Hacker News Reader

> I think that's a rather negative outlook.

I guess my post was partly influenced by this piece of information being rather hidden on their website, instead of up-front and center.

Spending a million can be justified if they manage to drag at least one useful thing out of the pile.

Then again, i'd rather see something like "Ok, you made this thing and you're fairly sure it's viable, let us help you make it shine". I've seen too many things fail where the tech and thinking behind it was solid and working fine, but a severe lack of round tuits strangled the project before it could blossom.

Sure. I think a slightly wider remit would be perfectly reasonable too.

It's just that kind of funding is a little more complicated to justify, as the outcomes are less well-defined.

I'm sure there'll be existing projects will be able to roll with the terms, and use the money in a way that both builds new functionality, while also refining the existing project.

>Then again, i'd rather see something like "Ok, you made this thing and you're fairly sure it's viable, let us help you make it shine".

I found this comment interesting, in that I imagine with the right PR campaign this could be easy to sell, and seems to me to be in line with extant German culture surrounding engineering rigor.

Let me propose an alternative way of looking at it, that 30KE for six months of possible part time funding of new projects is almost perfectly wrong financially.

Early in a project you want experienced people putting in lots of time (full time) on architecture and initial design and MVP. Later on, lower paid programmers can evolve the project part time to add javascript flavor of the month.

As an alternative financial model, how about 25KE (or more) for two months for expert level programmers to bootstrap a new project full time only, or 60KE for a year to evolve features and squash bugs on an existing project perhaps part time. Or if politics and PR make ongoing support impossible, then only do the bootstrap phase.

Its possible programmer salaries in .de are much lower than I think they are. However they can't too much lower, someone there is buying all those BMWs and VWs.

I think it fits well if you expect most projects to be a single engineer working full-time. An equivalent of up to €60k/yr full-time is a pretty good salary by most folks standards, even if it's not quite up there with top-tier engineering levels. (I'd probably suggest the funding was getting poor value-for-money if it was)

It's the opposite. Any decent programmer can make a nicely architectured MVP. It is maintaining the code, refactoring it and implementing new feature requests not envisioned by the original programmers that takes real skill.

Stupid analogy time: Building a shiny, new house; easy. Retrofitting a 300 year old house with 1000gb ethernet wiring everywhere, while keeping the original character of the house and with minimal disruption to its inhabitants; HARD.

> Stupid analogy time: Building a shiny, new house; easy. Retrofitting a 300 year old house with 1000gb ethernet wiring everywhere, while keeping the original character of the house and with minimal disruption to its inhabitants; HARD.

Actually, I thought it was pretty apt.

Simply not true when the design is not trivial.

I'm giving interviews with system design, I'd say that the majority of programmers who are decent cannot actually architecture anything well enough. And it doesn't matter if they're given more time, they don't have the training/experience for it. (They'll only learn the impact of their decisions later, eventually painfully).

On the other hand, they may be able to develop it if handed and led through a proper architecture.

A freshly graduated CS student can expect around 40k€/y in Germany, so 60k€/y is not bad. With a PhD you can expect more than 60k€/y, but it might ok for some people.

I believe this is attractive for entrepreneurial graduates, because they probably already have the self-employed paperwork down. This grant might then become a startup later. I guess you have to release the product from this grant, but being the only copyright holder, you can continue to develop it further in a proprietary fashion.

> Government backed funding for OSS projects is a really smart and efficient use of public money when it comes to investing in digital infrastructure.

I think that remains to be demonstrated. I can think of several problems:

* Maintenance, as mentioned above.

* Government's ability to 'pick winners'. How do you decide who gets the money?

* Free rider problem of public goods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#Free_rider_problem

It's an interesting experiment, though.

I don't see how the free rider problem of public goods appliesin this case.

My understanding is the free rider problem would be Linus Torvald quitting linux(because a family member needs experimental medical treatment) to work in HFT for a big pay bump. Even though he creates $10 million of value with Linux he only captures 200k of that, but in HFT he would generate far less value and capture more. This reduction in economic output due to Linus being unable to capture the value he creates because of Linux "free riders" is the free rider problem.

Public funding of public goods is a fix to the free rider problem in economics because it means the value creators no longer need to capture the value they generate.(or as much anyway)

If I were a German politician, I might question the use of German funds to sponsor projects that end up being used by startups in the US as infrastructure.

For example. It might not play out that way, but I don't see it as impossible either.

> If I were a German politician, I might question the use of German funds to sponsor projects that end up being used by startups in the US as infrastructure.

Only if you're bad at math.

The thing about funding public research generally is that the ROI is extremely high. When something good is free to use then it will be widely used and produce widespread benefits.

Which means that if you spend €30K with the result that local people capture a benefit of €200K and startups in the US capture a benefit of $800K, not funding it is cutting off your nose to spite your face. You're getting back more than you put in regardless of what anybody else is getting.

And the US has the same calculus regardless of what you do. If everyone makes the rational choice then it balances out because everyone is funding research and everyone is benefiting from it (and people rationally fund it in proportion to the benefit they get).

The only reason everyone doesn't is because the benefits are diffusely distributed so public research doesn't have a strong lobby. But you still come out ahead by doing the right thing here regardless of what anybody else does.

Creating some random bit of open source may or not be something akin to 'research', though.

It might work out, in the end, but there are things that people may not like about it. Experimenting is good.

The actual ROI on research spending isn't really known.

Here's an article from Nature looking at the evidence:

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100609/full/465682a.html

Economics is not physics. You're citing a paper that essentially says that measuring the economic effects of public research is hard. It is. But that neither proves nor disproves the matter, and it isn't going to change. It isn't a matter of having to do a better study, it's a matter of there being no good way to do a study.

This is quite common in economics, but it's especially bad here, because the benefits of research don't inherently result in transfers of currency, and the benefit is actually often to eliminate them. The existence of Linux means that businesses can make broadband routers without having a large internal software team, which means vendors have lower costs and more competition, which means you can get a broadband router for <$100 instead of $1000. That is clearly a useful benefit, but the specifics of it are going to depend on what people do with the surplus $900, which will change over time and cultures and populations in ways that have no relation to the research. There is not going to be any good way to measure that and any measurement is not going to be stable or generally applicable.

But the difficulty in measurement doesn't get you out of having to draw a conclusion, because you still have a decision to make and need something to base it on. So when data is not forthcoming, we use analysis. And the analysis clearly points to research producing large returns, because the product is one that is produced once and can thereafter be used and reproduced arbitrarily many times at negligible cost. It's the classic scenario that justifies governments building roads and infrastructure with tax dollars.

The caveat is that the research has to be useful. It is obviously of no benefit to allocate a crate of cash labeled "research funding" and then transfer it to cronies or apparatchiks. But then the fight isn't over whether we should fund research, it's over how to make sure the money goes to the right place.