I want some evidence that you're actually a PhD student at MIT before I start believing that the education system there is broken.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10348779 and marked it off-topic.
YC Research
381–389 of 389 posts
Re: YC Research
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
MSR publish a lot but try to get patents on potentially valuable research first.
Like literally any research organization or university anywhere today.
FWIW, as a researcher at a university, it is only my decision whether I apply for a patent or not. In contrast, patenting inventions is an inherent part of the research workflow at research labs such as MSR, Yahoo Research, etc.
Re: YC Research
#383Earlier 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).
Academics isn't really that bad. It's full of many of the smartest people in the world trying to do things which are fundamental but aren't seen by the market as important and can't be funded any other way besides charity. Sometimes it doesn't go that smoothly and there's some bureaucracy like in any organization (people are constantly fighting very hard to cut what little funding there is so academics have to fight…
I think there is a big disconnect between industry and academy. When I was a grad student (got a masters in CS) there was a huge lack of problems to solve at school. I went to Sun and after about a year I had 9 fantastic PhD problems.
Be nice if we could fix that. School is great, industry is great, somehow connect them.
Re: YC Research
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you haven't noticed the acceleration of YC from the moment Sam took over, I feel like you've not really been paying attention. From scaling up the numbers, to outreach to females and minorities, to the increased transparency, and the YC Fellowship and now this, you really believe you're just watching someone collect golden eggs? Do you realize how hard it is to grow a community? And how easy it is to screw it up?…
The golden goose thing was obviously an exaggeration. I think he's done a good job. And I'm sure the pressure is intense. I definitely couldn't do it. But the older I've gotten, the more I've realized that life is about opportunities . If you want them, you have to put yourself in the position to get them (as sama did). More importantly, you have to make the best of them (as sama has). But many, many people who don't…
Marc Andreesen wrote much the same in his career planning guide, 8 years ago:
http://pmarchive.com/guide_to_career_planning_part1.html
Anyway, if you would like any more than baseline success (where baseline success = working really hard to get into a profession with barriers to entry, like lawyer or doctor), you will have to deal with risk and uncertainty. You can't account for life without accounting for luck.
But life is long, and over the long-term, luck has a way of averaging out. And then the big question is how well did you capitalize on the luck you were given? A lot of people put themselves in positions where they have no chance of getting lucky, because they don't like the vulnerability and uncertainty that comes with realizing just how much of their life comes down to luck. That pretty much guarantees that they'll only be exposed to the unlucky events.
Re: YC Research
#385I 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.
My only question is where do I sign up? (as a young researcher who wants to work on important problems)
Same question here. But I guess sign up page will arrive on due time. What a fantastic initiative anyway!
Re: YC Research
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
If you watch any presentation from Alan Kay from the past few years, it looks like he's using PowerPoint or something similar. But, occasionally he does something PP can't do, like run a physic simulation or have all the letters in the text do a swarm animation. He's using Frank.
Re: YC Research
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
If you watch any presentation from Alan Kay from the past few years, it looks like he's using PowerPoint or something similar. But, occasionally he does something PP can't do, like run a physic simulation or have all the letters in the text do a swarm animation. He's using Frank.
Thanks for the tip. I'll try to watch for that. Confirms it's already practical for at least graphic presentations. Meanwhile, I wonder what the odds are of getting a hold of Frank to play with it or build on it. Might have to try to contact him.
Note: I thought about doing something similar in first secure desktop I construct where I do my presentation on it, let people counter the methods probably won't work, and then tell them after that. Always priceless faces when that happens. Also helps tell the contrarian bullshitters apart from those who think hard on your claims. Saves time in future. ;)
Re: YC Research
#388Hi. Seventeen-year old high schooler here, I love this idea. (@sama, anyone else behind YCR): All my life I had wanted to go into industry, follow that classic Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel dream that many CS High Schoolers go into. But recently, I got into research. The CollegeBoard opened up a class called AP Research I am now in, and I spent my last summer researching Machine Learning at my local private univ…
If you're into any field of applied AI such as Machine Learning, you'll have no trouble transitioning from industry to research and vice versa. It is a very flexible skill set and there is a lot of demand for it.
Just go the best university you can and take as many ML and AI courses possible, there really isn't much you can do wrong.
Good luck.
Re: YC Research
#389> We think research institutions can be better than they are today. I hope you'll expand on this. Is there something that YCR can do that academic research can't do? You might have more impact if you use that money to influence US and EU gov't to invest more in basic research. A 1% increase in annual gov't funding will be vastly larger than YCR's total budget. The Gates Foundation is tackling difficult health issues…
One comparative advantage that comes to mind is the institutional knowledge of computational and analytics systems. A lot of computational science is still done with a FORTRAN mindset (if not actual code), whereas faster, lighter, dare I say more agile approaches to simulation and data mining could be much better. Similarly, although I wouldn't guess is what YCR is thinking because it doesn't have the same cachet (th…
> In my field (geoscience) there are boundless slopes of fresh, trackless powder in the mountains of computational geoscience just waiting to get skied.
I need to steal that quote from you...