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Comment by mapgrep | Hacker News Reader

I remember using Google when it was hosted at Stanford.edu, luckily internet archive captures this moment:

https://web.archive.org/web/19981111183552/http://google.sta...

Notice that the branding is "Google!" with an exclamation point, just like that other Stanford tool for finding stuff online, Yahoo!.

The "About Google!" page is pretty interesting, includes links to Sergey and Larry's grad school personal home pages:

https://web.archive.org/web/19990204033714/http://google.sta...

It also includes, under "credits," this:

Research Funding: NSF, NASA, DARPA and Interval Research

So remember, Google may be touted as a quintessential Silicon Valley startup, but, like virtually all of them, it owes a lot to the work of the federal government.

(And what is Interval Research, you might ask? Wikipedia says it was a Palo Alto tech incubator co-founded by Paul Allen — previously the co-founder of Microsoft. Lol.)

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I wonder, how much research is there these days that doesn't get at least some money from a government agency? As a casual observer it certainly seems like the government throws so much money around that they have long since crowded out most of the private funding. Having funds going to pretty much every research lab in the country conveniently lets the feds take credit for pretty much everything with no way to refute it because no one knows what the research community would be like today without federal money.

Page and Brin were both initially funded by the National Science Foundation to do the algorithmic work that led to Google [1]. Page was supported by an NSF grant from the 1994 Digital Library Initiative program; Brin was at Stanford on an NSF Graduate Student Fellowship.

[1] https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660

FWIW, Interval Research had William Bricken as a consultant from 1993-2000 on Losp Deductive Engine, logic circuit design based on Laws of Form.

http://iconicmath.com/logic/semiconductors/

http://iconicmath.com/mypdfs/15p-bricken.120903.pdf

Bricken is the fellow who discovered the "Bricken Basis":

    A((B)) = AB
    A() = ()
    A(AB) = A(B)

This is the most parsimonious symbolic representation of Logic (yet found.) LoF with the Bricken basis is a more efficient notation than the standard ones. For example, it permits writing a SAT solver that does not require its inputs to be in normal form.[1] A proof in LoF notation is typically one or two orders of magnitude shorter than one using standard notation.

I'm pretty sure this stuff is the future of digital hardware.

[1] http://joypy.osdn.io/notebooks/Correcet_Programming.html

For years I remember their about page offering an explanation of how they scrape the web and score links, and a phrase something like “this might sound a bit recursive; that’s because it is!” But I haven’t been able to find it on archive.org or this site.

I’m surprised the federal government isn’t entitled to some form of ownership in the company if it IPOs.

They get taxes typically.

They were research grants. The idea behind a grant is that you don't get anything aside from the "knowledge" gleaned from the research.

> So remember, Google may be touted as a quintessential Silicon Valley startup, but, like virtually all of them, it owes a lot to the work of the federal government.

Oh, right. The thing that sucks trillions of dollars out of the economy and then claims credit for anything it touched.

The thing that ... supported all that innovation and works hard (though it's currently not doing that great) at keeping the economy in check.

"Supporting innovation" is a low bar. It's easy to do that with lots of money, by allocating a small fraction to investment and wasting the rest.

My point is that the cost isn't justified. Your point is "something happened, therefore it's worth the cost".

I didn't even advocate for the government writing research grants (though I do think it's a good idea). I tried (perhaps badly) to point out that "The thing that sucks trillions of dollars out of the economy" is a terribly silly characterization for the federal government.

The federal government runs on a deficit so it puts more money into the economy than it takes out.

I'm not sure what your point is. That deficit must be paid by value-creators, not the government--the same value-creators that were taxed in the first place.

You're so horribly wrong that you could convincingly make exactly the opposite argument, that the government (and by extension US taxpayers) are owed royalties.

If that were the case then there would be no need to raise taxes compulsorily, would there?

So you think taxes only fund government R&D? And that all taxpaying entities derive outsized profits by relying on government R&D?

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