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YC Research

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: YC Research

#371

Post by myth_buster »

shas3 wrote: post #159
myth_buster wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to hear that! Some of his thoughts really resonated with me although they run counter to the current corporate research culture. I think Google managed to recreate something similar with their 20% projects

> "recreate" Other companies have had the 15% / 20% culture, etc. long before Google. Example, http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/1998/01/9858

I'm not saying Google came up with 15/20% culture, all I'm saying is that they got some benefit from it just like Xerox got.

Re: YC Research

#372

Post by lacerta »

How do we search and see if the area where I currently do research in is something that YC Research would focus on in the near future? I am finishing up a MS in ChBE with a focus on designing materials using computational methods (eg. DFT) and would like to continue with similar projects.

Re: YC Research

#373

Post by Fomite »

mdpopescu wrote: post #332
markbao wrote: post #132

Reminds 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".

Except that tweet isn't really accurate - vaccine research is pretty active, and modern, new vaccines have made their makers a fair bit of money.

Beyond that, vaccines are a "Pay $X per month while healthy" treatment - you have to treat everyone whether they're sick or not, and as long as humans keep breeding, you have a replenishing customer base unless we manage the (rare) feat of eradication.

The problem is that modern vaccine targets are hard. Multiple strains, dangerous responses from partial immunity (Dengue), very rapid viral evolution (HIV, flu), etc.

Re: YC Research

#374

Post by maxerickson »

Fomite wrote: post #373
mdpopescu wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Except that tweet isn't really accurate - vaccine research is pretty active, and modern, new vaccines have made their makers a fair bit of money. Beyond that, vaccines are a "Pay $X per month while healthy" treatment - you have to treat everyone whether they're sick or not, and as long as humans keep breeding, you have a replenishing customer base unless we manage the (rare) feat of eradication. The problem is that m…

What about stuff that isn't very transmissible person to person?

(like Lyme disease, which had a vaccine pulled, I'm under the impression that it was not pulled for great reasons)

Re: YC Research

#375

Post by Fomite »

sackofmugs wrote: post #306
hugh4 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless YC is promising to fund these researchers for life they'll pretty much have to, or else they'll never get back on the treadmill once the YC money runs out.

That's not true. University professors have sabbaticals, and can also go on extended leave for multiple years and return just fine.

Professors on sabbatical are expected to produce things that matter to academia.

Re: YC Research

#376

Post by Fomite »

sama wrote: post #25
S4M wrote: post #16

That's great! Two questions: - Will the researchers need to be based in the Bay Area - AFAIK: not the best place to raise a family? - In the short term, how many researchers do you plan to hire?

Yes, but we're coming in on the very high end of the comp scale. We're also considering doing things like YC guaranteeing 100% mortgages for the researchers--housing prices in the bay area are a joke. We're starting relatively small (on the order of 10) and grow from there at a reasonable rate.

While I'm somewhat skeptical of the idea (I'll admit I'm an academic researcher) this seems like a very good step - the Bay Area is becoming cost prohibitive.

Re: YC Research

#377

Post by toufka »

varjag wrote: post #350
toufka wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will this research remain bias-free when salaries are being paid for by YC? What happens when some of the research that is done paints some of the activities of YC or their companies in a less-than-positive light?

It's not really that different from work in another corporate research division (IBM, PARC, MSR, Bell Labs..). Even in academia you are still getting paid, and your work is influenced by funding frameworks, citation index and faculty interests. Peer review has long been the traditional validation mechanism in science. I don't see why it wouldn't be applicable here.

Because as much as it is true that funding influences how some projects get started in academia, professors do get tenure. And they can and do things which would be totally offensive to a corporate parent. There is a totally different kind of publication coming out of even the old research labs and an academic institution, much less a modern corporation. A typical research lab does not need to worry about a bottom line - which a company (like YC) is obligated to care about.

Re: YC Research

#378

Post by Fomite »

maxerickson wrote: post #374
Fomite wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that tweet isn't really accurate - vaccine research is pretty active, and modern, new vaccines have made their makers a fair bit of money. Beyond that, vaccines are a "Pay $X per month while healthy" treatment - you have to treat everyone whether they're sick or not, and as long as humans keep breeding, you have a replenishing customer base unless we manage the (rare) feat of eradication. The problem is that m…

What about stuff that isn't very transmissible person to person? (like Lyme disease, which had a vaccine pulled, I'm under the impression that it was not pulled for great reasons)

One of my examples, dengue, is vector born, like Lyme. That's no promise the vaccine will be easy to develop. In the case of Lyme, I'd assert there's very few drug development paradigms that are robust to anti-scientific hysterics (says the person at a conference that regularly gets chronic Lyme picketers).

Re: YC Research

#379

Post by aswanson »

"You can't fall in love with the one thing being the hub for all things to come." Agree, now tell that to the dev responsible for tracking everything I do on my PC outside of Internet Explorer to be tracked in its search history, forcing me to revert to an older version.

Re: YC Research

#380

Post by effie »

grkvlt wrote: post #278
amelius wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Indeed. Simple link counting based search algorithms got gamed a lot in the past, by regular website operators and most heavily by spammers. That's partially why the current search algorithms are much more clever and secret than just using the Page rank. Human raters and machine learning off the data they generate are used as well. This helps to make the rules more uncertain and nasty SEO tricks much harder to discover and use.

Compare this to the situation in rating of academic research, where the papers are rated by the community of authors itself and the ranking is essentially a weighted counting of references. Of course it leads to lots of self-serving spam.

If the idea of independent raters (and possibly machine learning on top of it) could be implemented for academic papers as well, that would be a big improvement, I think. Academia has got a lot to learn from search engines.

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