Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

You could research the funding of startups. Or more broadly, how should capital be allocated?

Admittedly I have no idea how something like that could be quantified, and the study of economics has been trying to figure it out for decades. But if YC Research is looking to make maximally impactful investments, it seems like studying investing itself would make sense. There's a high risk of not producing anything useful, but also a huge upside if you get just a little better at figuring out who to fund. YC Research is in a position to bring together people from the worlds of business, machine learning and economics who might be able to make a dent in the problem.

Practically, it seems like navigating the financial investment process is the core skill of YCombinator, so you'd already be pretty far down the learning curve. And you don't have to convince people to adopt your ideas right away, you can try out whatever ideas your research produces simply by making investments. Better capital allocation of all forms could have a really big impact on society at large, if the right systems can be developed.

Thorium reactor research!

Explore game theoretically sound ways to start new companies as "worker co-ops" and to reward participants. The idea being to aim toward a future where there is a large gray area between "employee" and "entrepreneur."

The companies formed don't have to be start-ups per se: they could be as simple (and low risk) as a group of people who build web sites and apps for clients, but would like to have a stake in it rather than just "working for the man."

Since it is research, it is ok if things are explored that would require changes in laws.

I can imagine a site (or better yet, a standard protocol) -- sort of Kickstarter-ish, but different -- where people start projects, gather contributors, "pay" those contributors by giving them equity (or actually pay them, if the company is bringing in revenue).

There would be ways of holding votes (presumably voting power is weighted by how much you have contributed), and various checks and balances to prevent participants from gaming it. Everyone would probably be able to weigh in on the contributions of others, in a carefully designed way that encourages everyone to be productive, cooperative, and creative.

The idea is that there are a huge number of people out there with talent, creativity, and a willingness to take some risks, but most of them aren't really entrepreneurial types per se. This would be both a matchmaking site for getting people with complementary talents and personalities together, as well as a service for handling equity calculations as people contribute hours (and various other things that streamline the process so people with talent can spend their efforts using their actual talents).

Obviously there is some overlap with what Y-Combinator does, but this is a way of scaling it out much larger, in ways that could dramatically increase innovation as well as increasing job satisfaction.

Low cost, high density housing that's safe, clean, and comfortable. I think this goes hand in hand with the basic income research: what good is a basic income if any decent housing is more expensive than the income? (Alternatively: how do we fund basic income when the basic cost of living is so high?)

I think there's a lot of ways housing could be made cheaper via building materials and techniques, architecture, technology, policies, and processes. One of the issues with extremely cheap housing is keeping it safe and desirable for tenants, e.g., dealing with drug abusers and dealers (which frequently make our current low-cost housing dangerous).

Innovative but (superficially) crazy sounding ideas about campaign finance reform e.g. "Voting with dollars" http://amacad.org/publications/bulletin/summer2004/ackerman....