Very sad to see Hacker News discussing science funding. This has nothing to do with the hacker ethos of maximizing corporate profit.

They've always had the final say on issuing grants, but it was handled by career scientists rather than political appointees. Canceling grants in process is extremely rare.

Since many of those grants concern science and tech it does seem relevant to this site.

I think Mike Masnick said it best here:

> " Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)"

> ...but a few asked questions regarding what Techdirt is focused on these days, and how much we were leaning into covering “politics.”

> When the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore. It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist.

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/04/why-techdirt-is-now-a-de...

The current "Tech" culture, also traces its roots to people who very much didn't like the way things were done in corporate offices in places like NY.

Thats why Google used to have statements like do no evil, and it mattered to those early recruits. Things were built, with the intention to make things better for people.

The leaders of AI companies talk constantly about democracy and other values, while new CS grads are being told they will have no jobs.

For the record, I really wish HN was not as politically active. However this change is downstream of the environment.

> Also it really is sad to see “Hacker” News be “World News”. More Zig and less White House, please.

I have been on this website for 17 years (ugh that's scary), and people have been posting variations of this remark the entire time. It's a tiresome sort of post the thousandth time.

Politics have always been a consistent part of this website: it's a big part of the world that hackers live in, and barring rule enforcement to the contrary, hackers will always find politics interesting and want to talk about it.

If you want a website with a more narrow focus, there's always lobste.rs.