Earlier quoted context omitted.
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This is a charitable cause. My guess is that YCR-sponsored organizations will be involved in the kinds of projects that might affect world hunger, etc.
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YC Research
181–190 of 389 posts
Re: YC Research
#182Would love to know which fields/areas YC will be focusing for research. Is it for only Computer Science? or Physics? Biomedical Science or behavioral economics? or combinations of few fields?
And what kind of ideas/research will be given priority? Will it be bench/desktop based research projects or applied to people lives directly?
Re: YC Research
#183Earlier 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 ?
I think "we’ll have a process in place to address technology that could be dangerous" is a pretty strong hint, but it would apply about equally well to AI or nuclear, which are already the top guesses in this thread.
Re: YC Research
#184This is really cool! I wonder, though, if YCR will accept donations? It will be nice if I could personally contribute to a research project.
[Loong time lurker here. Couldn't help myself from commenting on this one.]
Re: YC Research
#185Will scientists at YC Research continue the common pattern of academic research/publications? Or are there some grander plans to disrupt traditional research?
(I'm working with Sam on YCR.) It's pretty important that YCR groups have strong ties with the existing research communities — research collaborations tend to have a multiplicative effect. So I'd expect to see papers coming out of YCR. However, I'd also expect to see many other forms of communication (e.g. blog posts, code releases, etc). In general, we'll tune our efforts to achieve the best research results and imp…
I love the accessibility and content of blog posts by members of Recurse Center. It would be amazing if scientists from YCR publish informal, yet rigorous posts for newbies.
Re: YC Research
#186Can we vote for projects somewhere?
Re: YC Research
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
If he is donating, why should he be obligated to donate it to some other charitable cause? Should humanity only focus on one problem at a time?
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You're getting downvotes because you are assuming that the research will be focused on something that won't impact humans in some "charitable" way.
>I think it's very interesting phenomenon that he values this research more than the lives of other people,
It's possible to make a donation to research something that isn't curing cancer for example but still impact the lives of people.
Re: YC Research
#188This 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.
In the article, he suggests finding Michelangelos. I imagine there are many who are clearly the right type, but many more non-obvious Michelangelos. Do you have (or intend to discover) a reliable way to foresee the best people even while circumstances influencing their lives have diverted them from the traditional outlets to look for such individuals? I assume there will be enough obviously great candidates wanting to "work" at YCR that you won't need to dig for hidden gems. I was just curious to know if it was something you'd considered.
Sam, when I met you at Startup School last year, I wanted to be brief. The most important thing I wanted to communicate to you was my gratitude, and I thanked you for sharing your startup class. I'm blown away by and so grateful for the stuff you've been doing since. I'm very excited to see how these new projects work out. Thank you again man.
Re: YC Research
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am a professional scientist and I have to disagree. 10 million is just seed cash that I'm sure will be magnified. But do not underestimate the cost of research. While a particular project that pays off seems (and is) a great return, salaries, equipment and conference travel consume a lot of money.
It probably depends on the type of research that you do. Drug research is expensive. But I think that you can do something like Xerox PARC (it seems like YCR might be going for something similar) with relatively little money. It appears that in 2001 their budget was $65m ( http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=86872 ). I'm not sure if their budget was larger during the 70's but that's not that much money considerin…
From what I can tell, back in the 70's Xerox PARC's annual budget that focused on computing was $10-14.5 million in today's dollars, which seems fairly cheap. But it took multiple years to develop it.
This also feels like cheating because we're targeting extremely successful research. If we knew ahead of time which research would be successful it would be a lot cheaper to do.
Re: YC Research
#190Phenomenal undertaking! When you say "Shouldn't be owned by any one company" does that imply that these releases will all be open-source? Do you have plans to develop a new form of IP licensing to go along with the research?