201–210 of 389 posts
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I'm definitely using it as you intended. "the day-to-day experience of most people in this country" is nothing like any of the things Altman, PG, Livingston etc... experience on a daily basis.
I'd wager most HN readers can't relate to the day to day experience of most people in this country.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-americans-have-less-th...
> "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 i…
> 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.
I still hope to find ways to put out useful information that will benefit people who are more "normal" than I am and I do have my concerns about the world being designed and run by so many people who absolutely cannot relate to the day-to-day experiences of most of their target audience/customers. But I don't know that hoping for "normal" people to do the design work is in any way useful.
I don't know what the answer is, but it seems like a lost cause to want people to do brilliant design work and also be normal. If you are that brilliant, you simply are not normal. Period.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd wager most HN readers can't relate to the day to day experience of most people in this country.
A reminder about how most Americans actually live: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-americans-have-less-th...
> 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.
He dropped out of Stanford, founded Loopt (which raised $30 million and then acqui-sold for $43 -- and I'm sure Sequoia got the bulk of it), was then made a YC partner and finally appointed president. His Wikipedia page says he's made some angel investments in successful companies like AirBNB, but my question is: "With what money?" Maybe he sold some private shares of these companies at some point. There's nothing wrong with that. But again where did the original money come from? Family?
I just don't get it. Please explain to me how dropping out of college and having your only startup fail leads to (a) being handed one of the most prestigious and influential positions in SV and (b) having so much money you can donate $10 million dollars like it's chump change. How does that make any sense in this universe?
pg started YC and deserves all the credit for basically inventing the accelerator archetype. He can do whatever he wants and I guess he thought sama was the best guy for the job. Maybe he is. Heck, I'll even admit that I think he's done a good job so far, although I also think plenty of people would be equally adept at watching a golden goose lay eggs.
I think SV -- and YC especially -- perpetrate a few huge myths which cause people to have unrealistic expectations of their lives and ventures. ("There aren't enough engineers!", for example. Just last week, sama was saying how easy it is to live in SV if you work at Facebook, make a $150k+ salary and got a $75k signing bonus... a situation he was pawning off as "average" but is actually highly above average.) These lofty, then unfulfilled expectations then cause depression in vast amounts of people, both inside the Valley and out.
To me, sama is a colossal SV myth, incarnate. "Look! If you're smart enough, you can rocket to the moon! Even if you drop out of school and your only startup fails!"
I don't understand the full story, apparently, but I just hope people aren't fooled. There is more than meets the eye, here.
Now, there are flaws to the use of electronic voting systems and the level of transparency required, but that is not what I mean.
What I mean is that every time I have run a large community the social structure that naturally emerges is not the one that we all allow ourselves to be governed by.
I'd like to research how tech could be used to empower lay citizens to shape their society in the way that they imagine it should be.
For example; I was interested in Google's internal experiment with voting transparency and delegation, and how it allows for a different kind of inclusive democratic process that isn't reflected in our existing systems.
One of the moonshot goals of the forum/community startup I created was to start to provide tools to support communities that shaped their own political and social structures, with an express goal of training them in the possibilities of being engaged in their society and then letting them use the tools to shape the real world in the same way that they shaped online societies.
Simply, I'd love to see research and later innovation into how societies and democratic functions could be.
When we talk about changing the world, I really mean it.
@sama - are the members of these groups going to be selected by YC or will there be an application process similar to YC? This is awesome to see, maybe YCR could be the next Bell Labs or something (although Google probably has a hold on that now).
Microsoft Research is also an excellent organization for CS related research.
[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/innova...
[2] https://thmatters.wordpress.com/2014/10/14/letter-re-closing...
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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).
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/09/essays-academ...
I really hope that we see some development of new types of programming languages. We seem to be stuck in a rut with procedural/OO/mostly-functional languages. Some research around flow based programming, especially related to machine learning. I can't help thinking we're missing something here...
I like the idea of YC funding research. Bias free and politics free research can go a long way. A couple of questions though for @sama: 1. Where will the research be based? Is YC providing space to setup lab? 2. One of the problems I see with this is lack of fellow researches present on site making casual collaboration harder (compared to a research university campus). Have you thought of that? 3. Are you planning on…
1. SF for now. 2. Yes, eventually we'd like to have multiple groups in the same space just for this reason--I always think the interdisciplinary stuff is underrated. 3. Some of both, probably, but mostly we want to support people that the existing system does not support (e.g. people that are not yet famous)
1. Try set up a lab in Cambridge at some point down the road.
2. Pay particular attention to CS theory: it's (arguably) high-impact and very cost effective --you can practically fund an entire generation of researchers in a subfield for a fraction of the cost of, say, a major interdisciplinary initiative. See for instance what the Simons foundation is doing at Berkeley[1].
Best of luck with what you're doing. You can end up actually changing the world in this way.