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Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

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Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#341

Post by effie »

gonehome wrote: post #140

Academic research/funding is broken - it'd be cool if there was a way to create something to fix the incentives. I think that's kind of the goal of YC research in a narrow sense, but it'd be interesting if there was a way to align the incentives so scientists collaborated more instead of hiding research so they don't get 'scooped'. At this same time this could get rid of the academic journals that charge huge amounts…

"get rid of the academic journals that charge huge amounts of money for access to publicly funded research by selling prestige to desperate researchers (so they can get more funding)." Quite well said. I think we really need two things to make that happen. 1. provide cool alternative to private companies selling prestige; and 2. exert more pressure by people from outside on the academia administrators and researchers. The current academic system is rotten, but it is, unfortunately, quite stable.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#342

Post by DrNuke »

DrNuke wrote: post #297

Virtual prototyping and probabilistic design of mechanical components. This would lower the costs of very big projects like nuclear power plants and make big nuclear more affordable. Small Modular Reactors are going there but there are proliferation issues and therefore the interest in mammoth plants is not dead yet. One tool nowadays is the CAE suite Tosca by Dassault Systems, which can work with both Abaqus and Ans…

Adding that this would also come good for space big shuttles and Moon or Mars colonisation so SpaceX.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#343

Post by pinouchon »

biofox wrote: post #318
mietek wrote: post #129

http://sens.org/ . Humans need more lifespan, badly. I’d have said AI safety, but it’s already on your list. Excellent. I’d also have said basic income. Good to know you’re on it. Meta-research. Academic publishing is obsolete, and knowledge should not be paywalled. How many researchers already make use of https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar or http://sci-hub.io/ ? Bacteriophages. Antibiotics are running out, while phag…

I couldn't agree more about funding SENS related research. I think focusing on extended lifespan misses the point though (although it's a nice side benefit). The diseases of old age cause more suffering than everything else combined. Seeing people I love deteriorate to a state of constant suffering is unbearable to watch. Seeing signs of ageing in myself hammers home just how helpless I am to do anything. I don't und…

Reducing existential risk is not about minimizing the amount of suffering in our own lives. It's about making the lives of our potential trillions of descendants possible.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#344

Post by jashephe »

derrida wrote: post #164
mietek wrote: post #129

http://sens.org/ . Humans need more lifespan, badly. I’d have said AI safety, but it’s already on your list. Excellent. I’d also have said basic income. Good to know you’re on it. Meta-research. Academic publishing is obsolete, and knowledge should not be paywalled. How many researchers already make use of https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar or http://sci-hub.io/ ? Bacteriophages. Antibiotics are running out, while phag…

> Humans need more lifespan, badly. Do we? Or do we need more realistic perspective about death? Why quantity over quality? Seems there's a lot of quality improvements that could be made [1]. For instance, I read recently (can't recall source) that San Fransisco's homeless is the least happy in the world. Also that the top 1% in the world make over $35K a year, but there are far happier people than exist in middle Am…

Indeed. From a biological standpoint, it's important to realize that an indefinite lifespan, as a life history trait [1], does not confer evolutionary fitness. The fact is that organisms do not appear to evolve to a maximal lifespan — they evolve to an optimal lifespan. Humans are already considered to be K-selected [2], and increasing lifespan appears to necessarily decrease fitness in other areas, as has been seen in worms [3] and flies [4] (e.g. reproductive fitness decreases and age of maturity increases, when lifespan increases).

More importantly, "near-infinite" lifespans reduce the efficacy of natural selection — longer-living organisms evolve at a slower rate. While, perhaps, unappealing, the culling of species members well past reproductive age is necessary to allow for more resources and potential for competition and selection in their offspring. And humans are certainly still undergoing natural selection in many arenas; just look at sickle cell trait [5] or or CCR5-Δ32 [6].

Death is a feature, not a bug.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_history_theory

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8608934

[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25601460

[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11965279

[6] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8791590

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#345

Post by akvadrako »

A lot of the ideas here are good, but each of them on their own could take all the resources of your initiative and you'd still only be able to start solving one issue.

The biggest meta-problem I see is the difficulty organising our thoughts and digital resources. For personal use, I use Devonthink, but it's far from ideal. For collaboration we use a hundred ways like comment threads and wiki's, which are all rather painful.

But I really feel being able to organise our (collective) ideas is the key to solving all the other problems better and faster, so we should work on it first. Possibly the solution looks like a content-addressable, distributed semantic web with privacy and massive federation, on which multiple user-friendly apps can share pieces of data.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#346

Post by codeshaman »

nugget wrote: post #23

Mental health - specifically in a future where we may be increasingly more connected virtually but increasingly less connected physically. In one or two decades when the average urbanite is serviced by on-demand autonomous vehicles and drones, works from home (or not at all), consumes news/media in a personalized subreddit-like echo chamber interspersed with cleverly integrated native advertising, and spends 10+ hour…

That.

We still don't know what long-term exposure to highly condensed, highly customized information does to our brains and social systems as a whole.

For example, there are signs that social network users are actually unhappy - in other words - are experiencing all kinds of mental health issues.

It is well known that programmers experience "burn outs", which, from personal experience, is a terrible and debilitating state sometimes even leading to suicide.

There is addiction to gaming, chat, porn, social networks.

Mobile phones have exposed everyone to the infinite stream of information/communication and I think this will lead to many more mental health issues.

I think we are not yet prepared for the kind of impact that current and future tech will have on our minds, so this would be a worthy field to invest in now.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#347

Post by decasteve »

vonklaus wrote: post #123

Stack Risk. We need to know how much CPU power entities have at their dosposal. If statistics aren't available, find data centers and energy breakdowns backout those costs and use sqftage to find amount of servers. COmputing power growth rate is likely biggest metric tp assess how the tech industry is doing and possibly better at measuring an economy than GDP. The risk asdociated with having elephant flow like owners…

Sounds analogous to understanding an electricity grid and power generation.

Distributing CPU power (decentralizing it) by having more people run servers in their homes is the Internet equivalent to rooftop solar.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#348

Post by liamconnell »

petra wrote: post #53

1. A lot of industries are concentrated and monopolistic, which leads to both issues of high prices, control and lack of local resilience. So how do we build a more decentralized economy ? What are the missing building blocks ? 2. Our current remote-work isn't good enough from the psychological perspective. No eye-contact, no body language, isolation, etc. But solving this is one of the only things thing that can byp…

Number 3 doesnt sound like a good idea. It seems like a way to ghettoize a large part of the population. The fact is that there will always be competition to be living physically close to the best community, so a low-cost urban center in the middle of nowhere would turn into a place like Newark.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#349

Post by yummyfajitas »

aylmao wrote: post #188
dineshp2 wrote: post #152

Education. Everyone knows it's broken,not effective anymore and literally a waste of time and money. More so if you had the oppurtunity to experience what education means in third world countries.Spoiler alert : it's a joke that will make you cry. It needs to be fixed as quickly as possible and research needs to be done for alternatives to help people in the process of learning.Online education is a good start, but w…

Education isn't ideal now, but I don't think online education is a good start or even a viable model. Training more and better teachers is the way to go, especially in "third world countries". Not only is there big issues with motivation and the whole social/interactive/distant aspect to moocs; what do you do when you don't have internet, or your device breaks? Now your education depends on a machine that costs a cou…

It's teachers that are not remotely viable in the developing world.

I read recently that the teacher failure rate in Maharashtra is about 15% - i.e., on a given day, 15% of Maharashtrian teachers just don't show up to work, and there is a famous case of an MP teacher who's been absent for 23 years. [1]

Further, even if the teacher shows up, the student may not be able to. Consider the "town" in this pic: https://imgur.com/mjWcEZZ Hiring a teacher for the 5-10 kids who live there is unaffordable, so the kids there need to climb the "mountains" [2] whenever they want to attend the closest school. Of course, the kids don't actually do that every day; work and family obligations often interfere.

A 5-10k s mobile phone with a (worst case) 250rs data plan works far better than 85% of the time, even in that rural town. It works on the student's schedule, so if a horde of visitors require the student to spend the day in the family restaurant, they can catch up at night.

The real thing which would help a lot is better devices. E.g., something closer to a kindle in terms of battery life an readability.

[1] Unfortunately I read this stat in a paper copy of the Pune mirror a couple of weeks ago, so I don't have a citation offhand. The 23 year absence is easy to google, however: http://www.hindustantimes.com/indore/action-against-teacher-...

[2] That's the Marathi term for the hills in that region.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#350

Post by effie »

mekarpeles wrote: post #203

+1 for YC Research's basic income (and standard for quality of life) Meta-Research. +1 for @mietek's Meta-research; creating a distributed, open ecosystem (not a website, but a protocol) for publishing and navigating interdisciplinary research. Medicine. +1 for Bacteriophages @mietek & open-medicine (e.g. Counter Culture Labs - Open Insulin) https://experiment.com/projects/open-insulin . Additionally, cancer and hear…

IPFS has some really great ideas. It could enable huge projects of major public interest, like open publication platforms, robust knowledge sharing and corruption-free news service. News sites are currently engaging in silent edits ordered by minority interests; in an IPFS-kind of web, edits of documents would be transparent since you can't rewrite distributed content without people noticing.
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