The independent researcher (2018) | Hacker News Reader

The independent researcher (2018)

nadia.xyz

65 pointsrnjailamba37 comments

I clean offices for three hours a day to pay for my research. Beats using my brain for something somebody else is interested in, but I am not! Each time somebody buys my book [1], I convert it mentally into hours of cleaning :-)

[1] http://abstractionlogic.com

While I dream of unshackling my research programs from the bureaucracy of the institutions they’re tied to, I do very much enjoy having an actual budget, paycheck, and health insurance. With all the chaos currently befalling the academic research community, I’m curious what alternative models exist, or could potentially emerge, to support independent research at the $500k - $5m level.

George Mitchell

Math research is cheap, requiring only coffee + room + board + health insurance

Yes, mathematicians don’t have families.

> + health insurance

In the US at least, this immediately makes it not cheap

Not if your income really only covers coffee + room + board. For example, a 40-year-old in California making $25K/year can get a plan on the ACA exchange for $13/mo.

Now do it for an applied physicist with a family and a mortgage!

In theory, the work I do sits in that valley of death between where the government funds uncertain things at a $1e5-$5e6 level and where private capital funds things with more certainty at the $1e7-$5e7 level. It’s easy to burn a lot of labor and equipment on dead ends before you know something will scale.

I am an independent researcher currently funded by a part-time job and a very supportive spouse. I play with algorithms and have discovered a new fast Fourier transform and a neural network growth+training algorithm that doesn't use gradient descent. Ideally, some benefactor would pay me to publish my findings and code, for the good of public knowledge, but my attempts to find such funding have fallen flat. Kind of funny that researchers can get funding for future work (without guarantees) but I can't find funding for an interesting discovery that is already done (there are issues with verification of the work, but it seems like a short-term NDA would take care of that).

I have resorted to partnering with a law firm, who, for a large cut of any revenue, will do all the IP work and "marketing" (i.e. contacting legal departments at companies that might be interested in the algorithm). This is not ideal, but is so far the only path presented that may help me recoup wages lost by not working full-time for several years. I figure if I retain control of the IP (and make money through licensing), I can make sure scientists and researchers have free usage rights.

If the IP thing works, I can hopefully continue independent research. If it works well, I hope to self-fund more research without the IP shenanigans. Otherwise, it is back to full-time employment.

You know you can just publish on ArXiV, right?

Yes, of course. When I write "pay me to publish" I don't mean "cover the costs of publication", I mean "fund my work".

Wouldn't publishing results showing your methods offer benefit attract future funding?

Certainly. It also helps a resume. And if that is the only value to the work, then so be it. But there is a reason why R&D departments and universities publish AND protect generated IP. They want returns on investment. In my case, I invested in myself. Why shouldn't I play this game?

Universities don't do research. Individuals affiliated with the university do. The usual deal is that the individuals own the results. If they want to commercialize the results, then the university (and possibly the funders) get a share. But the vast majority of academics don't do that, because commercialization attempts mean certain bureaucracy and uncertain gains. Most just want to talk about their results freely. Many even talk about preliminary work and preliminary results openly to make it less likely that the eventual results will be patentable.

Out of curiosity, what level of $ amount are you talking about?

6-7 figures. IDK if this is realistic, but it seems reasonable to me considering the cost and risk involved in reproducing this work from scratch (salary/benefits/overhead for a research group or individual; no guarantee of success), and the impact of the work (admittedly I am biased to think it's important). I have seen 6- to 7-figure gov't grants for projects (in a similar space) that I guarantee are lower impact.

Usually funding agencies do not fund people with no track record of publishing. If you haven't published your results (or even any prior work) publicly before, why do you expect companies to fund you?

I have a history of publishing in computational physics. But that's beside the point. I have an exciting new result in digital signal processing and I would like to get retroactively funded for the work. If researchers can get funded for future work, why not award past work that comes with a guaranteed outcome?

Payments for making past discoveries public create terrible incentives. They encourage you to keep your discoveries secret until someone is willing to pay enough for them. If your discovery is not particularly valuable on its own, but someone else could make a breakthrough building on it, that breakthrough won't happen, because the other person does not know about your result.

Patents, while also terrible, are a better model. They at least require you to disclose the invention first, and then it's up to you if you can take advantage of your temporary monopoly. While practical impact may be lagging due to reduced commercial interested during the monopoly, the result is at least public, and other people can build on it.

Publishing on arXiv is now very difficult. You need someone to endorse you who has an account on arXiv and has three recent publications in the area of research you're trying to submit.

I just went through this and had prominent researchers willing to endorse me but unable to do so because of the now stringent requirements on arXiv.

FYI, I am an independent researcher.

Those rules for arXiv have existed for quite some time. It is one endorsement per domain. https://info.arxiv.org/help/endorsement.html

Suppose an independent researcher with a background in linguistics solves P vs NP. Unlikely but not impossible. Who on earth is going to take a look at their paper? No one credible, that’s for sure.

So even if someone has the funding and the will for independent research, the problem remains of confirming the validity of their research. This is a research problem in its own right. Ideally we have a system of peer review to validate research, but in practice we use a weak form of argument by authority as a loose proxy for reproducibility. This works better for some fields than others. I know I immediately go Scott Aaronson’s blog to determine whether some new “quantum breakthrough” is actually plausible. It’s a decent proxy in this field for correctness. But psychology? Much more difficult to find a good proxy.

Luckily I think mathematics is already moving in a direction that will eliminate the validation problem. Think you’ve solved the Collatz conjecture? Submit your Lean proof to an automated proof checking system hosted on a university website and if it validates, someone famous is going to take a look at your proof even if you never finished high school. We’re not at that point yet, but it’s inching closer. The group that proved the value of BB(5) received a lot of serious consideration of their work despite their unconventional backgrounds due to having a formally validated proof on hand. Without that proof? Hard to say whether the claim would have been reviewed.

> Suppose an independent researcher with a background in linguistics solves P vs NP. Unlikely but not impossible. Who on earth is going to take a look at their paper? No one credible, that’s for sure.

This is patently false.

Mathematicians see hundreds of delusional papers over a career. It takes seconds to read their "no one understands me, I'm trying to save the world" tells. Every seen a Dr. Bronners soap label? Yep, that guy was crazy too.

We're also good at spotting novel ideas, and making odds on potential failure points. A good paper telegraphs their approach.

Post on a legitimate archive server, and wait. You'll get read. If nothing else, you'll make the next AI training corpus.

> This is patently false.

Ok, I stand corrected.

A class distinction is independent work that correctly uses the common vocabulary vs work that misunderstands or re-invents half of it or tries to build from the ground up with obscure not-fully-explained concepts.

There's no problem with reading the first. While reading the 2nd would be a serious slog if it didn't (usually) immediately fall into one or more fallacies or inconsistencies. Might there be a good idea deep in that 2nd type writing? There might but you can't expect people to first learn an inconsistent foreign language just in that hope. What you do get is people reading through to these first inconsistencies and reporting on that.

Here's the downside of being an experimental particle physicist, while our theorist colleagues famously just need paper, pencil and a trash can (and perhaps not even the latter), it is hard to be a gentleman experimentalist without very involved lab equipment.

switch to a cheaper discipline until the price of technology for high energy comes down (will HEP be cheaper with space manufacturing)? lots of unsolved problems in "breakfast table" physics, granular pile cone angles, honey hyperbola dynamics, etc.

The price will not come down in a vacuum, you need people working on the tech to improve it

or people working on adjacent tech. high energy physics greatly benefitted because chemistry and medicine wanted superconductors for nmr and mri technology (in production 1980, ssc proposed 1984)

This is the dream. But the author even mentions the reality

>Having tried this both ways, I can say that having a steady salary (and health insurance!) allows me to do much better work than when I was worried about my next source of funding.

So yes, there are, in theory, no gates of knowledge or funding. But overall this reads as a lucky person passionately encouraging those considering the same path, but from a very lucky position of survivorship bias.

It's funny how this was written in 2018 but thanks to AI in 2025 this is becoming increasingly accessible.

In fields like AI research, tools such as Cursor and Claude/GPT are effectively mini-research assistants that help refine hypotheses and accelerate coding experiments.

While fields requiring expensive experimental resources (psychology, medicine, physics) remain challenging, even these areas benefit from AI-powered analysis of observational data.

The barriers to meaningful contribution are lower than ever.

> Speaking from my own experience, funding opportunities are often hiding in plain sight, or can be cobbled together from a number of places. I funded my initial research with a grant from the Ford Foundation, without any prior connections or RFPs. We found each other through someone I’d cold emailed. The grants weren’t big, but they were enough, carrying me through the following year until I joined GitHub.

I'm curious about others' experiences with research funding. My company has participated in grants that stemmed from the broader economic impact of crypto. While crypto isn't generally viewed positively on HN, it has contributed to cryptography research, supporting topics like homomorphic encryption and ZK.

I want to try to become an independent researcher, when the funding for my PhD position runs out.

My idea for financing this is finding a few companies who pay a retainer fee to not only get direct easy access to my expertise when they need it, but are also interested in the results of the kind of work I'm doing when they don't need anything specific from me.

I work on supply chain security with systems like Nix, and recently put up a first version of a website: https://groundry.org/

I read a bit of the referenced paper. Sounds pretty cool :). Good luck

Thanks, and thank you for reading! :)

Another example I’m reminded of:

David Silver sold his video game company, made a good amount of money and then decided to do a PhD in Alberta in Reinforcement Learning under Rich Sutton way before it was cool to work in RL.

If people have other modern examples, please share them!

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