Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

steveblank.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 528 posts

Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

#331

Post by barchar »

xixixao wrote: post #59
twobitshifter wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not why it can’t be done so much as why it isn’t done. Share buybacks allow companies to reward executives directly as their compensation is tied to stock price. If we started not doing that, the priorities might shift, but those executives like things the way they are. Before Tim Cook Apple had never done a buyback - Jobs was always thinking Apple could do better with the money in R&D than paying off shareholders. W…

Dumb maybe question: Why couldn’t the companies with excess profits just pay they employees more in salaries?

1. They don't have to 2. If employees want to be exposed to excess profit (and loss) they can buy shares like everyone else. (Not a super strong argument tbh) 3. It's impossible to measure how much any given employee/department really contributed and they don't want to create a culture of chasing fat bonus checks. 4. To some extent they do tend to. Profit sharing plans and ESOPs aren't that uncommon

Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

#332

Post by kochikame »

terminalshort wrote: post #167
moffkalast wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah if you go check almost any major scientific breakthrough of the past century it usually starts with "some guy was working in a corporate lab with an unlimited budget". We're stagnating as a species a lot more, but at least the shareholders got a payout for their hard work of doing literally nothing. Rent seeking at its worst.

Yes, let's not pay out the investors. That's how you get lots of funding.

There needs to be a balance

Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

#333

Post by makapuf »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #285
whatshisface wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the free market says that young adults 18-24 want to spend thousands of dollars on gyms, saunas and sports facilities, why should government regulators get involved?

because government regulators are backstopping the loan that young adult took for that sauna. There's no free lunch. Its not a free market when a 17yr old with zero job experience can enter loan agreements of 100k per year. And you know that's true because in any other scenario, the same 17yr old will get laughed out of any loan office. I'm not even sure a 17yr old would get a 400k bank loan if the kid showing up at…

That ans I'm not sure the free market could not provide private independent luxury sports amenities just next to universities if it was a real need. I'm pretty sure the free market sports places would fail fast however.

Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

#334

Post by Peteragain »

I do feel this is a case of Americans believing their own propaganda. What the US does well is efficiency. The problem is, capitalism has pushed the time to ROI (return on investment) to get shorter. 5 years is what venture capitalists were working on. At one point there was status for a corporation to have a research lab of quality - in the same way as corporations had glorious architecture for their headquarters, Bell labs was about status. These research labs provided a safe space for curiosity driven scientists. In the interests of efficiency (and because it no longer had kudos) the labs were abandoned and - in a classic US way - it was decided the State should do the science. The trouble now is that the Universities are thinking about their ROI. Curiosity driven science has no home at the moment.

Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

#335

Post by chris_va »

unix_fan wrote: post #117
fidotron wrote: post #64

There's something odd in this argument. If you come at it from a Canadian perspective Canada seriously spent on neural network computer science when almost no one else did (many in AI considered the entire thing discredited and impossible), now the (financial) gains from that are almost entirely in a foreign country. The US science establishment was all about buying and utilizing Russian rocket engines until he-that-…

I’m blind, and participate in a lot of research projects to create accessible technology, which are mostly done by universities. What I have noticed as a foreigner participating with US based universities is that, a lot of this research while very high-quality and very well done does not actually result in anything that the intended audience gets to use or experience. And a lot of this is due to the amount of red tap…

I think the article does not explain this well, but (having worked in an applied science field for many years) much of the work is picked up from these failed projects by other members of the field. Sometimes this is quick, sometimes years later. Anyway, while it might not immediately evident, shelved projects often do move the state of the art forward and unlock someone else's success (hence part of the argument for it being a public funded system). Of course, a lot do not, but that is the nature of research.

Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

#336

Post by citrin_ru »

treis wrote: post #191
fidotron wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China are certainly better at turning the results of research into products, whether that research was them or anyone else. The canonical example here is 5G. Once again the US science establishment had the guy, he ends up doing the breakthroughs for polar coding, they failed to appreciate him, he left and ended up being funded by Huawei. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdal_Ar%C4%B1kan The US science establishment isn…

Eh, China is better at directing massive state level resources at incrementally improving technology. Nothing truly revolutionary has come out of China. The West is still ahead in that sort of stuff.

It seems to me that incremental improvements undervalued in the West instead lots of efforts spend on chasing revolutions (which don’t happen often) and China capitalised on this.

Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

#337

Post by nobodywillobsrv »

terminalshort wrote: post #3

> In the 20th century, U.S. companies put their excess profits into corporate research labs. Basic research in the U.S. was done in at Dupont, Bell Labs, IBM, AT&T, Xerox, Kodak, GE, et al. This changed in 1982, when the Securities and Exchange Commission ruled that it was legal for companies to buy their own stock (reducing the number of shares available to the public and inflating their stock price.) Very quickly B…

A few points that seem to be going unstated here:

a) allowing share buy-backs might be good or bad. But it isn't good or bad unconditionally! The restrictions on the buyback policy should matter. Ideally, buybacks should make prices boring not create ultra thin books with hefty valuations that are cheaper to manipulate. But it seems the regulations around buybacks are in line with incentivizing growth and not stabilizing real prices.

b) to some extent putting uncertain/opaque research inside corporations is a defense against getting into regimes where it becomes easier to manipulate prices. I hadn't thought of it before, but if if important public companies become beholden to traded price and it becomes easy enough for large foreign entities to move markets, then it is simply a matter of "pricing" short term market punishment of a company for any policy you don't like. Yes, this might seem a bit far fetched, but remember that this kind of incremental worsening of outcomes is precisely what people say is hapenning via regulation and legal challenge in key industries.

Just some interesting thought legs spun off from the discussions here.

Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

#338

Post by exe34 »

ActorNightly wrote: post #190
metal_am wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very surface level analysis like saying that the automobile was just an iterative improvement over a horse. Or a computer is just a better abacus. Fundamental research is all about diving into the weeds and finding new problems to solve. It's true that some of the "low hanging fruit" no longer exists (you won't see someone like Euler or Newton who's names pop up all over the place), but I can promise you th…

Automobile was improvement over the horse because things needed to get places. To improve on current automobile will require either massive government investment and regulation in the sense of flying cars, or full electrification with paradigm shifts in transportation, like induction charging roads or battery hot swaps or whatever else. The modern Corolla Hybrid is pretry much the peak optimal point of transportation…

high temperature superconducting would cause a big leap. cheap energy would also help. cheap compute-in-the-walls. machines doing all the dangerous jobs.

Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

#339

Post by utopiah »

terminalshort wrote: post #162
fundad wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who should read this article and won't are actually an anti-growth movement. The silicon valley bros I work with are lapping up the sabotage because they want a lower standard of living in America and less science and innovation because they are already comfortable enough. Their sites are set only on the short-term gains of anti-Muslim and anti-abortion sentiment and "though talk" on immigration. Results a…

SV bros want less science and innovation, and are anti-abortion / anti-immigration? Have you been to SV?

Maybe they meant before X/Twitter.com, before Google, before Meta, before... wait, what's left? PayPal mafia much? Anduril? Oh you meant startups? That will then be bought by those?

There is an ideal of SF but SV isn't SF, definitely not non-tech SF.

So... you might think of a version of SV that existed, maybe, at some point. It might even still exist as some rebellious employees of those large corporations but in practice people with the money and power in SV I believe now are pretty much with such a stance, yes, sadly IMHO.

Wind has turned, in SV too.

Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

#340

Post by pjmlp »

WD-42 wrote: post #321
UncleOxidant wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, he went to Xerox PARC and copied their research.

He also didn’t seem to have an issue borrowing Unix, which obviously has a rich history of research and academia.

Indeed, however many people are too young to remember that he looked down into UNIX, as a bunch of greybeards without taste.

"Why We Have to Make UNIX Invisible."

https://www.usenix.org/blog/vault-steve-jobs-keynotes-1987-u...

"That time I had Steve Jobs keynote at Unix Expo"

> They said a Unix weenie was code for software engineers who hated what we were doing to Unix (the operating system we licensed)—putting a graphical user interface on it to dumb it down for grandmothers. They heckled Steve about his efforts to destroy it. His nightmare would be to speak to a crowd of them.

From https://web.archive.org/web/20180628214613/https://www.cake....

The value proposition NeXT found on UNIX, was the same as Microsoft (after they let go of Xenix, thanks to MS-DOS golden goose deal with IBM), a means to an end, the market of companies and universities that wanted something with UNIX in the box.

"NeXT marketing strategy video (1991)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRBIH0CA7ZU

Note that he wasn't at Apple when A/UX and MkLinux efforts took place.

Post reply on HN