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YC Research

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231–240 of 389 posts

Re: YC Research

#231

Post by vezzy-fnord »

rsync wrote: post #120
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.

"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.

I thought the issue there was primarily legal, not technical.

We have OsmocomBB, but it's limited to the 2G standard and comes with a ton of usage caveats pertaining to regulatory compliance and legality.

Re: YC Research

#232

Post by eli_gottlieb »

sama wrote: post #82

I was hoping to answer questions here for awhile but I'm getting pulled into a crisis so I have to go. I'm going to do an AMA on HN later this week (mostly to answer questions about applying to YC) and would be happy to answer more questions about YCR then.

You know, normally I'm one of those jerks constantly criticizing the Silicon Valley Way of things. But this was a very good idea, I wish you the best of luck with it, and if, God forbid, my current employer went pear-shaped, it's the kind of place I'd love to work.

Re: YC Research

#233

Post by webnrrd2k »

gone35 wrote: post #208
matheweis wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It's so common it's a whole genre in of itself nowadays: "quit lit". [1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/09/essays-academ...

Thanks -- good essay -- I just lost an hour or so reading it and following links.

Re: YC Research

#234

Post by hugh4 »

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).

In fairness, all systems are broken, academia isn't much more broken than anything else involving large numbers of mortals.

The basic problem is that we need to rank one researcher's merit against everyone else's, and there's no perfect way to do this because nobody can familiarise themselves with every individual's research. Rely on peers' opinions to measure merit and you just reward back-scratching. Rely on objective measures like citation counts and h-index and you incentivise people to focus on these instead of research quality.

The thing is that macro-scale works pretty well. As an overall system, academic science produces new knowledge at an astounding rate, and in terms of dollars in to research produced I'd say it works pretty efficiently. The measures we use are correlated with research quality even if they don't measure it perfectly.

It's only at the detailed scale where it looks badly flawed.

edit: and of course whenever I spend a long time writing a thoughtful comment I get the "you're submitting too fast, please slow down" message. Time to leave this comment to sit for an hour before pressing reply again...

Re: YC Research

#235

Post by go1979 »

pramodliv1 wrote: post #185
gdb wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

I was at SOSP until earlier today. During the Q&A of the Chaos graph processing system, there was discussion of a previous exchange between Frank McSherry and the authors of the work ... what was REALLY cool was that parts of the original exchange happened on Twitter and via blog posts and we were hearing about it at the conference some time later :)

Re: YC Research

#236

Post by interknot »

This sounds like a great idea, and I can't help but think of this as a very "Valley" take on Renaissance-style patronage.

Here's hoping this effort has similarly transformative results!

Re: YC Research

#237

Post by kd0amg »

koopuluri wrote: post #171

There's repeated mention of academia being broken due to issues such as politics, and mis-aligned interests between researchers and their departments. What have been the changes over time in Academia that led to this?

One of the big ones is that funding has not grown with the number of researchers, so researchers must spend a larger and larger portion of their work time on competing to get the work funded (or a longer portion of their professional life waiting for their chance at actual research-focused employment).

Re: YC Research

#238

Post by Amorymeltzer »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #228
Amorymeltzer wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>$10m isn't really very much in the scheme of research. NIH alone funds to order of $25bil a year in science research Sure, but the NIH is funding near to 50,000 competitive grants a year. Some googling online gives median/average grant size at $300k/$350k. Even $25bil over 50,000 projects is $500k a project a year. An academic institution will take 50% or more straight off the top, so you're looking closer to $150k…

I agree it's real money, enough to do some real stuff. But: > An academic institution will take 50% or more straight off the top, so you're looking closer to $150k to $250k a year. Well, that 'overhead' is paying for things like lab space, electricity, health insurance (at least for the faculty, good luck grad students), liability insurance, etc. Not to mention the actual salary of the PI and/or other researchers --…

Maybe, maybe not. I debated bringing it up, and honestly YCR is likely to have a large, up-front facilities cost (regulations, certifications, etc.). It would make sense to start easy - don't start off with infectious diseases of humans - and build from there. But still, I'd wager that YCR will run far more efficiently than your average university. Someone above brought up the UC system: management-level positions have grown over 200% the last few decades (http://universityprobe.org/2011/03/new-data-on-management-gr...). Even if we limit the scope to department administrators and staff, YCR won't need nearly the same sort of personnel infrastructure.

Re: YC Research

#239

Post by keithwhor »

vickychijwani wrote: post #226

Surely I'm missing something here. Won't giving YC equity to these researchers (who are working not-for-profit and releasing IP freely) incentivize research that benefits YC startups directly and hence increases the value of the equity held? Can someone explain why not? Honest question.

Doesn't Elon Musk encouraging other people to use Tesla's battery IP help drive the electric vehicle market to maturity faster, creating more opportunity for Tesla to succeed?

The market is still the market. Not sure we should look this gift horse in the mouth. George R. Price figured out altruism can be reduced a math equation decades ago, it doesn't mean we can't embrace the good that comes out of decisions like this. :)

Re: YC Research

#240

Post by tdylan »

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…

Research != Business idea
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