11 ms·

> "To start off, I’m going to personally donate $10 million..." Holy cow. That's real money. Sincerely very impressed by the commitment.

by dewitt 11y ago

leni536 11y ago
Reminds me of a great historical figure of Hungary, István Széchenyi. >Széchenyi gained a wider reputation in 1825, by supporting the proposal of the prime minister, Nagy, to establish the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; Széchenyi donated the full annual income of his estates that year, 60,000 florins, towards it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istv%C3%A1n_Sz%C3%A9chenyi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istv%C3%A1n_Sz%C3%A9chenyi
- samstave 11y ago
  >The height of the bubble was reached in the winter of 1636-37. Tulip traders were making (and losing) fortunes regularly. A good trader could earn up to 60,000 florins in a month— approximately $61,710 adjusted to current U.S. dollars. With profits like those to be had, nothing local governments could do stopped the frenzy of trading. Then one day in Haarlem a buyer failed to show up and pay for his bulb purchase. The ensuing panic spread across Holland, and within days tulip bulbs were worth only a hundredth of their former prices. The tulip bubble had burst. Florins appear to be pretty steady with the dollar...
  - Luc 11y ago
    That was a different Florin, though perhaps it would be possible to find the exchange rate in 1825: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austro-Hungarian_gulden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austro-Hungarian_gulden
aroch 11y ago
I don't want to minimize the awesomeness of the YCR proposal, but $10m isn't really very much in the scheme of research. NIH alone funds to order of $25bil a year in science research. Public-private funding schemes probably fund an order of magnitude more every year. $10m is pretty much just enough to fund one reasonably sized group, doing advanced research, for about a year to a year and half. Seems to me that Sam is hedging so YCR can do its first round in about a year and get a bigger ask by pointing to the starting groups achievements.
- jecel 11y ago
  Alan Kay's group got $5M from NSF to "reinvent computing". The money lasted 6 years, in which they produced a reasonable prototype (called "Frank") of a complete personal computing system in only 20K lines of code.
  - aroch 11y ago
    Money in theoretical CS research goes pretty much entirely to overhead, not much goes to reagents / processes. Paying a little under a million a year in expenses isn't surprising there.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/images/archive/7/7f/20070505235023!SelfExploratorium.ppt http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/images/archive/7/7f/2007050523... http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf Holy crap, that was some kind of read! Thanks for telling me about this as I had never heard of it. My proposal, similar to what Racket and REBOL/RED attempt, was to combine simple DSL's on top of a LISP and low-level 3GL (eg high-level assembler) with optimization, safety, etc built into translation process. Seems like Kay already did most of that with way more clever abstractions and techniques. Gives me hope my smaller proposal might go somewhere esp as I wanted to build components & servers not desktops. Thanks again for the link!
    - corysama 11y ago
      If you watch any presentation from Alan Kay from the past few years, it looks like he's using PowerPoint or something similar. But, occasionally he does something PP can't do, like run a physic simulation or have all the letters in the text do a swarm animation. He's using Frank.
      - nickpsecurity 11y ago
        Thanks for the tip. I'll try to watch for that. Confirms it's already practical for at least graphic presentations. Meanwhile, I wonder what the odds are of getting a hold of Frank to play with it or build on it. Might have to try to contact him. Note: I thought about doing something similar in first secure desktop I construct where I do my presentation on it, let people counter the methods probably won't work, and then tell them after that. Always priceless faces when that happens. Also helps tell the contrarian bullshitters apart from those who think hard on your claims. Saves time in future. ;)
jrmo 11y ago
As a researcher, I've run the numbers on what it would take to start a new nonprofit research institute. Assuming some other sources of revenue (e.g. grants), 10M was actually the sweet spot to get a minimum sustainable group off the ground (about 5 PIs, with postdocs and grad students). This is for math/cs/physics theory, where there are no experimental costs. The IP stance is surprising -- for an independent group, it is tough to give up on a potential source of revenue. Seems like YC itself provides a way to monetize the ideas, though, since some of them will likely feed into the VC side and help the companies.

> "To start off, I’m going to personally donate $10 million..." Holy cow. That's real money. Sincerely very impressed by the commitment.

by dewitt 11y ago

> "To start off, I’m going to personally donate $10 million..." Holy cow. That's real money. Sincerely very impressed by the commitment.

leni536 11y ago

Reminds me of a great historical figure of Hungary, István Széchenyi. >Széchenyi gained a wider reputation in 1825, by supporting the proposal of the prime minister, Nagy, to establish the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; Széchenyi donated the full annual income of his estates that year, 60,000 florins, towards it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istv%C3%A1n_Sz%C3%A9chenyi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istv%C3%A1n_Sz%C3%A9chenyi

samstave 11y ago
>The height of the bubble was reached in the winter of 1636-37. Tulip traders were making (and losing) fortunes regularly. A good trader could earn up to 60,000 florins in a month— approximately $61,710 adjusted to current U.S. dollars. With profits like those to be had, nothing local governments could do stopped the frenzy of trading. Then one day in Haarlem a buyer failed to show up and pay for his bulb purchase. The ensuing panic spread across Holland, and within days tulip bulbs were worth only a hundredth of their former prices. The tulip bubble had burst. Florins appear to be pretty steady with the dollar...
- Luc 11y ago
  That was a different Florin, though perhaps it would be possible to find the exchange rate in 1825: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austro-Hungarian_gulden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austro-Hungarian_gulden

aroch 11y ago

I don't want to minimize the awesomeness of the YCR proposal, but $10m isn't really very much in the scheme of research. NIH alone funds to order of $25bil a year in science research. Public-private funding schemes probably fund an order of magnitude more every year. $10m is pretty much just enough to fund one reasonably sized group, doing advanced research, for about a year to a year and half. Seems to me that Sam is hedging so YCR can do its first round in about a year and get a bigger ask by pointing to the starting groups achievements.

jecel 11y ago
Alan Kay's group got $5M from NSF to "reinvent computing". The money lasted 6 years, in which they produced a reasonable prototype (called "Frank") of a complete personal computing system in only 20K lines of code.
- aroch 11y ago
  Money in theoretical CS research goes pretty much entirely to overhead, not much goes to reagents / processes. Paying a little under a million a year in expenses isn't surprising there.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/images/archive/7/7f/20070505235023!SelfExploratorium.ppt http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/images/archive/7/7f/2007050523... http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf Holy crap, that was some kind of read! Thanks for telling me about this as I had never heard of it. My proposal, similar to what Racket and REBOL/RED attempt, was to combine simple DSL's on top of a LISP and low-level 3GL (eg high-level assembler) with optimization, safety, etc built into translation process. Seems like Kay already did most of that with way more clever abstractions and techniques. Gives me hope my smaller proposal might go somewhere esp as I wanted to build components & servers not desktops. Thanks again for the link!
  - corysama 11y ago
    If you watch any presentation from Alan Kay from the past few years, it looks like he's using PowerPoint or something similar. But, occasionally he does something PP can't do, like run a physic simulation or have all the letters in the text do a swarm animation. He's using Frank.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      Thanks for the tip. I'll try to watch for that. Confirms it's already practical for at least graphic presentations. Meanwhile, I wonder what the odds are of getting a hold of Frank to play with it or build on it. Might have to try to contact him. Note: I thought about doing something similar in first secure desktop I construct where I do my presentation on it, let people counter the methods probably won't work, and then tell them after that. Always priceless faces when that happens. Also helps tell the contrarian bullshitters apart from those who think hard on your claims. Saves time in future. ;)

jrmo 11y ago

As a researcher, I've run the numbers on what it would take to start a new nonprofit research institute. Assuming some other sources of revenue (e.g. grants), 10M was actually the sweet spot to get a minimum sustainable group off the ground (about 5 PIs, with postdocs and grad students). This is for math/cs/physics theory, where there are no experimental costs. The IP stance is surprising -- for an independent group, it is tough to give up on a potential source of revenue. Seems like YC itself provides a way to monetize the ideas, though, since some of them will likely feed into the VC side and help the companies.