Hacker News Reader

Comment by azhenley | Hacker News Reader

F&A comes out of NSF grants. If I get a 500K grant, the first 150k or so would have gone to my university. Some universities this overhead number would be lower, some higher, but it is taken out first.

> The author is also engaging in manipulative data presentation techniques (such as presenting the cost of a graduate student for five years

I shared the yearly/monthly breakdown the sentence before that: "It includes their salary ($2200 a month), tuition ($15,000 a year), and benefits ($200 a month)."

I didn't post anything misleading or inaccurate. I included screenshots of my cumulative budget pages and included specific numbers to make examples more concrete. Not making any claim as to whether F&A is evil or not (it’s not).

View on HN

You purposefully multiplied the grad student's compensation by five years to make it sound like a huge number.

You purposefully cited the NSF as an example, and left out mention that the NIH (five times the funding of NSF) and numerous other organizations, provide for F&A overhead.

You present the 30% "take" as being high, when it's actually very reasonable, and you clearly think it's all one giant waste of money. Heat, cooling, water, power, internet, computational clusters, internet connections? Those don't cost money! I don't have lab space! Why am I being charged overhead!?

Over and over you're clearly manipulating readers to generate outrage. The whole piece is one giant bitch-fest; woe be the poor AI researcher!

Do you not understand how you're fueling anti-science-research efforts? The level of threat scientific research funding is constantly under? And how one of the most frequent means of attack is the perceived wasteful overhead?

You seem to take this very personally.

The author is a computational researcher, and most of his funding likely comes from NSF not NIH. Why would you expect him to write about how NIH grants work? Why would you expect him to write how things work in life sciences? If you have an issue with it write your own blog post and share it.

As a non-academic I have to say I didn't read it like that. I saw no outrage, and I don't see 200k over 5 years as a big number. And I didn't get the sense that the support thought it was a big number.

I say this not to invalidate your reading of the article (I'm not down voting you), but merely to say that for one not invested in the area, I didn't see the emotions you see.

Which speaks to me about how it's easy, and dangerous, to ascribe motivations and emotions to a piece when they may not be there.

I found it interesting as a well detailed piece, I assumed most grants just went as salary to the researcher, and that cleared this up.

Also, perhaps I'm more aware of what things cost running a business, and so an "overheads" cost of 30% seems reasonable. Our cost-to-salary ratio is higher than that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com