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YC Research

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Re: YC Research

#271

Post by j2kun »

gone35 wrote: post #210
sama wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

FWIW, two (partially self-serving) suggestions: 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[…

Can't stress this enough, but a lot of TCS research only becomes valuable once you put it into the wild, and that takes a lot of interdisciplinary work.

A lot of the stuff in TCS is theory for the sake of theory, and one would want to avoid too much of this.

Re: YC Research

#274

Post by Amorymeltzer »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #258
Amorymeltzer wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a point of comparison. The NIH pool is large but spread very thin and, we can both agree, less efficiently than YCR is likely to be. Twice? Infinite? No of course note, but it's a point of interest in the "$10 million isn't so much" discussion. And no, researcher's salaries (postdocs, tech, grad students, etc.) are not included. The indirect costs go to the university to pay for department/college-level utilit…

Well, salaries obviously WOULD have to be included in the YC case, there's no other pool of money for them to come from! So that would actually be a significant cost that the NIH grants _don't_ have to include (if it's not included in the overhead), but the YC Research seed money WOULD have to. But I understand that research faculty in science and biomed are increasingly expected to bring in grant funding as a condit…

Point of clarification: Researcher salaries aren't included in the indirect costs aka overhead, they come out of the lab's funding. So 50% indirect costs of a $300k project means $100k to overhead/indirect costs, and $200k to research; researcher salaries, grad student stipends, healthcare, etc. all come out of that $200k. Then what's left of that $200k funds the lab.

Re: YC Research

#275

Post by anonbiocoward »

Would you be willing to let someone just participate? I have multiple lines of research and my physics background allows me to reach further into biology and computation than most biology types. And for a variety of reasons I don't quite have the same funding problems most people have, but I would really like to work with the groups you are able to put together. I would be happy to fill out the same application.

Your log files should be able to unmask me but for additional reasons I'd rather not publicly associate my claims above with my identity.

Re: YC Research

#276

Post by lightcatcher »

gone35 wrote: post #210
sama wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

FWIW, two (partially self-serving) suggestions: 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[…

Serious question: In what ways is CS theory high-impact?

I'm particularly interested in any arguments that complexity theory is high-impact (beyond the very useful insight that there are some problems for which no polynomial time algorithm is known). I have a pretty good idea of the impact of cryptography and randomized linear algebra (sometimes considered CS theory), but am also interested in hearing about other fields considered CS theory with useful applications.

Re: YC Research

#277

Post by dnautics »

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.

Thanks! Was wondering if YC would eventually do something like this, given the path it seems to be taking wrt nonprofits... It was a huge pain setting up an independent nonprofit to do the research I wanted to do, then fundraising was hard again, and then I didn't raise enough money to pay myself... So good luck to everyone who applies to this.

Re: YC Research

#278

Post by grkvlt »

amelius wrote: post #255
hugh4 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 object…

> 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. In the meantime, Google seems to have developed a pretty good ranking system that is difficult to game.

Don't citation indexes work pretty much exactly like Google's PageRank, with cites taking the place of href links? A parent comment seems to suggest the same thing, so it looks like the ranking is gameable.

In practice I understand this happens via citation-swapping (similar to link swapping, or paid links in blogs) and poor-quality journals accepting articles for a fee, or without review (much like paid content, or content farms) and papers that cite other articles just for the increase in rankings (similar to link farms) so the analogy to SEO (in its various hats) seems to fit.

This would suggest that the only way to fix the 'broken' citation ranking system is the same as Google, and bolt on empirically determined heuristics above the pure mathematical model of PageRank, and black-list or penalise certain journals or types of citation?

Re: YC Research

#279

Post by Imscaredofsama »

sama wrote: post #268
Imscaredofsama wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole sama thing doesn't compute for me and has negatively impacted my otherwise stellar view of YC. 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:…

This is worth answering. I made single-digit millions from the Loopt acquisition. Almost all the money I've made has been as an investor. I got lucky in that the first few investments I made in 2009 (very small dollar amounts) were really good, so I was able to raise capital to keep investing at a much larger scale with other peoples' money. I didn't have much liquidity until last year. Takeaway 1: the easiest, lowes…

I respect the fact that you took a moment to add some clarity. Obviously you have a good sense for politics -- you know this is something people need to understand.

But hot damn! If you've been so successful people are literally having a hard time believing it's true... that's... that's... I don't even know.

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