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MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/maga-is-winning-its-war-against-us
55•devonnull•2h ago

Comments

rolph•1h ago
not according to this article. the attempt is to defund research, gov can make money out of thin air to an extent, but not indefinately, and it has to be paid for in real terms.

private interests have greater actual holdings than gov.

"they" are not winning, they are chasing a major provider of high standard of living, right out the door.

jruohonen•1h ago
From the liked NBER study:

"Between 58 and 68 percent of citations to Chinese publications come from other Chinese publications, even for breakthrough work. This contrasts sharply with other regions, where cross-border citation rates are substantially higher."

https://www.nber.org/digest?page=1&perPage=50

zb3•1h ago
The more Chinese publications, the bigger share of their citation rates, right?
3eb7988a1663•1h ago
Surely English fluency is somewhat relevant.
surgical_fire•49m ago
Interesting.

I wonder if within my lifetime it is possible that Chinese will become the main language one has to learn to be on top of things, with English becoming more niche.

These shifts happen slowly I presume. There was a point where a lot of people learned French as a lingua franca, and it transitioned to English over decades.

andretti1977•1h ago
… “Ignorance is strength” might was well be an official MAGA motto…
MrGilbert•1h ago
I cannot help but wonder how many decades it will take the U.S. to recover from the damage that the current administration is causing, both economically and in trust on a global scale. While in no way comparable, as a German, that topic feels familiar non the less - and to this day, it's a long and rocky road.
bestouff•1h ago
I'm not even sure the Nazi regime was that much anti-science.
karmakurtisaani•43m ago
A lot of great scientists left Europe because of them tho.
burnt-resistor•25m ago
True. And they forced some scientists to work for them to build terror and WMDs. This regime doesn't even want technological supremacy in many other domains like drones and counter-drones except maybe hypersonic missiles and unworkable pocket battleships.
PigeonHolePncpl•1h ago
Economically? No idea.

Global trust? I'd give it 20-40 years.

surgical_fire•48m ago
That presumes a sharp correction in the direction the US is heading, whatever it is.

Is that a given?

burnt-resistor•27m ago
Much of the damage is irreparable. Organizations that no longer exist have lost workers, other stakeholders, resources, and trust permanently.. and in cases like USAID and healthcare, people have suffered permanent injuries or died.

These clueless assholes don't care about or understand the implications of the damage they've caused... they're gangs of criminals rapists and pillagers scorching the earth and leaving chaos and destruction in their wake.

rootusrootus•1h ago
As is so typical in politics, whether it is countries, parties, or legislation, irony dominates the naming. Democratic People's Republic of Korea, PATRIOT act, MAGA, the list goes on.
jmclnx•1h ago
China is increasing funding, US is cutting funding so this will only help China.
gverrilla•1h ago
Absolutely deleting progress.
wileydragonfly•1h ago
NIH grant funding is still down about 35% and they’re lying about it. They’re not updating Reporter fully so the director has been able to obfuscate it. Graduate programs are reducing admissions and I imagine fewer potential scientists are interested in the PhD path given “current situation.” So I imagine it’s going to take several “good” years to undo what’s been done.
nis0s•1h ago
I hate that it happened because of a political reason, and many topics affected were unnecessarily targeted, but it’s 1000% true that many labs were overfunded, and accumulated resources which were essentially spent on ego bullshit. There need to be more cuts and selective funding of research labs, in general. Sadly, funding R1 does not guarantee that you’re going to get anything meaningful from that research as a non-trivial number of PIs just used excessive funding to bloat up their numbers to appear politically important, like middle managers at FAANG. So, essentially creating an adult daycare with no regards to output or impact. This needs to stop, and spending needs to be allocated responsibly. Lab impact needs to be assessed on regular (2-yr seems reasonable) basis, and then funding needs to be diverted to new or better players.
readthenotes1•1h ago
How is this affecting the replicability crisis?
jaybrendansmith•16m ago
Again, I don't understand why this post is flagged. Don't hackers care about science? Isn't this newsworthy?
carefree-bob•14m ago
It's partisan political flamebait. Hey that's fine if you want to engage in that stuff, I recommend going to twitter or bluesky for it.

The Bromine Chokepoint: How Strife Could Halt Production of World’s Memory Chips

https://warontherocks.com/cogs-of-war/the-bromine-chokepoint-how-strife-in-the-middle-east-could-...
99•crescit_eundo•3h ago•45 comments

Vercel April 2026 security incident

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/vercel-confirms-breach-as-hackers-claim-to-be-sell...
374•colesantiago•7h ago•253 comments

A. J. Ayer – ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’ (1988)

https://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/a-j-ayer-what-i-saw-when-i-was-dead/
36•isomorphy•1h ago•26 comments

Swiss authorities want to reduce dependency on Microsoft

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-ai/swiss-authorities-want-to-reduce-dependency-on-microsoft/91...
82•doener•1h ago•21 comments

Show HN: Faceoff – A terminal UI for following NHL games

https://www.vincentgregoire.com/faceoff/
63•vcf•3h ago•23 comments

I wrote a CHIP-8 emulator in my own programming language

https://github.com/navid-m/chip8emu
27•pizza_man•2h ago•4 comments

I learned Unity the wrong way

https://darkounity.com/blog/how-i-learned-unity-the-wrong-way
55•lelanthran•3d ago•24 comments

Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/18/opus-system-prompt/
114•pretext•11h ago•64 comments

Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1975-09
496•DamnInteresting•2d ago•125 comments

Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game

https://kotaku.com/video-game-devs-explain-how-pausing-works-and-sometimes-it-gets-weird-2000686339
381•speckx•3d ago•211 comments

The seven programming ur-languages (2022)

https://madhadron.com/programming/seven_ur_languages.html
242•helloplanets•14h ago•94 comments

Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page

https://twitter.com/weezerOSINT/status/2045849358462222720
270•Tiberium•6h ago•88 comments

Nanopass Framework: Clean Compiler Creation Language

https://nanopass.org/
103•NordStreamYacht•4d ago•24 comments

The RAM shortage could last years

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/914672/the-ram-shortage-could-last-years
111•omer_k•14h ago•103 comments

SPEAKE(a)R: Turn Speakers to Microphones for Fun and Profit [pdf] (2017)

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot17/woot17-paper-guri.pdf
146•Eridanus2•12h ago•64 comments

KTaO3-Based Supercurrent Diode

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c05590
23•PaulHoule•3d ago•1 comments

Reverse Engineering ME2's USB with a Heat Gun and a Knife

https://github.com/coremaze/ME2-Writeup
40•Bawoosette•1d ago•5 comments

College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

https://sentinelcolorado.com/uncategorized/a-college-instructor-turns-to-typewriters-to-curb-ai-w...
447•gnabgib•1d ago•406 comments

What are skiplists good for?

https://antithesis.com/blog/2026/skiptrees/
241•mfiguiere•2d ago•57 comments

Show HN: Shader Lab, like Photoshop but for shaders

https://eng.basement.studio/tools/shader-lab
124•ragojose•3d ago•34 comments

NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers

https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/04/any-color-you-nist-scientists-create-any-wavelength...
401•rbanffy•1d ago•185 comments

Eliza a Play by Tom Holloway

https://www.mtc.com.au/plays-and-tickets/whats-on/season-2026/eliza
8•abrax3141•2d ago•6 comments

Show HN: Prompt-to-Excalidraw demo with Gemma 4 E2B in the browser (3.1GB)

https://teamchong.github.io/turboquant-wasm/draw.html
76•teamchong•10h ago•38 comments

Blue Origin's rocket reuse achievement marred by upper stage failure

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/04/errant-upper-stage-spoils-blue-origins-success-in-reusing-n...
25•rbanffy•2h ago•1 comments

Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7

https://tokens.billchambers.me/leaderboard
598•anabranch•1d ago•561 comments

The electromechanical angle computer inside the B-52 bomber's star tracker

https://www.righto.com/2026/04/B-52-star-tracker-angle-computer.html
411•NelsonMinar•1d ago•106 comments

4-bit floating point FP4

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/04/17/fp4/
62•chmaynard•1d ago•44 comments

Reading Input from an USB RFID Card Reader

https://kevwe.com/blog/usb-rfid-reader
23•kevwedotse•2d ago•4 comments

The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20170810
188•signa11•18h ago•92 comments

Six Levels of Dark Mode

https://cssence.com/2024/six-levels-of-dark-mode/
5•Akcium•3h ago•0 comments