names even if they don't exist anymore.

How did these R&D operations get their start? The same as universities at the time: they were funded by private backers, often family, or the parent corporation of the R&D Lab (IBM Research, Bell Labs, General Electric, etc.).

It's Vannevar Bush who spearheaded the creation of the federal research funding system as we know it today, for the sake of the war effort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush.

As a side effect, basic research is now mostly government funded, and the peer review system was created to ensure taxpayers were "getting their money's worth".

A more interesting question is: why did it work then, and could it work today? My (admittedly pessimistic) view is that life-changing innovations were a lot easier (read: cheaper) to create back then. Continual breakthroughs in materials science, transportation and communications technologies left a lot of "white space" to innovate in.

> The USA did quite well in applied research before the federal government became the dominant source of funds.

For my own curiosity, when did that transition occur?

1950 according to wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation

DARPA, ARPA-H, etc.

Perhaps US Universities should tap into billion dollar endowments or slash the administrative headcount instead of raising tuition yet again.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/02/nih-trump...

But the point of an endowment is to have a relatively stable funding stream in perpetuity - if you start dipping into the principal, the funding stream starts shrinking and is no longer perpetual.

Harvard’s endowment, for example, already funds a little less than 40% of its budget, and should be able to continue doing so indefinitely. If you bump that to even, say, 50% there’s a good chance it won’t have any endowment (or funding stream!) at all in the year 2100.

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