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Comment by freyrs3 | Hacker News Reader

> Public funding for science is frozen or being cut, private R&D labs are shuttering their doors, and companies are increasingly concerned with quarterly results at the expense of long term research.

It's ironic that Silicon Valley owes most of it's existence to investments by the DoD and ARPA. Most of the technology we use in the electronics industry today would not exist except for all the public money that was poured into semiconductor research. Slashing public funding, especially of fundamental research, is one of the worst things we could probably do for our economy's future.

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It's OK, the silicon valley companies and other private sector institutions who have benefited so much from investment by the DoD and ARPA are ready to address any investment shortfall to the sciences, right?

I mean, investing in a startup that has a value proposition based on real scientific research is the same as investing in the research in the first place. Am I right?

> investing in a startup that has a value proposition based on real scientific research is the same as investing in the research in the first place

Not necessarily, if invest in science you're investing in the lab producing publishable results, without the constraint of bringing a product to market. The two don't necessarily overlap.

I read his/her comment as sarcastically implying that that wasn't the case. :)

The transistor invention was privately funded.

The semiconductor material used by Bardain, Brattain, and Shockley for their Nobel Prize work at Bell Labs was developed by researchers at Purdue University under a grant funded by the National Defense Research Council. Their developments were hardly independent of publicly funded research.

If you want to play this game, you can go back even further and find that they built on work done by privately funded individuals during the Victorian Era and during the Enlightenment. Go back even further and you'll find that much (but by no means all) of the wealth that funded that was acquired thanks to Feudalism.

I therefore credit feudalism for the creation of the transistor.

You seem to have misunderstood the comment, (the sibling comments should help explain, or maybe some light reading about the invention of the transistor).

I have no idea what you are getting at. I am familiar with the invention of the transistor, and understand the comment I was replying to completely. Furthermore, there are no sibling comments to my comment....

What I am guessing went wrong here is that you are unfamiliar with sarcasm, so I'll help you out: I don't actually credit Feudalism with the invention of the transistor.

Don't bother. HN is libertarian leaning thus will defend military spending and fight any criticism of the US military or its massive spending to the death.

I'm not even going to go into how a lot of that spending, if freed up, would go toward endeavors that are not military related and to a parallel timeline we can never know. Imagine NASA with 10 or 50x the budget. Or NSF with 10x the budget, etc. We'd probably be typing this on a moonbase or on a cottage on Alpha Centauri's earth-like planet.

Instead we fawn over the peanuts that falls out of the elephants mouth and praise its generosity for feeding the hungry.

I think you may have responded to the wrong person. I'm just making a point that who you credit with a discovery can change many times if you are willing to point at the owner of the shoulders that the inventor was standing on.

Transistors discovered by a private lab? A private lab with government funding? A private lab building on work done by individuals such as Faraday? Individuals who in many cases received government funding in the UK? Individuals who were building on work by Benjamin Franklin, a self-made and self-funded man? Benjamin Franklin, who doubtlessly was enabled by early work on the scientific method itself by Roger Bacon? Roger Bacon, who was supported by the catholic church? Roger Bacon, who built on work of earlier Muslim scholars?

If we want to play the "who gets credit" game, we need to decide beforehand how many times we are going to go down the "who funded who" tree, and "who researched the prerequisites" tree.

I'm not talking about politics; I am pointing out that you people are talking past each other because you all have different ideas of how to assign credit.

Right, my point is that a lot of people here are invested in the idea of "military solves all" and will try to disingenuously tie all innovations to military or defense financing.

I think what he meant was NOT FOR PROFIT which every single one of those people you mentioned all the way back to feudalism operated under the spirit of.

It's just now all the low hanging fruit is gone and you need million dollar labs instead of an apple and a notebook.

That is debatable. It's kind of a stretch to call AT&T Bell Labs 'privately funded' as ATT was a government-sanctioned monopoly. Technically it was privately funded, but not through a working market system. Kind of like the other great industrial pure research labs (MS, IBM, Xerox).

Bell Labs was privately held, but hardly privately funded. In fact most of it's funding during the semiconductor boom came from federal agencies.

The transistor development was not done under government direction or a government contract to do the work. It was done by a private company choosing to invest their own funds into it.

Funded by a monopoly supported by the public.

Why is this ironic?

Possibly because of the staunchly anti-government, private-industry-can-always-do-it-better attitude that's nearly endemic in the SV tech scene?

If that public money were not poured into semiconductor research, would humanity have simply forgotten about it?

I think not.

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