I'm suggesting that a logical question that readers of Hacker News might want to consider when they get excited about a new result in CS, Physics, Biology, etc. is what are the practical circumstances that fostered these results? i.e. How did someone get paid to work on these problems?

In this case the funding source was NSF...

This is particularly pertinent to ongoing attacks on the federal research infrastructure of the United States:

* The current administration has proposed to cut NSF's funding from $9B/year to $3B/year.

* The current administration is trying to impose retroactive changes to already negotiated grant indirects that will result in budget shortfalls of hundreds of millions of dollars. One immediate consequence of this is dramatically fewer graduate students will be admitted to graduate programs across the board; undergraduate summer research programs will be shut down; etc.