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by pcurve 10mo ago

[flagged]

saagarjha 10mo ago
1. People with foreign sounding names may have been born in the United States. 2. People who were born outside the United States but moved here to do research a while back don’t suddenly stop doing research here.
foota 10mo ago
I'm not trying to be too pc, but you can't really tell based on someone's name where they were born. That said, the US only has some 5% of the worlds population (albeit probably a larger proportion of the literate population), so you'd only expect some fraction of the world's researchers to be US born. Not to mention that US born is an even smaller fraction of births (2.5-3%, by Google), so you'd expect an even smaller fraction of US born researchers. So even if we assume that we're on par with peer countries, you'd only expect US born researchers to be a fraction of the overall research population. We'd have to be vastly better at educating people to do otherwise, which is a longshot. Obviously this makes turning away international students incredibly stupid, but what are we to do against stupidity?
chairhairair 10mo ago
How do you know where the authors were born?
raphman 10mo ago
FWIW, many of the researchers on the paper did not study in the U.S. but immigrated after their PhD studies. I checked the first, middle, and last author: Lars Mescheder got his PhD in Germany, Bruno Lecouat got his PhD in France, Vladlen Koltun got his PhD in Israel. (Edit: or maybe they did not actually immigrate but work remote and/or in Europe)
_fizz_buzz_ 10mo ago
Apple is also a global company and has offices and research labs world wide. At least a couple of the authors seem to work for Apple but at their German lab.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
onion2k 10mo ago
are most research done by foreign born people Approximately 96% of the world's population is not American, so you should expect that really.
throawayonthe 10mo ago
foreign to... where?
xvector 10mo ago
Why don't we produce enough experts in the US to saturate our tech companies? It's because American education culture is trash. American parents are fine with their kids getting Bs and Cs. Mediocrity is rewarded and excellence is discouraged in our schools, both socially and institutionally. Meanwhile you have hundreds of millions of foreign born children pulling out all the stops to do the best they possibly can at school precisely so they can get into the US and work at one of our top companies. It was never even a competition. Immigrants and children of theirs will continue to outperform because it is literally baked into their culture - and it is baked out of ours.
neom 10mo ago
It makes sense you're getting downvoted but I thought it was actually an interesting question so I spent the past hour or so doing an autistic rabbit hole (including finding the linkedins of the folks on the paper linked here to understand their backgrounds), heh. Was somewhat surprised to learn that the pipeline wasn't built by industry demand, it was supply pressure from abroad that happened to arrive just as US universities needed the money (2009/10). In 1999, China's government massively expanded higher education, combined with a system where the state steers talent into stem via central quotas in the "gaokao", it created an overflow of CS capable graduates with nowhere to go domestically, India's 1991 liberalization created the IT services boom (TCS, Infosys, Y2K gold rush) and made engineering THE middle class ticket, so same overflow problem. US phd programs became the outlet for both countries. In that light, the university side response probably wasn't state side industry demand for loads of PhDs, who was hiring those then? Google Brain didn't exist until 2011, FAIR until 2013. It wasn't really till 2012+ that industry in tech started to hire big research groups to actually advance the field vs specialized PhDs here and there for products... so not a huge amount of pull from there. Then, at the same time, universities were responding to a funding crisis... there was a 2008 state budget collapse, so it was backfilled with international Master's students paying $50-80k cash (we do this in Canada heavily also), that revenue cross-subsidized PhD programs (which are mostly cost centers remember). I also read some say PhD students were also better labor: visa constraints meant they couldn't easily bounce to industry, they'd accept $30k stipends, tho I saw other research contradicting this idea. The whole system was in place before "AI Researcher" was even a real hiring category. Then deep learning hit (2012), industry woke up, and they found a pre built pipeline to harvest: The authors on that Apple paper finished their PhDs around 2012-2020, meaning they entered programs 2009-2015 when CS PhDs were already 55-60% foreign born. Those students stayed, 75-85% of Chinese and Indian STEM PhDs are still here a decade later. They're now the senior researchers publishing papers you read here on HN. This got me wondering, could the US have grown this domestically? In 2024 they produced ~3,000 CS PhDs, only ~1,100 domestic. To get 3,000 domestic you'd need 2.7x the pipeline...which traces back to needing 10.8 million 9th graders in 2018 instead of 4 million (lol), or convincing 3x more CS undergrads to take $35k stipends instead of $150k industry jobs. Neither happened. So other countries pay for K-12 and undergrad, capture the talent at PhD entry, keep 75%+ permanently. Seems like a reasonable system emerged from a bunch of difficult constraints? (and just to reiterate, even tho it was an interesting research project for me, you can't infer where someone is directly from based on their name) https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/highest-exam-how-gaokao-shapes-china https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/highest-exam-how... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalisation_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalisation_in_Ind... https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf24300/data-tables https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf24300/data-tables https://www.aau.edu/newsroom/leading-research-universities-report/new-data-show-us-retains-significant-share-foreign https://www.aau.edu/newsroom/leading-research-universities-r... https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf25325 https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf25325 https://www.science.org/content/article/flood-chinese-graduate-students-stem-was-boon-u-s-students https://www.science.org/content/article/flood-chinese-gradua... https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign-students-and-graduate-stem-enrollment https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...
tomhow 9mo ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46402044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46402044 and marked it off topic.

[flagged]

by pcurve 10mo ago

[flagged]

1. People with foreign sounding names may have been born in the United States. 2. People who were born outside the United States but moved here to do research a while back don’t suddenly stop doing research here.

foota 10mo ago

I'm not trying to be too pc, but you can't really tell based on someone's name where they were born. That said, the US only has some 5% of the worlds population (albeit probably a larger proportion of the literate population), so you'd only expect some fraction of the world's researchers to be US born. Not to mention that US born is an even smaller fraction of births (2.5-3%, by Google), so you'd expect an even smaller fraction of US born researchers. So even if we assume that we're on par with peer countries, you'd only expect US born researchers to be a fraction of the overall research population. We'd have to be vastly better at educating people to do otherwise, which is a longshot. Obviously this makes turning away international students incredibly stupid, but what are we to do against stupidity?

chairhairair 10mo ago

How do you know where the authors were born?

raphman 10mo ago

FWIW, many of the researchers on the paper did not study in the U.S. but immigrated after their PhD studies. I checked the first, middle, and last author: Lars Mescheder got his PhD in Germany, Bruno Lecouat got his PhD in France, Vladlen Koltun got his PhD in Israel. (Edit: or maybe they did not actually immigrate but work remote and/or in Europe)

_fizz_buzz_ 10mo ago

Apple is also a global company and has offices and research labs world wide. At least a couple of the authors seem to work for Apple but at their German lab.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

onion2k 10mo ago

are most research done by foreign born people Approximately 96% of the world's population is not American, so you should expect that really.

throawayonthe 10mo ago

foreign to... where?

xvector 10mo ago

Why don't we produce enough experts in the US to saturate our tech companies? It's because American education culture is trash. American parents are fine with their kids getting Bs and Cs. Mediocrity is rewarded and excellence is discouraged in our schools, both socially and institutionally. Meanwhile you have hundreds of millions of foreign born children pulling out all the stops to do the best they possibly can at school precisely so they can get into the US and work at one of our top companies. It was never even a competition. Immigrants and children of theirs will continue to outperform because it is literally baked into their culture - and it is baked out of ours.

neom 10mo ago

It makes sense you're getting downvoted but I thought it was actually an interesting question so I spent the past hour or so doing an autistic rabbit hole (including finding the linkedins of the folks on the paper linked here to understand their backgrounds), heh. Was somewhat surprised to learn that the pipeline wasn't built by industry demand, it was supply pressure from abroad that happened to arrive just as US universities needed the money (2009/10). In 1999, China's government massively expanded higher education, combined with a system where the state steers talent into stem via central quotas in the "gaokao", it created an overflow of CS capable graduates with nowhere to go domestically, India's 1991 liberalization created the IT services boom (TCS, Infosys, Y2K gold rush) and made engineering THE middle class ticket, so same overflow problem. US phd programs became the outlet for both countries. In that light, the university side response probably wasn't state side industry demand for loads of PhDs, who was hiring those then? Google Brain didn't exist until 2011, FAIR until 2013. It wasn't really till 2012+ that industry in tech started to hire big research groups to actually advance the field vs specialized PhDs here and there for products... so not a huge amount of pull from there. Then, at the same time, universities were responding to a funding crisis... there was a 2008 state budget collapse, so it was backfilled with international Master's students paying $50-80k cash (we do this in Canada heavily also), that revenue cross-subsidized PhD programs (which are mostly cost centers remember). I also read some say PhD students were also better labor: visa constraints meant they couldn't easily bounce to industry, they'd accept $30k stipends, tho I saw other research contradicting this idea. The whole system was in place before "AI Researcher" was even a real hiring category. Then deep learning hit (2012), industry woke up, and they found a pre built pipeline to harvest: The authors on that Apple paper finished their PhDs around 2012-2020, meaning they entered programs 2009-2015 when CS PhDs were already 55-60% foreign born. Those students stayed, 75-85% of Chinese and Indian STEM PhDs are still here a decade later. They're now the senior researchers publishing papers you read here on HN. This got me wondering, could the US have grown this domestically? In 2024 they produced ~3,000 CS PhDs, only ~1,100 domestic. To get 3,000 domestic you'd need 2.7x the pipeline...which traces back to needing 10.8 million 9th graders in 2018 instead of 4 million (lol), or convincing 3x more CS undergrads to take $35k stipends instead of $150k industry jobs. Neither happened. So other countries pay for K-12 and undergrad, capture the talent at PhD entry, keep 75%+ permanently. Seems like a reasonable system emerged from a bunch of difficult constraints? (and just to reiterate, even tho it was an interesting research project for me, you can't infer where someone is directly from based on their name) https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/highest-exam-how-gaokao-shapes-china https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/highest-exam-how... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalisation_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalisation_in_Ind... https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf24300/data-tables https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf24300/data-tables https://www.aau.edu/newsroom/leading-research-universities-report/new-data-show-us-retains-significant-share-foreign https://www.aau.edu/newsroom/leading-research-universities-r... https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf25325 https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf25325 https://www.science.org/content/article/flood-chinese-graduate-students-stem-was-boon-u-s-students https://www.science.org/content/article/flood-chinese-gradua... https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign-students-and-graduate-stem-enrollment https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...

tomhow 9mo ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46402044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46402044 and marked it off topic.