YC Research • Hacker News Board

Re: YC Research

#161

Post by argumentum » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 8:47 PM UTC

pw wrote: post #127

> I’m going to personally donate $10 million Statements like this always turn me off. I guess it's because it breaks the illusion that Sam and everyone else at YC are normal people like most of us. They're not. They're INSANELY wealthy by any reasonable standard.

If it's any consolation, they were "normal people" before they became insanely wealthy. If anything, that's the point of YC .. to give "normal people" with intellect, determination and good ideas the chance to become "insanely wealthy" while improving the world.

Re: YC Research

#162

Post by matheweis » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 8:47 PM UTC

biswaroop wrote: post #148

aresant wrote: post #36

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…

Seconded. This is brilliant. As a physics PhD student at MIT who's leaving to build a startup, I'm finding it a relief to leave a broken system. The academic community is fraught with politics, mismanagement, and inefficiency. Researchers are driven by a need to get published and get grant funding, not to expand the frontiers of human knowledge. Impact is currently measured by citation pagerank, and broader impact is…

Wow, I knew things were bad, but the education system must be well and truly broken when the students at one of the world's top research universities are leaving to build startups, and calling it a broken system on their way out. (No sarcasm intended; I couldn't find a way to say this better).

Re: YC Research

#163

Post by aroch » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 8:47 PM UTC

dewitt wrote: post #38

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

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.

Re: YC Research

#164

Post by robotresearcher » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 8:50 PM UTC

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #35

srean wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

AI is not really lacking for funding and research activity right now.

Re: YC Research

#165

Post by eCa » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 8:50 PM UTC

mehrdada wrote: post #20

sama wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No--all IP developed is free to the world, so we wouldn't be able to use it defensively.

It is possible to structure it as "patent granted to everyone, but expires the moment they bring up a lawsuit against us or any of our licensees" to do doubly good for the world.

Then it would no longer be free.

Re: YC Research

#166

Post by koopuluri » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 8:51 PM UTC

ihsw wrote: post #96

CPLX wrote: post #32

> YC has a very high problem flux at this point What does this phrase mean in English?

A significant amount of proposals are too pie-in-the-sky to take seriously but still warrant attention . Honestly I'd like to see Kickstarter take a stab at this too, providing the general populace with an outlet to support research projects.

https://experiment.com/ - Not sure what their numbers are though.

Re: YC Research

#167

Post by argonaut » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 8:52 PM UTC

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #143

raphman wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MSR publish a lot but try to get patents on potentially valuable research first.

Like literally any research organization or university anywhere today.

Which only makes an organization like YC Research even more valuable of an experiment.

Re: YC Research

#168

Post by ISL » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 8:57 PM UTC

matheweis wrote: post #162

biswaroop wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded. This is brilliant. As a physics PhD student at MIT who's leaving to build a startup, I'm finding it a relief to leave a broken system. The academic community is fraught with politics, mismanagement, and inefficiency. Researchers are driven by a need to get published and get grant funding, not to expand the frontiers of human knowledge. Impact is currently measured by citation pagerank, and broader impact is…

Wow, I knew things were bad, but the education system must be well and truly broken when the students at one of the world's top research universities are leaving to build startups, and calling it a broken system on their way out. (No sarcasm intended; I couldn't find a way to say this better).

Leaving to do something interesting in industry is a time-honored tradition, particularly at the fancier schools.

Academia is but one fruitful track for a smart grad student.

Re: YC Research

#169

Post by tlb » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 8:57 PM UTC

pcmaffey wrote: post #158

"heretical" "dangerous" "free to everyone" Strong language. Especially coming from an organization that generally touts "ideas as useless." Well here's a model based exponentially upon the promise of "ideas." I sincerely hope you disrupt the current models, which have been severely hijacked by interest groups, short-term thinking, and governance. So yes Sam, you have some bold ideas (you're not yet sharing). Put $10m…

No one at YC thinks that ideas are useless.

Perhaps you're thinking of this [PG, 2005]: Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.

This is specific to startup business ideas, not scientific ideas. And worthless != useless. Worthless (in the narrow sense) means you can't sell it for a lot of money.

Re: YC Research

#170

Post by Natsu » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 8:59 PM UTC

cambion wrote: post #153

rsync wrote: post #120

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." Two words: baseband processor. The world really, really needs a fully open baseband processor.

It's true that we need an open baseband processor, but I wonder if this qualifies as the sort of blue-sky research that I'm guessing they'll want to focus on? My feeling is that the software to accomplish this is already largely there, but the hard part of getting a design to the fab and actually getting anyone to adopt it isn't. I think there would also be a number of regulatory hurdles to cross, since this would en…

They only care if you can make it work on channels it shouldn't, they don't care whether the code that controls it is open or not.

But yes, an open processor could help with a lot of open networking problems, even though it seems more like an engineering matter than research per se.