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Comment by domnomnom | Hacker News Reader

Exception:INRIA.

> Exception:INRIA.

Name one successful (as in: >1G$ cap) company started by INRIA researchers.

I thought the question was about research strength, not money-making strength. Although capitalisation is not really about making money rather than promising to make money later. Pretty much orthogonal to the aim of research.

In CS it's kind of combined.

Hm. One can do awesome CS research without having to make tons of money. One can also make money with other people’s/universities’/countries’ CS research while doing zero CS research in-house. Research and money making are pretty much orthogonal.

With research I refer to fundamental CS research, not how to squeeze 0.00053% more out of imagenet or making photos of young people look old, or solving problems of logistics in driver scheduling.

Okay, let me rephrase this: The current strategy is great for individual researchers - when they become successfull they can get a great $400k/year job in the US. It sucks for the europeans who paid for them to get there though.

Funny enough, the way Germany’s Max-Planck Society is successful in hiring top US scientists not through outrageous salaries, but by offering them guaranteed, generous research budget in perpetuity. Not all researchers care about getting rich personally.

Karl Marx would be so proud of you.

No need to get personal. All I’m saying is that research success is not well measured by the amount of money it reels in. That doesn’t mean scientists should not make money.

It just means the one has little to do with the other. Orthogonal.

I know excellent scientists who are rich and equally excellent ones who are poor. I also know some intellectually less well endowed folks who are crazy rich.

Money and research success have little to do with each other. All I’m saying.

You've just elucidated all that is wrong with EU research.

You won't have money for fundamental research if you don't have a huge focus, as a research institute, on economic output.

In the EU, money for fundamental research comes from the government. I agree that this means less money and perhaps more bureaucracy, but als less dependence on economic trends and fads in the industry, and the ability to focus on fundamental questions without having to chase commercialisation.

I know both sides, EU and US approaches to research and research funding, and I think both have their strengths and weaknesses. But either way I think measuring research performance by the amount of money made is the wrong measure.

I searched for INRIA success stories. I found the MLdonkey peer-to-peer client written in OCaml. (I do remember using it many years ago. It was odd.)

Where are the successful, world-changing company spinoffs?

Ok, that's the wrong measure. But didn't they sponsor basically the whole OCaml compiler, which has gone on to be hugely influential?

> Ok, that's the wrong measure.

Is it though? I guess that's the difference between Europe and US in CS. In the US they find a way to make money on the innovations.

Yes, it is wrong. Financial success is only one proxy for impact, and not an especially good one in my view. Lots of things that really maybe the world better will make no money, and in fact reduce a lot of companies' incomes by making purchases unnecessary. Open source software is a prime example.

The biggest and most useful open source projects are often either funded or created by financially successful corporations. The rest of open source is generally rife with useless junk that benefits almost no one (except maybe the author) precisely because there is no pressure to validate ideas and outcomes with money. This isn't an argument or discouragement against open source, but any financially successful product is a billion times more likely to be impactful and useful than sampling by almost any other factor like open source.

Whereas in Europe university driven innovations are often placed in the public domain, especially in France. What is better for society? Depends on the viewpoint I guess.

Now pause to think about how e.g. France has made the EU spend many, many billions to create a search engine that can replace Google? (Unlikely.)

Google earns money with advertising. They also do some kick-ass CS research, but that’s not what makes the money. In fact, ad sales fund Google’s research.

> They also do some kick-ass CS research, but that’s not what makes the money.

Yeah, that's kind of known.

Exactly. Google churns out awesome innovation, but hardly any of that makes any money. Proving the point that money making is not what measures research success.

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