I'd also add (4) be incredibly curious about lots of things; (5) surround yourself with other smart, curious, and committed people who have a culture of critiquing ideas; and (6) devote a lot of time to deep thinking.
(8) be good in counting things,
(h) be consistent in your thinking,
(10) have a good memory,
(11) be good in counting things,
(12) refrain from making silly comments
I'd say it's worse than that. This new policy of vetting will be extremely high cost in terms of time, money, and lost opportunities for students and universities, while also be rather useless in practice. Seriously, what student applicant won't clean up their social media profile? What threats will actually be caught by this approach?
This whole policy is dumber than conventional security theater.
But then again, that's the point of this policy. It has the thinnest veneer of being for a legitimate purpose while hurting those that this administration wants to hurt.
> At IBM, where he worked from 1952 to 1993, Garwin was a key contributor or a facilitator on some of the most important products and breakthroughs of his era, including magnetic resonance imaging, touchscreen monitors, laser printers, and the Cooley-Tukey fast Fourier transform algorithm.
>
> And all that was after he did the thing for which he is most famous. At age 23 and at the behest of Edward Teller, Garwin designed the very first working hydrogen bomb...
> "and the Cooley-Tukey fast Fourier transform algorithm"
Supposedly, at Garwin's scheming, one of the creators wasn't aware the immediate application of the algorithms they were optimizing was nuclear weapons,
> "Tukey reportedly came up with the idea during a meeting of President Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee discussing ways to detect nuclear-weapon tests in the Soviet Union by employing seismometers located outside the country. These sensors would generate seismological time series. However, analysis of this data would require fast algorithms for computing DFTs due to the number of sensors and length of time. This task was critical for the ratification of the proposed nuclear test ban so that any violations could be detected without need to visit Soviet facilities.[4][5] Another participant at that meeting, Richard Garwin of IBM, recognized the potential of the method and put Tukey in touch with Cooley. However, Garwin made sure that Cooley did not know the original purpose. Instead, Cooley was told that this was needed to determine periodicities of the spin orientations in a 3-D crystal of helium-3."
I expect at the time the distinction was irrelevant.
I also don't think it's necessary to be critical about the wording above. Perhaps "was related to nuclear weapons" reads better? But it's not exactly ambiguous, especially after reading the quoted passage.
I understand. However, in the climate of the nuclear arms race, I think that all projects having anything to do with nuclear physics were likely to be kept under tight wraps.
The comment I replied to seems to be taking a snarky tone toward a comment that was interesting and furthering the actual topic of the post. By highlighting that it didn't take a stance:
> one of the creators wasn't aware the immediate application of the algorithms they were optimizing was nuclear weapons
Even your reply to me seems to only allow interpreting "application ... was nuclear weapons" to mean "building" or "developing" instead of "detecting" when to me it simply means "in the domain of." And certainly you agree that detection is in the space of nuclear weapons?
The obvious reason detection technology falls under the same secrecy umbrella as weapons design is because one leads quite quickly to the other if you start to think about why it might be developed.
As a native speaker I disagree with the unnecessarily narrow interpretation. It may be the simpler conclusion to reach but with the accompanying material it is obviously not the intent.
This post is a great example of whataboutism and distracting people from the big picture: science funding works and has led to a large number of innovations that many of us here on HN use every day.
The original article talks about several of these, including RISC, out-of-order execution, speculative prefetching, vector processing, GPGPU, and multicore.
It's easy to cherry pick and find things that you might personally disagree with. That's true with any system created by us humans. That doesn't mean that you should burn the whole thing down, which is what this administration is doing.
I feel like I've been making the same post over and over on threads like these. NSF-funded research has led to innovations like the above, as well as multibillion dollar companies like Google, Databricks, Duolingo, and more (and that's just in computer science). NSF-funded research has had an incredible Return on Investment in terms of jobs, economic growth, and national security. It took generations to build the American scientific enterprise, and the system has worked incredibly well as is. It's incredibly short-sighted and a massive self-own to destroy something that has advanced the USA and the world so much.
Having served on several NSF review panels, NSF (and academia in general) manages conflicts of interest rather seriously. You cannot review proposals if you have collaborated with any of the investigators of a proposal within the past few years (the time is well defined but I don't recall what it is off the top of my head).
Also, NSF program officers can have conflicts as well, for example if you are on leave from a university then you can't be heading a review panel that has any grants related to that university.
At my university, we also have to do periodic online training about conflicts of interest, and have to fill out financial forms disclosing whether we have a financial stake in the work (e.g. if we own a startup and are trying to direct research funds to that startup).
Basically, I've always felt that we held ourselves to a higher standard than Congress held itself too (e.g. being on a Congressional oversight committee and owning stock in affected companies, but that's a different rant).
Those cheering on the current administration's actions and the wrecking ball of Musk and DOGE have such a distorted view on the way the US government works. The ethical standards maintained regarding conflicts of interest, the inability to receive gifts, transparency, and fraud prevention are all taken extremely seriously and have been for many decades. The US has had a civil service whose skills, experience, and professionalism many other countries envied and tried to replicate.
The changes being made now will deprofessionalise and politicise large parts of the US civil service. The US will be poorer for it.
Also, pragmatically, it's a system that has yielded incredible ROI since WW2, in terms of new industries, new companies, jobs, science, economic gains, productivity gains, and national security. The US university system is the envy of the entire world, and it's being targeted for dismantling by very petty, cruel, and incompetent people.
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.
First, it's highly unclear a priori which scientific discoveries will pay off. The discoverer of Green Fluorescent Protein was denied funding, with others eventually winning the Nobel Prize for it. Same for mRNA vaccines, most recently featured in COVID-19 vaccine, which also recently won a Nobel Prize.
Second, while there are always improvements to be made, the system as is (or was) worked pretty well in practice without knowing what the expected ROI was. The PageRank algorithm which led to Google was funded in part by an NSF grant on Digital Libraries. The ROI on that single invention just from taxes, jobs, and increased productivity likely exceeds NSF's annual budget. DataBricks and Duolingo are also based in part on NSF research.
Yeah, the system is imperfect, as all human-oriented systems are, but for the most part it works pretty well in practice and has been a linchpin in the US economic growth and national security.
If we're going to count the COVID-19 vaccine as a benefit of federal research funding, surely we need to also count COVID-19 itself as a cost, given the strong evidence that the virus was a product of US-funded gain of function research.
It’s not conclusive, but it’s strong enough that President Biden (or rather, someone with control of President Biden’s autopen) issued Dr. Fauci a blanket pardon backdated to 2014.
To believe that, they would have to believe he had done something that a prosecutor would object to and that was serious enough to get Fauci imprisoned. Which is to say, that he had committed a crime. If we're expecting it to be an arbitrary act of legal harassment, Trump's team could concoct something based on Fauci's work in 2013. Corruption isn't limited to a 2014-2025 window; unless they are basing it on facts.
As we have seen, Trump can hire prosecutors who will prosecute anybody he points his little finger at. He always hires lackeys, so it was easy to predict he would harass Fauci.
So how will the pardon help? If the assumption is that the prosecutors are going to fabricate crimes, the pardon will only help if they fabricate a crime that happened under certain conditions (see: https://www.justice.gov/pardon/media/1385746/). If they're just making something up they can make something up and claim it happened in 2013.
The pardon doesn't protect him from harassment, it only protects him if he specifically committed crimes from 2014-2025 or in several official capacities. If the Trump team is just going to pretend they can say he did something 25 years ago in a private capacity and the pardon does nothing. The pardon only helps if he did something plausibly criminal recently (in which case there is a real question of why he got a pardon - they aren't supposed to be preemptive method of putting people above the law without even knowing what they did).
A charitable interpretation for Fauci is it is there to distract people from the numerous Biden-family pardons the same day and to stop people asking what they did (https://www.justice.gov/pardon/pardons-granted-president-jos... if anyone wants to look - C-f "Biden" & I count 4 that day + Hunter). But there are probably other things going on.
None of your links show any indications of crimes. I don't get the obsession with Fauci when there's an actual criminal using the Oval Office to harass innocent people every day.
If they want to prosecute him they'll have to state a rationale to get around the pardon. That rationale will be used to prosecute them when they pardon themselves. If they want to weaken the pardon power, they are welcome to. Biden ensured they have to go to maximum lawlessness if they want to do that. They have the power to, no one is disputing that. But in choosing to exercise that power, they will hang a sword over their heads.
Actually it's not that hard. The main legal avenue to invalidate the Biden pardons would be to argue that Biden never actually issued the pardons. He didn't sign them (the autopen did) and given his mental state there's no clear evidence that he was even aware of them. Trump, in contrast, routinely signs executive orders and pardons with news cameras in the Oval Office with him, while chatting with journalists. So it would be hard to argue that Trump was not the one actually issuing them.
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