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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

It's SHAMEFUL that academics like Stein who dedicate their lives to developing amazing open-source software do not get funding and frequently fail to get tenure. These individuals truly are making the world better!

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Most academics do not get funding or tenure. Most funded academic mathematicians lose funding at some point. The funding rate for NSF grants in mathematics is certainly less than 33%, and one can only submit a standard proposal once per year. The competition is FIERCE. (I've been on panels: it is terrifying to see who doesn't get funded.) Ask any mathematician -- theorem prover or software writer -- about excellent people she knows who have lost their grants. You will instantly get multiple examples.

Mathematicians who write software are no more likely to be "truly making the world better" than those who prove theorems and teach hundreds or thousands of students every year.

I'm not saying anything about Stein here. He's a rare mathematician: strong on theory and practice, a passionate advocate for his causes, and a respected teacher. But there is a danger of missing the real point here -- most good things don't get funded or recognized. This has gone on for centuries. The funding situation now in the US (for both theory and practice) is better than it has been almost everywhere for almost all time.

It seems trivially obvious that a better use of funds at many universities would be paying for actual academic research at a few hundred K per year, vs a big-name football coach, with all the associated staff, assistants, equipment, etc, for tens of millions per year.

Except the ROI on the football program is obvious and huge compared to literally any department at the university.

Since when it has become acceptable that the goal of academic institute is/should be dirty ROI? And then why just football? Start funding cabaret, rave parties and poll-dance events as they surely will have more ROI.

Sports has been the undoing of US education in schools [1] earlier and now it seems even in higher ed. The sooner they get rid of sports from educational institutes the better for them.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case...

I was on staff at a small science and engineering school with a top 25 football team, and I was the faculty rep for the cycling team. I had no love for football, and I say that as someone who played in highschool. Until I saw the finances and realized they funded the entire sports program. As much as it pained me, I had a hard time complaining after that.

High school is not the same as college.

Also, The Atlantic is not a reliable source. It prints garbage like this:

"Football at Premont cost about $1,300 a player. Math, by contrast, cost just $618 a student."

even though everyone at the school takes math, very few play football, and not everyone involved in football is a player.

>>Also, The Atlantic is not a reliable source. It prints garbage like this:

Atlantic may or may not be a reliable source. What about this? A coach is given a whooping $7,004,000 salary.

Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh is in his first year with the Wolverines and sits behind Saban with a $7,004,000 total pay. [1]

[1] http://www.si.com/college-football/2015/10/08/highest-paid-c...

By definition of positive ROI, the university has more money than before, which in particular means it can spend more money on research by building football stadia.

On the wider scale, extracurriculars only affect[2] share-of-students rather than increase the total number of students[1], so such programs have a globally negative ROI. But each individual university is making a rational decision.

[1] I'm assuming there's a negligible percentage of students that would avoid college entirely if no or very few colleges had football programs. It's safe to ignore football scholarships, because you still have the option of giving the students free money, which is cheaper than giving them free money and also running a football program.

[2] I'm also assuming the football program itself doesn't generate enough revenue to offset its costs, and only affects enrollment. I honestly don't know if they make enough money in tickets and trinkets to offset the debt service for a stadium, salaries for coaches, free tuition for students, etc. If the ROI is positive(or even negative, but with a positive cap rate), then it might be rational economically to continue them.

You're assuming that the ROI generated by football isn't a transfer from other universities who lose students to the spending uni. More likely, funding football is a zero sum game which generates no overall benefit for the research community.

You think that football game attendees (and T-shirt buyers, and...) would write checks to math researchers if football got cancelled?

That's what I said in my second sentence.

Mathematicians who write software are no more likely to be "truly making the world better" than those who prove theorems and teach hundreds or thousands of students every year.

How can this be true in the case of a mathematician who writes something that many/most of the others use?

It follows by transitivity!

I think nontraditional research organizations like YC Research and Google's Project Zero can solve this problem.

Open source basic infrastructure -- everything from Sage to OpenSSL -- suffers from a market failure.

We rely on these foundational projects for billions of dollars a year in commerce, but they often get minimal funding and are supported by semi-broke volunteers working in anonymity.

* GPG is maintained by one guy, who was about to give up before a few people threw coins in his tip jar after this story a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791

* OpenSSL was comically underfunded and underappreciated until Heartbleed happened and people remembered how much it matters

Stein's story is powerful and shows how neither traditional companies nor universities help here. In the world of math software:

* The companies created a bunch of closed-source walled gardens (Mathematica, Matlab, etc).

* The universities were unwilling to support free and open tools. They gave tenure and support only for authors of research papers, not tools, no matter how useful or widely deployed.

Even the guy who made NumPy and SciPy didn't get recognition for it---wtf.

I think that these new, independent organizations with rich patrons can fill in the gap. Organizations like YC Research, Project Zero, and Canonical.

We need more of them.

These projects are a crucial part of the infrastructure of the modern information society. The solution to a lack of funding for these things is not charity from rich patrons, but governmental investment based on taxes.

I tend to disagree. The government incentives are aligned toward large long term investments, not individual DaVincis or Galileos

But that's exactly my point. Software development and maintenance requires long-term investments.

See the before-the-last slide

Academia values mindless papers over actual results.

To be clear, this is a side effect of using publication count as a surrogate for an individual's total contributions to an academic field. Everyone knows this is the metric for success, so you either have to optimize for it, or risk looking like a failure.

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