HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

muaytimbo

292 karma · joined July 4, 2021

submissionscomments
muaytimbo··on 2025 Hiring Pause
10.7B endowment. Clearly can't make it without federal funds.
muaytimbo··on Penn to reduce graduate admissions, rescind acceptances amid research cuts
22.3 billion endowment. Maybe they can fund a little research without taxpayers?
muaytimbo··on DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data
giving DOGE sudo is a whole article?
muaytimbo··on What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
I will elaborate, for the intentionally obtuse and for people who have not lived in the world of academia. When writing NIH grants you typically have a section describing prior foundational work in the field or in the lab itself that the grant proposes to fund.

In our lab, at the time I was there, the majority of our publications were from 2 white and a chinese male. When writing grant proposals to continue this work (to be continued by the same 3 chemists) the gender/racial characteristics of other members of the lab who were female and of other racial backgrounds were described in great detail, even though they had not contributed to the prior work and were not going to continue the project in the future. Our backgrounds were left unmentioned. This was the way to secure funding was what the PI in our lab told me when I inquired about the glaring discrepancy.

It is my opinion that backgrounds should be irrelevant and funding should be granted on the strength of the proposal. That's not the case today.

EDIT: I left academia in 2013, maybe things have changed.

muaytimbo··on What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
It's past time these institutions were audited. I had an NSF fellowship and was on numerous NIH grants during my PhD work (Chemist). All of them, even in 2013, had DEI language that made it clear if you were a white/chinese/indian male you were not going to be funded. The institutions, already, were self sabotaging, doling out tons of taxpayer money, not to the best ideas, but to labs that had a few women of various colors other than white working in them. It pushed me and almost all of the other chemists (who were generally white/chinese/indian males) in my class to leave the field either after our PhD or post-doc.
muaytimbo··on A new book shows how the power of companies is destabilizing governance
Center left is already authoritarian IMO. She’s definitely not the worst, her views are on her medium: https://medium.com/@marietje.schaake

Take from it what you will.

This very article reeks of authoritarianism. Read her blog, not the first time she’s advocated for bureaucratic regulation of tech companies.

muaytimbo··on A new book shows how the power of companies is destabilizing governance
The author is an authoritarian lawmaker. This is a false flag to consolidate additional power over the last vestige of the free Internet.
muaytimbo··on California bans legacy admissions at private universities
CA wants to control who sits on private company's boards and who can be admitted to private school's student bodies. Is there any limitation on what CA can require of a non-public entity in the state?
muaytimbo··on Sweden will offer migrants $34k to go home
What is the purpose of the 34k? Why not just put them on a plane back to their country of origin?

Are they not able to be found?

muaytimbo··on Officer who ignored NYPD's 'courtesy cards' receives $175K settlement
One set of rules for the ruled and another for the rulers. This is well known, what’s new here?
muaytimbo··on AlphaProteo generates novel proteins for biology and health research
This is interesting work but I think something has been intentionally overlooked. Creating proteins is difficult and it's also unclear how many of these sequences folded into the predicted 3d structure. Small molecule synthesis is still easier, cheaper, and more scalable than protein therapeutics. I think this would've been more impactful had they focused on improving on the SOTA small molecule - protein interaction models.
muaytimbo··on SpaceX Pulls Employees from Brazil, Discourages Travel There
some things are more important than returns, I'd rather export free speech than import censorship. That said you should know that up front.
muaytimbo··on Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content
Yup, lots of moochers out there. Makes sense to me.
muaytimbo··on Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content
Probably none, 50% of the population pays NO federal income tax.
muaytimbo··on Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content
Totally agree, it doesn't matter who earned the money, only that the government needs it for welfare
muaytimbo··on Dutch DPA fines Uber €290M because of transfers of drivers’ data to the US
Exactly, I think the US ought to make some extremely ambiguous laws and fine EU companies, dollar for dollar.
muaytimbo··on Dutch DPA fines Uber €290M because of transfers of drivers’ data to the US
"What about the users' freedom to live without being spied upon?" Pretty simple, don't use Uber.
muaytimbo··on Dutch DPA fines Uber €290M because of transfers of drivers’ data to the US
It has indeed. American companies basically finance the EU superstate bureaucracy. I'd like to see some reciprocity on the American side, fining EU businesses dollar for dollar.
muaytimbo··on Transformers in music recommendation
it says the track embedding vectors are inputs, the music representations are probably learned in an earlier model, w2v or a two tower model.
muaytimbo··on X says it is closing operations in Brazil due to judge's content orders
and vietnam.
muaytimbo··on X says it is closing operations in Brazil due to judge's content orders
2nd amendment protects the 1st. You either have both or neither.
muaytimbo··on Texas sues GM for unlaw­ful­ly collecting and selling dri­vers' pri­vate data [pdf]
In an efficient market safe drivers wouldn't be compelled to subsidize unsafe drivers.
muaytimbo··on Israel tried to frustrate US lawsuit over Pegasus spyware, leak suggests
The US sanctions Russian and Chinese companies it accuses of being vassals of the state. Why do we not do the same to Israeli companies? AIPAC.

Reminds me of this other article on HN: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2024-0...

Israeli propaganda bot networks deployed to influence lawmakers.

Israel is literally everything US politicians say they abhor in a foreign government.

muaytimbo··on Supreme Court rules ex-presidents have immunity for official acts
This was an obvious outcome, the government always protects its own. The government class gets immunity from the bottom, cops and judges, all the way to the top, legislators, and now, the president.
muaytimbo··on Stonehenge Damaged by Protesters
Not sure how you reached that conclusion:

"English Heritage, which manages the UNESCO World Heritage Site, said it was “extremely upsetting” and said curators were investigating the damage."

muaytimbo··on Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers
But what about Donald Trump's conspiracy with Russia? Or the Russian Hunter Biden laptop disinformation op? Or the Russian spy whale?

Oh whoops I guess you're right, all of those were lies about Russian perpetuated by US govt and media.

Side note: Russia has an economy the size of TX. Are they really wasting all of their money convincing Americans which octogenarian to "rule"?

muaytimbo··on Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers
So Israel does the exact thing all the politicians try to scare us into believing Russia does every election in the US. I guess the difference is AIPAC.
muaytimbo··on School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere
HN is a fact free zone, didn't you know that?
muaytimbo··on School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere
Kids don't want to be at school, teachers don't want to be at school, local residents don't want to fund schools.

In NYC public school reading/math comprehension is at 50%. They fail as measured by their own grading scale every year. In aggregate, public schools are always lagging behind their private counterparts.

Unfortunately once a large special interest group is subsidized by the taxpayer and a voter base is established for local politicians and the jobs program never goes away even though all evidence indicates the benefit to the taxpayer is marginal.

muaytimbo··on Car ownership in the US is becoming more expensive
I've seen the same thing with regards to A/C units in vehicles in Manhattan.

It's actually great, rates in NH are low because residents need to be conviced to purchase instead of being forced to subsidize insurance companies.

Page 1 of 6Next →