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Comment by DiabloD3 | Hacker News Reader

Government tech investment delivered the Internet, the single largest advancement to humanity, even bigger than the moon landing.

It's also like he doesn't know what investments are: a gamble that you think the proposed company/solution/whatever is going to succeed, and that the few successes will be far more valuable than what was spent on all the investments, successes and failures combined.

This is like if I wrote an unhinged rant about how Y Combinator wastes money and is stupid because most of the picks have turned out to be shit choices, and ignoring the fact that the few that survived, found their market fit, and succeed were highly profitable and helped fund future rounds to continue the process.

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These famous US government investments are more precisely described as military investments, which they were. Almost all effective government investment was closely connected to a specific military objective, and measured against delivery on that objective. The US has been unusually effective at keeping these projects from turning into pure jobs programs, which is the default outcome in virtually every country.

It is an interesting question as to why the US defense institutions are so consistently effective at producing advanced R&D when that is not the outcome of almost any government program in the world, including most other parts of the US government. Even most modern trauma medicine was pioneered by the US military. These programs usually manufacture sinecures in most countries. The US has somehow, in this one narrow area, largely avoided that trap. It would be interesting to know if it is cultural and/or an artifact of how the programs are structured.

My brother in Christ, do you not think the government invests in any sort of infrastructure or medical R&D? This was a single infrastructure project that pioneered new techniques like ground freezing to let tunnels be dug bigger than before or through less stable soil[1] or any sort of grant money given to university researchers on various drugs that then get spun out into products or brand new companies.

For all its faults the US government is still the greatest producer of scientific research and advancements as far as we know in the history of the universe and that includes far more than just military related projects

[1] https://appel.nasa.gov/2020/07/23/the-big-dig-learning-from-...

It feels like the flow of useful research out of US military spending has slowed down considerably. You notice people are still pointing at the internet here.

The main advantage the US has had historically is just a much larger budget. If you can throw ten times as many darts, you'll hit the bulls eye ten times as often.

The Mansfield amendment in the 70s banned military funding for research that was not tied to specific military stuff, that might be a factor here

DARPA still has a budget though, even if it is much smaller than NSF's. And there is still a lot of DoD funded research.

Almost all government R&D spending is via small(ish) grants to academia for entirely unfocused "blue sky" research. Once you accept the premise that research should have no specific application in mind, it becomes impossible to determine if it's actually doing anything legitimae or is just fraud, which is why there's so much non-replicable crap coming out of universities.

Military R&D is done with a specific, achievable goal in mind. It's not blue sky, it's more like "we need a better missile, how do we do that". Most of the real impactful innovations out there came as a side effect of trying to achieve some other goal, with only rare exceptions (ChatGPT?).

As for why other countries don't, their military spending is too small to catch up and then exceed the state of the art. All the money gets spent on buying stuff the US developed.

For projects I am familiar with, usually you have to propose actual deliverables, and there are project reviews and reports that have to be delivered to program managers.

But given the nature of research, it is kind of unpredictable. One trick is to propose research that you've already completed or at least gotten into a prototype phase.

I think “investment” in regards to government is meant less as “wild bet that will get us all rich” and more of “expenditure that will save us money 5 years down the road”.

Conflating the two is just disingebuous, and provides cover for all sort of unaccountable boondoggles like healthcare.gov (initial launch, not the hastily rebuilt version) and California EDD’s latest redesign apparently costing a shiny $1.2 bln https://calmatters.org/economy/2023/11/california-unemployme...

There's a big difference between government contract work that results in lackluster results and cost overruns, and research grants.

I think the article is focusing on the former, but the title is admittedly vague.

The internet, GPS, and NASA in general are gov-tech home runs for the ages. But the first two were military projects, and NASA was meant for winning the space race part of the cold war.

I wonder if they went well because there was a clear path forward in each case. When the local town puts up a site, they are probably not as inspired by a clear vision.

Don't leave out NOAA/NWS which provides radar and satellite coverage for most of the country and supercomputer modeling to deliver predictictive results unimaginable 100 years ago.

The internet was only one of many telecommunications digital protocols. It was inevitable that computers would be connected together, with one protocol or another.

> the single largest advancement to humanity, even bigger than the moon landing

Such an incredibly American thing to say, with a healthy portion of recency bias sprinkled on top.

This is only beaten by that one time someone online referred to the HMS Titanic as USS Titanic. Because it was groundbreaking for its time, it must have been US American, of course.

There was another government that tried to create an Internet: France's Minitel. It eventually failed miserably in front of the assault of private sector pushing the US Internet, even if it seemed as a good thing for a while.

I don't know a lot about Minitel, but it sounds like it was impressively useful years before the web.

In the US I'm sure many AOL users didn't think they needed the web. Apple even collaborated with AOL to create their own online service, eWorld, just as the web was taking off (they shut it down after a couple of years and migrated users to AOL.)

There is an interesting effect where early technology adopters get left behind once a replacement technology takes off and goes mainstream.

I'm sure many people who had Blackberry, Palm or i-mode devices didn't think they needed the iPhone.

Claiming the Titanic would seem to be a peculiar kind of exceptionalism, assuming it wasn't a joke or a typo.

And wasn't the web (which is how people commonly experience the internet) invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN?

>Government tech investment delivered the Internet

Hmm ... nah. The internet would have happened anyway. Also, we owe its growth to plenty of ISPs everywhere and quite possibly ... piracy and porn.

Even if it was true and the government single handedly created the whole www, that shouldn't be a carte blanche to just waste money that could otherwise be invested in a better way.

Also your bit about YC, YC is private money, they could throw all of it into the ocean and I wouldn't bat an eye. The government, however, takes almost half of what I make, for sure I'd like to know, with unprecedented detail, where and why my money is going to.

You couldn't be more wrong if you tried to, lol.

Sounds... strange.

> that's not a carte blanche to just waste money that could otherwise be invested in a better way.

What are some of the better ways to approach investment by the government today, compared to what we have?

Let the people discover what to invest in themselves.

I'd rather have a panel of experts in the field with clear criteria decide the merit of the grant vs a crowdfunding-like model where people vote for the most charismatic person with the most well-produced video.

Those “panels of experts” tend to be interested in what they are already trained in. An expert is the last person you want to push for new ideas.

What clear criteria do they use to decide the merits of grants?

> the most charismatic person with the most well-produced video.

Ability to actually communicate your idea and justification for being funded, effectively and in a professional manner, is something notably missing from many academic projects. It's not exactly zero signal.

> Let the people discover what to invest in themselves.

and then the people will be asking for faster horses.

Did the government invent automobiles?

In-Q-Tel seems to be doing well from the outside. Curious what people think. I’m also confused why the EU pursues broad megaprojects instead of adopting the model that produced their antecedents. Is there some historical reason?

Happened anyway? You have any idea of the value that was created by having it happen many years earlier? Modern integrated computers let alone the Internet were brought into being because of defense investment by the government. These things rarely happen entirely organically in free markets. You think SpaceX would exist without heavy early investment by NASA, or later money from the commercial crew program? Unlikely.

>Happened anyway?

Absolutely, zero doubt about it!

>You have any idea of the value that was created by having it happen many years earlier?

There's no early or late, it happened when it happened.

Also www means "world wide web" which, by definition, implies a collaborative effort of the whole ... world? Sure, props to the US for lighting the first spark, but after that everyone did their part, even us, its users.

Piracy is routinely found to be illegal when it meets the judicial system, and the distributors of porn profited greatly from the distribution system before the internet. Why would they be the drivers of this?

edit: replied to the wrong comment, but it's still relevant to the assertion that the internet would have been invented without public funding

Yes, an effort of the whole world's public institutions. Tim Berners-Lee didn't work for the CERN Corporation when he set up the Web.

Some effort from everybody in the world, even us, its users.

I'd estimate the "GDP" and traffic related to public institutions as a single-digit percentage of the whole web.

Private interest created the use cases and further innovation but public investment, as they say, took the initiative in creating the Internet.

Private interest created the internet you use today.

It’s like saying Pythagoras created all of modern math, including calculus.

No one here is claiming the Internet was created by one single party or another. Taking the initiative in creating something is a different thing from creating all of it.

Tim Berners-Lee’s contribution was not novel. Hyperlinking things had many parallel competing implementations.

Had he waited a couple of months we would have essentially the exact same thing with a different name.

TCP/IP and lower level protocols that connected everything together is really the boon. The protocols for how we exchange data on top were inevitable.

TCP/IP and protocols which originated from ARPANET?

There is a looong way from a University Communication protocol to my ISP giving me gigabit connection for 50 bucks a month to connect to Pornhub.

Private sector delivered the Internet. Academia researched and established standards. What the US government did was having the foresight to understand this need and grant research funds and contracts to the sectors able to deliver.

It's not a negligible contribution by any means but it's pretty small in the grand scheme of things.

Yes, tcp/ip was a foundational protocol that came from DoD money. My point is that CERN’s contribution was negligible to the Internet, not that government investment is irrelevant.

Funny how much these invisible hand types rely on unfalsifiable claims to make their point. “Would have happened anyway, 100% positive of this”. Oh for sure dude.

The burden of proof always seems to fall on people who live in reality.

> The internet would have happened anyway.

Maybe "mega-AOL" might've happened, but an open network of networks where there's no parasitic mega-corp acting as gatekeeper and tollbooth operator? Citation needed.

AOL was made far after that and still exploded in popularity. Facebook today is approaching the level of mega AOL.

There is a constant pull between open and closed systems. Nothing the government did ensured networks would be connected together. TCP/IP is such a low level building block it’s easy to create closed networks with it.

The bulletin board networks.

People with two or more computers were always finding ways to connect them before the internet. Networking protocols were a dime a dozen in the 70s and 80s. The idea that people would never hit on the idea of a protocol over telephone wires is not particularly compelling.

It's like saying if the Wrights had not invented controlled, powered flight in 1903 we'd still not have airplanes. (It would probably have been accomplished by other people by 1908 or so, 1910 at the latest.)

The internet was just one step in a long line of digital telecommunications networks, starting with telegraphy. See "The Victorian Internet" by Tom Standage

https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Ninetee...

"happened anyway" is always logic I see applied to government made advancements and not to private ones.

A good read on the topic is "The Entrepreneurial State" by M. Mazzucato.

Not always, not the case with me.

Would you say the Google search engine or the iPhone have happened anyway?

Definitely!

Google was just one of many search engines when it was created, arguably the best of its time, but still not the inventors of the search engine.

Same thing with Apple and the iPhone.

> Government tech investment delivered the Internet,

Don't forget about microchips.

>> Government tech investment delivered the Internet,

> Don't forget about microchips.

The Romans are all bastards, they have bled us 'till we're white, they've taken everything we've got as if it was their right, and we've got nothing in return though they make so much fuss, what have the Romans ever done for us?

https://youtu.be/Qc7HmhrgTuQ

Why are all of these examples of successful government tech investment so old? ARPANET, moon landing etc. are all 50+ years old - before most HN readers were even born. How many billions/trillions have been spent since then without achieving anything nearly as spectacular?

The internet didn’t become the central piece of society and commerce until around 20 years ago, so partially it is explained by needing time to mature and adopt.

Investments from the 90s onward have been more public-private partnerships, but things like the human genome project or a number of cancer treatments and pharmaceuticals have been developed in this manner.

Third, I’m not sure I would regularly expect something as big as the internet to be invented every decade.

Not necessarily disagreeing with you because I feel similar to your comment, but I wanted to dig in a little to see if it’s more truthful or more biased.

By 2000 the military involvement in the internet was long since history. If you want to talk about the time when government investment was what mattered you have to go back ~35 years or more.

My point was that large investments, especially in infrastructure, need decades of time to bake. So investments made this century could just be cooking.

I also suspect the push by the uS right wing have impacted the number of great government innovations. The federal role nowadays seems to be to do the core research that is not directly profitable, then transfer control to companies to reap the rewards. (Because of the often incorrect “the government can’t do anything right” narrative pushed in the states)

This really seems to have worked out kind of OK on one hand, although sometimes I wish that the public had more ownership of the technology that we funded.

Because we've been gutting scientific grant spending since like 2005, leading to a cutthroat environment where for the most part only the most well-connected and well known get the big grants?

> Why are all of these examples of successful government tech investment so old?

There are indeed newer examples such as GPS, RF-CMOS, Lidar, Siri, mRNA vaccines that DARPA invested in one way or another. Not saying they are as spectacular as the internet.

Not to mention that perhaps the low-hanging fruits are all reaped in the earlier years.

The newer tech might just not be as impactful as the yester-decade's, because those impact is already felt, and creating more impact in the face of today is getting harder and harder. Exponential growth is not possible to achieve in practise.

Rna vaccines might be that but it is still too early to tell.

Investing in something not successful is not specific to governments though.

You can find recent examples too. Also take into account the survivor bias.

The latest technology that got appreciated on HN I could think of it the Mistral LLM, trained on a government funded EuroHPC. It’s a few weeks old.

NSF has funded all sorts of major advancements and inventions we depend on: cloud computing, multicore processors, wireless networks, fiber optics, computer graphics, bar codes, MRI, PCR, CRISPR, improved LASIK, doppler radar, modern internet and web, cryptography, AI/ML, etc.

Also: Google (pageRank, data centers), Nvidia (CUDA), VMware (virtualization), Qualcomm (CDMA) - many tech companies have leveraged research (and people) funded by NSF.

On the NIH funded/medical side we can look at things like mRNA vaccines, which may be transformative in fighting many diseases.

On the DOE-funded side we seem to be seeing major advancements in nuclear fusion.

On the DARPA side modern self-driving cars (and associated businesses) seem to derive from DARPA's grand challenge in the 2000s.

NSF research funding has paid huge dividends in tech.

Poorly paid graduate students are the secret of US research productivity, and they also graduate and work in companies to produce all kinds of technology.

military and government in the US should be distinguished because it makes a stark and pointed difference in results

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