YC Research • Hacker News Board

Re: YC Research

#31

Post by myth_buster » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:38 PM UTC

sama wrote: post #12

myth_buster wrote: post #8

This thread [0] from couple of days back on Alan Kay's views on recreating Xerox PARC seems relevant. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10322929

We talked to Alan at great lengths in the process of putting this together. He is the most insightful person I've ever met on how to structure an organization for great research.

Glad to hear that! Some of his thoughts really resonated with me although they run counter to the current corporate research culture.

I think Google managed to recreate something similar with their 20% projects

Re: YC Research

#32

Post by CPLX » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:39 PM UTC

> YC has a very high problem flux at this point

What does this phrase mean in English?

Re: YC Research

#33

Post by mrdrozdov » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:39 PM UTC

@sama is this targeted towards pre-PhDs who are deciding between pursuing their PhD or working in industry, as well as post-PhDs who are full-time researchers?

Re: YC Research

#34

Post by gdb » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:39 PM UTC

fasouto wrote: post #21

Awesome news. It's interesting to see new ways to fund research. BTW the "Read more" at https://ycr.org/ point to the Y Combinator blog not to the post permalink. It will became confusing once you write a new post.

(I put together https://ycr.org.)

Yep, I'm planning on swapping in the permalink in a day or two, but just want to avoid making changes during this launch.

Re: YC Research

#35

Post by BinaryIdiot » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:39 PM UTC

srean wrote: post #18

sama wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For now they are going to be hand-selected by me (the area we are starting with requires pretty specific domain expertise). Not sure what we'll do in the future.

Any helpful teasers on what that domain might be ?

Sam has expressed his desired to get really good AI to become a thing. Since YC does a ton of tech I'd bet $10 it's AI.

But of course this is just my useless speculation :)

Re: YC Research

#36

Post by aresant » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:39 PM UTC

I love this idea.

Not sure if this is driving your thinking but this would open a desperately needed alternative to Academia if you can scale this idea as successfully as you've scaled startups.

I've watched my genius brother-in-law (PhD Materials Science & Chemistry / Biomimicry) be consumed by a very broken UC system over the past decade.

Started with an exceptionally bright, curious, and inventive man who created breakthrough science in self-healing materials for the "benefit of the world"

10 years of grant fights, personnel struggles, under-served licensing resources, conflicting lab-vs-student priorities, etc has put him out the other end hopeless and disenfranchised.

The world will probably lose one of their best "public" researchers to the bowels of commercial science as a result.

Go for it Sam, good luck and excited to see what your first projects are.

Re: YC Research

#37

Post by suyash » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:40 PM UTC

sama wrote: post #11

dreamdu5t wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bell Labs had an annual budget of over 3 billion since the 80s.

Clearly if it seems promising we're going to up the funding significantly.

That is great news Sam! This is really exciting to see an incubator starting it's own research lab and on top of that, keeping it totally in the open source. I'm fascinated by Research work folks have done at Parc and Disney, you should have a look here and perhaps speak with someone at Disney as well: http://www.disneyresearch.com

Re: YC Research

#38

Post by dewitt » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:42 PM UTC

> "To start off, I’m going to personally donate $10 million..."

Holy cow. That's real money. Sincerely very impressed by the commitment.

Re: YC Research

#39

Post by PabloOsinaga » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:43 PM UTC

@sama: how are you thinking about evaluating progress of the groups? it seems all the bureaucracy in the current research ecosystem derives from the fact that it is really hard to evaluate progress in research/science. So you form a committee of experts to evaluate if a given researcher is doing well, and that eventually leads to politics and bureucracy. what are you thoughts on evaluation?

Re: YC Research

#40

Post by sama » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:43 PM UTC

mrdrozdov wrote: post #33

@sama is this targeted towards pre-PhDs who are deciding between pursuing their PhD or working in industry, as well as post-PhDs who are full-time researchers?

Both.