YC is being brave and smart ... again. Keep it up.
YC Research
331–340 of 389 posts
Re: YC Research
#332Reminds me in some way of this tweet from PG last year: > Paul Graham (@pg) — Markets are usually quite clever but one place they break is in encouraging treatments rather than vaccines. Subscription revenue. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/498875418527543297
As someone else already replied, that's an incentive problem. If you change the incentives to "pay $X a month while healthy, pay nothing when sick" then the profit would be in the cure.
Unfortunately, we switched from that a while ago (my understanding is that we used to do "pay while healthy" around the 1900s) and now the current way seems "normal".
Re: YC Research
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Alan Kay's group got $5M from NSF to "reinvent computing". The money lasted 6 years, in which they produced a reasonable prototype (called "Frank") of a complete personal computing system in only 20K lines of code.
http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/images/archive/7/7f/2007050523...
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf
Holy crap, that was some kind of read! Thanks for telling me about this as I had never heard of it. My proposal, similar to what Racket and REBOL/RED attempt, was to combine simple DSL's on top of a LISP and low-level 3GL (eg high-level assembler) with optimization, safety, etc built into translation process. Seems like Kay already did most of that with way more clever abstractions and techniques. Gives me hope my smaller proposal might go somewhere esp as I wanted to build components & servers not desktops.
Thanks again for the link!
Re: YC Research
#334Great job Sam! YC isn't any more only about starting new companies and making them profitable. But about improving lives for everyone on the planet. And to do that
>'YCR is a non-profit.'
Just brilliant!
Re: YC Research
#335This is such an insanely great idea. This (alongside with the YC Fellowship and the classic YC program) makes us really have no excuse for not doing something great, that matters for us and for the world. Wow, YC, well played.
Re: YC Research
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's also chairman of the board for two nuclear power companies. And YC itself has been branching into biotech and hardware and other science-y companies. Anything seems possible to me.
My money's on nuclear. Advanced nuclear designs regularly claim 25 year timeframes for design, qualification testing, licensing activities, supply chain development, and construction. Transatomic is proposing concepts that require long qualification and licensing developments, many of which could make meaningful progress in a small lab with a $10M initial budget. You have to produce your salt fuel and do materials te…
Whoops, I mean UPower, not Transatomic
Re: YC Research
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear would also make sense? AI might make more sense becaues nuclear seems like a hard place to do "heretical" research, but what do I know
Nuclear makes sense. The fluid-fueled nuclear company he's the chairman of (Transatomic) is considered at least slightly heretical by the nuclear industry, which is used to its solid fuel water-cooled reactors. They also use used nuclear fuel (i.e. transuranics in nuclear waste) as fuel, which could be called heretical because recycling nuclear waste was once outlawed in the US by Jimmy Carter (but it no longer is il…
I meant UPower, not Transatomic. Whoops!
Re: YC Research
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fie…
Graph theory is a good example of this - the asymptotically fastest minimum spanning tree algorithm was made possible by Hopcroft and Karp just drawing weird data structures on a chalkboard until union-find popped out, which gives you near-linear time MST.
Re: YC Research
#339I 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.
Good on you sama. This is one of those "for future generations" quests. It's nice to see people proactively shooting for the stars.
Re: YC Research
#340Earlier 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…
>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. I wouldn't call throwing out your trained experts and starting with fresh trainees in a five-to-seven year cycle all that efficient.
It is if you can get away with paying 'em twenty five grand a year for the duration. Kaching!