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Comment by dewitt | Hacker News Reader

> "To start off, I’m going to personally donate $10 million..."

Holy cow. That's real money. Sincerely very impressed by the commitment.

I don't want to minimize the awesomeness of the YCR proposal, but $10m isn't really very much in the scheme of research. NIH alone funds to order of $25bil a year in science research. Public-private funding schemes probably fund an order of magnitude more every year.

$10m is pretty much just enough to fund one reasonably sized group, doing advanced research, for about a year to a year and half. Seems to me that Sam is hedging so YCR can do its first round in about a year and get a bigger ask by pointing to the starting groups achievements.

>$10m isn't really very much in the scheme of research. NIH alone funds to order of $25bil a year in science research

Sure, but the NIH is funding near to 50,000 competitive grants a year. Some googling online gives median/average grant size at $300k/$350k. Even $25bil over 50,000 projects is $500k a project a year. An academic institution will take 50% or more straight off the top, so you're looking closer to $150k to $250k a year.

$10 million is a lot of money. Science can be expensive but that $10 million can last a long time.

I agree it's real money, enough to do some real stuff.

But:

> An academic institution will take 50% or more straight off the top, so you're looking closer to $150k to $250k a year.

Well, that 'overhead' is paying for things like lab space, electricity, health insurance (at least for the faculty, good luck grad students), liability insurance, etc. Not to mention the actual salary of the PI and/or other researchers -- which universities in STEM schools increasingly expect to be covered by grants too. The academic institutions would argue all the 'overhead' they take is legit funding of things necessary for the research to take place, but even if you think they are spending it inefficiently or 'stealing' money for unrelated things...

I think as a rough napkin calculation, the $500K is probably still closer to that same $500K when YC Research spends it too, not twice as much.

Maybe, maybe not. I debated bringing it up, and honestly YCR is likely to have a large, up-front facilities cost (regulations, certifications, etc.). It would make sense to start easy - don't start off with infectious diseases of humans - and build from there. But still, I'd wager that YCR will run far more efficiently than your average university. Someone above brought up the UC system: management-level positions have grown over 200% the last few decades (http://universityprobe.org/2011/03/new-data-on-management-gr...). Even if we limit the scope to department administrators and staff, YCR won't need nearly the same sort of personnel infrastructure.

More efficiently, I'm sure.

For starters, I'm prejudiced to think any smaller org will run more efficiently than a larger one (even though I realize this is literally the opposite of conventional/mainstream assumptions!).

But TWICE as efficient?

Also, I think all those administrator salaries are probably being funded by tuition (that is, by government subsidized student loans that the students will be paying back for most of the rest of their lives), rather than research grants. :)

Or actually you didn't even suggest twice as efficient, you suggested virtually ZERO costs other than direct research costs -- would we call that INFINITELY more efficient with a zero in the denominator? :) (Not even including salaries? Aren't those also funded in part by the 'overhead'?)

It was a point of comparison. The NIH pool is large but spread very thin and, we can both agree, less efficiently than YCR is likely to be. Twice? Infinite? No of course note, but it's a point of interest in the "$10 million isn't so much" discussion.

And no, researcher's salaries (postdocs, tech, grad students, etc.) are not included. The indirect costs go to the university to pay for department/college-level utilities, facilities, infrastructure, and administrator salaries (which, admittedly, the lab does benefit from).

Well, salaries obviously WOULD have to be included in the YC case, there's no other pool of money for them to come from! So that would actually be a significant cost that the NIH grants _don't_ have to include (if it's not included in the overhead), but the YC Research seed money WOULD have to.

But I understand that research faculty in science and biomed are increasingly expected to bring in grant funding as a condition of employment/tenure. It sounds to me like the institution expects to help pay their salaries with it.

And with institutions hiring faculty _to_ do research, not caring about teaching really, evaluated solely on research, they are basically there to do research... it actually doesn't sound that unreasonable to consider a portion of their salary overhead. The research couldn't get done if they weren't getting the salary, after all.

But anyway, yeah, like I said, I do agree with your original point that this is real money that is enough to fund real research.

Point of clarification: Researcher salaries aren't included in the indirect costs aka overhead, they come out of the lab's funding. So 50% indirect costs of a $300k project means $100k to overhead/indirect costs, and $200k to research; researcher salaries, grad student stipends, healthcare, etc. all come out of that $200k. Then what's left of that $200k funds the lab.

$10m is a lot of money for some fields, but in the scheme of high tech and high reward biological/chemical/physical research it really isn't. Personnel overhead alone for a reasonably sized group (10-20) can range from $2m on the low end, up to 5 or 6 million on the high end.

For example, at many institutions it takes ~$250k to support a single researcher (Salary, health/personal insurance, institutional insurance) .

Alan Kay's group got $5M from NSF to "reinvent computing". The money lasted 6 years, in which they produced a reasonable prototype (called "Frank") of a complete personal computing system in only 20K lines of code.

http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/images/archive/7/7f/2007050523...

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf

Holy crap, that was some kind of read! Thanks for telling me about this as I had never heard of it. My proposal, similar to what Racket and REBOL/RED attempt, was to combine simple DSL's on top of a LISP and low-level 3GL (eg high-level assembler) with optimization, safety, etc built into translation process. Seems like Kay already did most of that with way more clever abstractions and techniques. Gives me hope my smaller proposal might go somewhere esp as I wanted to build components & servers not desktops.

Thanks again for the link!

If you watch any presentation from Alan Kay from the past few years, it looks like he's using PowerPoint or something similar. But, occasionally he does something PP can't do, like run a physic simulation or have all the letters in the text do a swarm animation. He's using Frank.

Thanks for the tip. I'll try to watch for that. Confirms it's already practical for at least graphic presentations. Meanwhile, I wonder what the odds are of getting a hold of Frank to play with it or build on it. Might have to try to contact him.

Note: I thought about doing something similar in first secure desktop I construct where I do my presentation on it, let people counter the methods probably won't work, and then tell them after that. Always priceless faces when that happens. Also helps tell the contrarian bullshitters apart from those who think hard on your claims. Saves time in future. ;)

Money in theoretical CS research goes pretty much entirely to overhead, not much goes to reagents / processes. Paying a little under a million a year in expenses isn't surprising there.

It may not be a lot in terms of research, but it's certainly a lot in terms of a voluntary personal donation to anything, however much money someone has.

Reminds me of a great historical figure of Hungary, István Széchenyi.

>Széchenyi gained a wider reputation in 1825, by supporting the proposal of the prime minister, Nagy, to establish the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; Széchenyi donated the full annual income of his estates that year, 60,000 florins, towards it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istv%C3%A1n_Sz%C3%A9chenyi

>The height of the bubble was reached in the winter of 1636-37. Tulip traders were making (and losing) fortunes regularly. A good trader could earn up to 60,000 florins in a month— approximately $61,710 adjusted to current U.S. dollars. With profits like those to be had, nothing local governments could do stopped the frenzy of trading. Then one day in Haarlem a buyer failed to show up and pay for his bulb purchase. The ensuing panic spread across Holland, and within days tulip bulbs were worth only a hundredth of their former prices. The tulip bubble had burst.

Florins appear to be pretty steady with the dollar...

That was a different Florin, though perhaps it would be possible to find the exchange rate in 1825: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austro-Hungarian_gulden

As a researcher, I've run the numbers on what it would take to start a new nonprofit research institute. Assuming some other sources of revenue (e.g. grants), 10M was actually the sweet spot to get a minimum sustainable group off the ground (about 5 PIs, with postdocs and grad students). This is for math/cs/physics theory, where there are no experimental costs. The IP stance is surprising -- for an independent group, it is tough to give up on a potential source of revenue. Seems like YC itself provides a way to monetize the ideas, though, since some of them will likely feed into the VC side and help the companies.

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