Name: Science--the endless frontier
ISBN: 9780691186627

What Hacker News says

contemporary343Jun 2026

If you haven't read it already, it's really worth digesting the arguments Vannevar Bush made regarding funding basic science in 1945 (Science: The Endless Frontier) which resulted in the NSF as we know it being founded:

https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/2023-04/EndlessFrontier75t...

"A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowl- edge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade, regardless of its mechanical skill."

I think FROs are certainly worth exploring, but if we're diverting vast amounts of funding to existing research infrastructure and talent to funding them, the opportunity costs are huge. This is not well appreciated, but universities are in fact very cheap places to do research compared to any modern alternative one might construct. I suspect FROs will end up being much more expensive just for structural reasons, and will end up re-discovering the university bundle slowly and piece by piece. Moreover, for many types of research they will have to effectively rebuild a range of infrastructure (facilities, equipment, etc.) that already exists at universities throughout the country.

None of this justifies blowing up the extensive basic research infrastructure we have today in pursuit of unproven experiments. Once they're proven, a conversation can be had about how to reconfigure existing assets and new government-funded approaches. But such discussions must include congress, the appropriators of the funds.

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DrAwdeOccarimJul 2020

I wonder how much loose Fed policy is funnelling into these IPO and 2ndary offerings. Honestly, that or like infrastructure is fine by me for things freshly printed money to go into. Investing in science always pays off in the long-run. Our leaders should re-read Science The Endless Frontier, by Vannevar Bush (https://nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm)

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jashepheMar 2020

This calls to mind the ever-relevant “Science: The Endless Frontier” [1] by Vannevar Bush, who more or less oversaw the entire American federal research enterprise during and post-WWII. He famously said that the best thing you can do for scientific progress is give scientists money and then get out of the way (i.e. not even putting out requests for grant submissions in specific domains, like the NIH often does now).

[1] https://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm

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TomOwensSep 2026

For the past couple of months, I've been doing a deep dive into engineering and engineering philosophy, and I have some thoughts about this article.

The biggest thing I noticed was that, even though there was an acknowledgment of the lack of a singular definition of engineering, the definition used throughout was tied to a linear model of innovation. I've been able to trace this thinking to the 1920s, with a growth in popularity in the 1940s and 1950s. A prime example is Vannevar Bush's Science: The Endless Frontier. Although the report had some good outcomes, like leading to the establishment of the National Science Foundation, Bush's own autobiography acknowledged that this model was a disservice to engineers and engineering, as it led to many engineering accomplishments being touted as scientific achievements and scientists getting credit for the work of engineers in popular literature and the press.

There aren't too many other views of engineering out there. A handful of contemporary authors keep coming up: Florman, Vincenti, Ferguson, Koen, and Petroski. Most other things I've read tend to cite one or more of these authors and continue to build upon their foundations.

Picking up any one of the other perspectives on engineering would let you make another connection to the 1968 NATO conference. There were really three camps that offered definitions about what software engineering should be. People like Dijkstra, Hoare, Naur, and Wirth focused on applying mathematics and computer science and on theory building. McIlroy, Bauer, and Bemer looked at how software development could learn from industrial engineering and mass production. David and Ross emphasized practical problem solving. By the 1969 conference, the practical problem-solving piece had dropped out of focus, even though this is very closely related to how other engineering philosophers looked at engineering.

Another aspect from some of the engineering philosophers is the craft roots of engineering. This also tends to disprove the linear model of innovation. Engineering existed well before modern science, and there are several cases of engineering development without a robust scientific understanding of the principles that enable it. Modern science became a tool in the toolbox of modern engineers, but it's not a precursor to engineering. The craft roots have been there all along and were part of engineering education up into the early 1900s. This can tie back into Agile Software Development and the software craftsmanship movement of the 1990s and early 2000s.

The paragraph about application programming being removed from the debates in the 1960s misses a key point. In the 1960s, "software" was shorthand for "systems software", or the stuff provided by computer manufacturers to allow people to make their computers do stuff. Application programs were not really considered software until at least the 1970s. It's a bit nuanced, but there's a reason for excluding this group of people: it was seen as a different thing entirely.

Finally, no mention of Margaret Hamilton. Failing to even mention Hamilton and her use of software engineering as an aspiration to elevate programmers to the same status as the other engineering disciplines on the Apollo program misses a huge moment in the development of the idea of software engineering.

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dredmorbiusJun 2023

That's an excellent question. Does HN count?

I've thought a bit about intentional communities --- communes, utopian towns, and the like. The thought occurred some years back that amongst the most successful intentional communities are college towns. These are, hands down, some of the best places to live, and certainly on a per-population basis, in the US and Canada, based on a wide range of measures (though housing costs tend to be higher than surrounding areas).

There are a slew of smaller, non-dominant, and often quite small towns to be found around the world, though the US might be a good exemplar, whose central focus is often a university or college. Some public, some private (though virtually all benefit by public financing of research or student aid / loans).

These virtually always contrast sharply with surrounding towns, even for relatively small schools.

As to what makes these tick ... I don't have any solid evidence, but I've a few theories:

- Many of these schools were either formed or saw a sharp growth following the Sputnik scare and emphasis on higher education in the 1950s. See particularly California's Master Plan for Higher Education: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Hig...>, or the UK's "Green Book": <https://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/greenbook1941/...>

- There are a number of associated populations for the institutions, with widely varying residency periods. Students pass through in 2-8 years typically (net of transfers, drop outs, extended undergraduate programmes, a/k/a "five year" and "six year" plans, and graduate / professional programmes). Faculty tend to remain much longer, often much of their professional career (40+ years). Alumni may settle in the region (though most do not). And there is the "town" (vs. "gown") component, which may be sympathetic, adversarial, or a mix of both --- residents of the community who are not directly affiliated with the university. (Instances of town-gown conflict, including actual armed battle and shooting wars, date back to mediaeval times, e.g. the St. Scholastica Day riot of 10 Feb 1355.)

- The school itself has a central organising principle and mission, which many other intentional communities lack.

- The school has associations with other institutions, organisations, and agencies, some of higher learning, many not, and tends to form strong relationships with government, business, cultural, and religious sectors.

- Since the 19th century, official government recognition of the significance of both higher education and research has resulted in an increasing degree of official sanction and financial support, initially the German Humboldtian model, technical schools (e.g., M.I.T., founded in 1861 in large part to support the U.S. Navy's newfound interest in steam propulsion), land grant universities (organised in the US under national acts of 1862 & 1890), and the modern research university (largely spawned by the Manhattan Project and Vannevar Bush's Science, The Endless Frontier (1945) and formation of the US National Science Foundation, and widely emulated in other countries). In the UK there is a distinction made between the Ancient Universities (Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dublin), the Red Brick Universities, chartered in the 19th century, the Plate Glass Universities, chartered between 1963 & 1992, and ... whatever comes after. See: <https://www.ukuni.net/articles/types-uk-universities>.

Note that universities themselves don't necessarily make money directly (through tuition), though some are extraordinarily wealthy (e.g., Harvard (~$50 billion), Yale (~$40 billion), Stanford (~$38 billion), Princeton (~$35 billion), see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...>). Those funds tend to come from grants (both government and privately-funded research), alumni donations, and increasingly technology licensing. In the case of Stanford, real estate is a massive contributor. Schools often also benefit from tax breaks and other legislative relief and exemptions.

So, you say, that's really interesting, dred, but how do you translate that to online communities, especially those for which locality and location are not central elements, as they are for brick-and-mortar institutions?

I don't know, though ... I've been pondering just that for a decade or so.

The insight does suggest a few solution-shaped objects and/or characteristics, however:

- A key failing of venerable fora is that the membership often becomes exceedingly stale. Not only do new members fail to arrive, but the more interesting and dynamic members of the old guard often leave as both the noise floor rises and the clue ceiling drops. Reward for participation simply decreases. Universities subvert this by pumping fresh students through. I suspect HN's YC affiliation and fresh founder classes in part aids HN in this regard.

- A forum is almost certainly not a freestanding enterprise but an adjunct to another institution or set of institutions. Again, HN serves, but does not profit, YC.

- Universities are mission rather than profit driven, and both teaching and research are a key element of that mission. This ... plays poorly with the notion of a VC-funded online community start-up. Ezra Klein in a podcast on media earlier this year noted that a key challenge in organising new ventures is that the profit motive and VC / investor interests tend to conflict strongly with journalism's prerogatives.[1]

- Several of the most successful previous online communities formed either directly through or closely affiliated with educational institutions. The Internet itself, email, and Usenet directly, Facebook originated on the campus (and with the student body) of the most selective-admission university in the world, and I'd argue that Slashdot's early tech-centric membership was at least strongly academic-adjacent.

- Universities are focused not only on the present moment, that is, streams, but on accumulated wisdom and knowledge. Here, HN is less a model than, say, Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation, in which something of a community forms through the editor community which creates (and fights over) the informational resources being created. Wikipedia doesn't quite have a social network, though various discussion pages and sections approach this.

- On the "small" bit, there's both a selective-admissions and graduation element that academia shows. That is, you don't just let anybody in, and, after they've "completed the course", they're graduated and moved on, with the exception, again, of faculty and staff. Just how that translates to an online community I'm not entirely sure.

- Another element of the "small" bit is that universities are organised: into colleges (that is, interest areas), departments (specific faculty), courses (specific topics of study or interest) and sections, that is, specific groups or meetings of students for lecture and/or discussion. Individual class size is a key dynamic, and much of the experience of the past 75 years or so shows the challenges of scaling lectures and the profoundly different characteristics of a small seminar (say, 5--15 students), a modest upper-division class (25--30), and moderate-to-large lectures (50 -- 1,000 or more students). Strong interactivity is sharply curtailed above about 15 students, and the options for interactivity above about 50--100 are near nil. Choosing how groups are organised, who's permitted in, and what size limits exist, as well as communications between various divisions (sections, courses, departments, colleges, universities) all come into play, as I see it.

And then there's politics. One of the notorious elements of universities is how various divisions rival amongst one another, gatekeep, define what is in (or out) of a specific discipline's remit, resist challenging new concepts, and form cliques and fads ... just like any human domain, only more so. I have a nagging suspicion that online communities might in fact have similar tendencies, and that these would also have to be subverted somewhat to avoid pathological development.

There are a whole slew of other factors --- techical capabilities, UI/UX, online abuse, legal issues, privacy and identity, spam, propaganda, surveillance, censorship, etc. So many dumb ways to die.

________________________________

Notes:

1. "How the $500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works" (14 Feb 2023), interviewing Tim Hwang. Specifically: "If you’re able to aggregate a lot of attention online, we just have this almost religious faith that there’s just some way that you’ve got to be able to turn this into money. You will become a Google. You will become a Facebook.... [T]he flip side of that [is] that if you come to a V.C. and you say, I want to do a subscription business model, they’ll say, well, I don’t know — we don’t have a whole lot of examples of that really blowing up, so why don’t you just do advertising?" <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/podcasts/transcript-ezra-...> Which is to say: unless you're planning a pure-play advertising monetisation model, which is to say, the Sidam Touch (advertising turns everything to shit), you won't get funding.

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mdp2021Jul 2022

> Vannevar Bush - head of military research during WW2, author of “As We May Think” and “Science, the Endless Frontier” - wrote a memoir late in life, Pieces of the Action. It was out of print and hard to obtain for a long time, but Stripe Press has brought it back in a new edition

The author of the article collected a number of excerpts grouped by topic: "On invention"; "On leadership and management"; "Communication style"; "On society, war and politics"; "Fun stories"; "On the spirit we need".

Already near the beginning we meet a remarkable one: Vannevar Bush was contacted by a «chap» who said he «made a very great invention and wanted [Bush] to develop it for him». Basically, the guy had a "generic idea" of the kind "what if we harnessed the power of things", and showed as if unaware that what is important is feasibility. "Silver bullets" before the times of populism.

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