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YC Research

blog.ycombinator.com

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351–360 of 389 posts

Re: YC Research

#351

Post by kzhahou »

pw wrote: post #138
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it's because it breaks the illusion that Sam and everyone else at YC are normal people like most of us. Not to sound contemptuous, but are there really people out there who consider the folks running YC "normal people?"

I feel like you're using "normal people" as pejorative. I meant it as "is able to relate to the day-to-day experience of most people in this country."

Ya, or even "is able to relate to the day-to-day experience of most people who read Hacker News."

Sam's startup --like for many here-- was not a roaring success. Few of the entrepreneurs and engineers here on HN have an extra $10m in the bank after an experience like that.

Re: YC Research

#352

Post by kzhahou »

pw wrote: post #312
travv0 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would this change your feelings toward YC? I don't understand why, in yours eyes, someone's wealth would affect the validity of their contributions.

Because it reminds me YC is yet another institution by wealthy designed to perpetuate their own wealth.

There's an unfair implication there, as YC does want to improve the world (while making great wealth along the way).

It'd be more to the point to say that it's a reminder than YC is part of an institution where a small class of people (investors and founders) routinely take home millions, while rank and file employees (even with employee #1, 2, 3...) get to only watch as the CEO and investors play with their Maclarens and spend their millions on whatever they're passionate about.

Re: YC Research

#353

Post by p4bl0 »

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.

The problem is not that it is gameable or not. Even if it is, most researchers won't try to game it. The problem is that they will focus on optimizing these counters by necessity (they have no choices, it is that or goodbye), rather than doing what they want to do: great research.

I wouldn't call prioritizing quantity over quality gaming the ranking system, it is merely playing by its rules. I would call gaming it if there was some cheat (like you cite me and I cite you even if really we shouldn't), which may happen but I believe is rare.

Re: YC Research

#355

Post by fsloth »

rcthompson wrote: post #289
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…

I've been wondering if academia is really fundamentally broken, or whether it's just horribly distorted due to some combination of underfunding and overpopulation, resulting in way too much competition for scarce resources.

I would claim it's culture is just polluted by scientific management. Too much haste.

Re: YC Research

#357

Post by andyjohnson0 »

First, this is really great. I'm looking forward to seeing how it works in practice.

"We plan to do this for a long time. If some of these projects take 25 years, that’s perfectly fine with us. "

Building an institution that supports this kind of long-term commitment is going to be a challenge. While there are plenty of organisations that work over those timescales, very long-term projects seem to me to be unusual - and not just because results are increasingly expected in the short-term, but because 25 years is about half of a long career and few people (imo) have the commitment and self-belief to embark on such a project. I can think of some, like SETI [1] and Mass Observation [2], but they tend to be highly distributed. The danger might be that you end-up with something like the Institute for Advanced Study [3] with its debatable productivity record.

Nevertheless, this is a massively positive announcement from YC. We need more stuff like this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_in...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass-Observation

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study#C...

Re: YC Research

#358

Post by humility »

Congratulations on this great endeavour! I've frequently mulled setting up website like patreon to help support and accelerate crucial research, which is seeing less and less progress these days. I'm glad YCombinator took note of this problem too!

Re: YC Research

#359

Post by emanuelev »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #357

First, this is really great. I'm looking forward to seeing how it works in practice. "We plan to do this for a long time. If some of these projects take 25 years, that’s perfectly fine with us. " Building an institution that supports this kind of long-term commitment is going to be a challenge. While there are plenty of organisations that work over those timescales, very long-term projects seem to me to be unusual -…

J Strother Moore would disagree with you, the development of ACL [1] is going on from 40 years!

[1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/acl2/acl2-doc.html

Re: YC Research

#360

Post by andyjohnson0 »

emanuelev wrote: post #359
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #357

First, this is really great. I'm looking forward to seeing how it works in practice. "We plan to do this for a long time. If some of these projects take 25 years, that’s perfectly fine with us. " Building an institution that supports this kind of long-term commitment is going to be a challenge. While there are plenty of organisations that work over those timescales, very long-term projects seem to me to be unusual -…

J Strother Moore would disagree with you, the development of ACL [1] is going on from 40 years! [1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/acl2/acl2-doc.html

An interesting project - thanks for pointing it out.

I'm not saying that such long-term projects are impossible, just that they are rare due to institutional and human reasons. And because they are rare, we don't have much experience with how to design successful support institutions.

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