Research into future programming languages, particularly into dependent types and future development environments. A relatively small amount of money can have tremendous positive impact on the world in this area.
Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
51–60 of 545 posts
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#52Learning through experiences -
One of the hardest skills to ever master is the art of putting oneself in others shoes. It's hard to imagine how it feels to live like a woman in a man dominated world because you can never experience that. Our solution to most crimes is to restrict ones freedom and hope that somehow that person will figure out why what he did was wrong. Does it have to take 15-30 years in order for someone to learn from his mistakes? Can we do better?
I believe we can. We should be able to put someone in an entirely different life by using hypnosis, VR, drugs, etc., and let them live a life so s/he can see the other side of world and learn things on his/her own. What sort of technological changes do we need to enable this? How do we model that virtual world to make people believe that its real? How would it impact someones life after such an experience?
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#531. 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 bypass politics as a way to decrease housing costs and transportation costs , which are ~50% of our living costs.
3. Is it possible to go to some empty space in the u.s , and establish a city from scratch , a city that would be purposely designed for low living costs ?
4. There was a study , in 2004, measuring happiness, which showed the Amish we're considerably more happy than regular people , and as happy as the "forbes 400" billionaires. How do we create such happy communities, while still living in a technological world ?
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#54Deer population control. Reduce deer in the northeast and reduce the primary vector for northeaster deforestation and Lyme disease. Come up with an effective way to reduce the deer overpopulation that doesn't involve shooting or poisoning them
In The west, research ways to control the wild boar/pig population, or find a way to produce a sustainable food source from wild boars that doesn't require owning lots of land.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#55Criminal justice reform. Alternatives to drug prohibition.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#56Corruption.
Bureaucracy is responsible for a lot of corruption. Getting things done in the government is meeting a lot of people and filling a lot of forms. Bribing is sometimes the shortest path to get work done.
Having interoperable data systems, forms that can be filled online and an easy way for citizens to understand the law and fill the papers without a human touchpoint would make things much more seamless and transparent.
P.S. - Low level corruption might not be such a big deal in the developed countries but is an efficiency drain on about 70% of the global population living beyond that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index#/...
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#57In addition to things with long time horizons, it makes sense to look at things that have little profit-incentive for startups or companies to work on.
One example would be nutritional supplements. It's fairly expensive to do a good nutritional study, and there's no good way to make money off of the results (since companies can't patent supplements). So, no one funds good studies on supplements.
At the same time, finding out that certain supplements have positive or negative effects would be great for humanity as a whole.
This also goes for nutrition in general, though supplements are easier to research.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#58Large Scale Medical Data Mining research, similar to OpenAI.
Specifically Computational Healthcare a Search and Aggregation Engine for Medical Records & Claims.
We believe that this is a classic Software eating the world situation and the time is perfect for it.
Here is the link http://www.computationalhealthcare.com
We have access to almost 130 Million de-identified medical records from approximately 36 Million patients (~10% of US population) this includes all Inpatient, ED, Ambulatory Surgery records between 2006-2011 from California. To put simply if you lived in California and went to a hospital there is 95.9% chance that we have your data. This data has been available for quite some time but its use has been hindered due to lack of good software. The data has led to significant research, e.g. my collaborator (not me) published a paper showing risk of strokes following pregnancies in New England Journal of Medicine last year.
At Cornell Tech & Weill Cornell Medical College, we have developed a Search and Aggregation engine that will revolutionize how researchers and physicians use this data. Imagine your mother with Leukemia in Remission just got admitted for Pneumonia. With our software, the Physician will be quickly able to asses likelihood of this occurring and rule out any confounding adverse events. Or consider that there is a rare combination of diagnosis e.g. Graves Disease and Clotting disorder that is indicative of a unique genetic mutation likely to offer novel insight into disease process. With our software questions like these can be answered within second, Today & Right now.
The Data, Legal structure and fully functional prototype are available right now. We were counting on support from AHRQ, but sadly the agency has run into trouble due significant budget cuts.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#59Some way to use technology to make legislation (lawmaking) easier, smarter, better.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#60Cheap Virtual Reality behavioral therapy. There is research that show great promise in VR phobia therapy. VR seems to be quite a potent medium for modifying habitual patterns and emotional reactions. And soon it will be a popular hardware.
It would be quite interesting to research the possibility of delivering working (open source? / mental health as an app?) behavioral therapy solutions for home VR ecosystems.
There is a possibility of a great improvement of therapy costs and the quality of life.