Please disrupt the SF housing market. Or just pay my rent.
Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
131–140 of 545 posts
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#132Rapid, relevant education.
How can we give people education which maps to real life skills in 0.5x the time it currently takes? I spent a semester of college learning to write a memo...(in 2010).
- software assisted learning plans based on interest and need - cover personal finance, negotiation, and learning techniques.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#133Low 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, tech…
I think this is important for 'average' dwellers and not just low-income folks.
My wife won't live in an apartment ("high-density") area because groceries are hard to get inside. Car-->fridge distance matters a hell of a lot to her.
But we can solve that problem.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#134Education: Vocational retraining effectiveness for work for 45+ people. I am not one of them, but there seems to be more and more left behind with no strategy/known good answer. I personally can't figure out how to teach and elevate people to do good work so it tends to be they end up being a long term on social security/unemployment/draining savings. So the question would be: - What are the most effective ways to re…
What needs to be taught is that it is POSSIBLE to automate a problem. Many people (not sure why you're picking on over 45s here; it seems like this is true at all age groups) don't fundamentally understand that computers can be used to perform tedious or error prone tasks.
Ask a non techie how much they spent at Amazon last year, and you'll get some mumbling about mint or their bank offering a search option, ask a UNIX neckbeard and get an answer via awk and col, and ask an overworked, underpaid administrative assistant and you'll get an excel spreadsheet that crudely but effectively provides the answer.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#135Young researchers in the medical research sciences. It seems, at least from everything I read, that the NIH et al are heavily incented to keep the inertia and old researchers doing incremental, low-impact studies in charge. Cancer research needs a DARPA, maybe YC can spark it: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/opinion/young-brilliant-an...
Relatedly, it seems like we are getting close to having gene therapy working safely in humans. It would be fantastic to help speed that up.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#136Knowledge stewardship. The world's knowledge is growing exponentially, much faster than the tools to aggregate, catalogue, and filter that knowledge.
Khan Academy is a good start. And Google is, well, Google: you can find what you need, if you ask the right question. We need the 21st century library-teacher-guided learning system.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#137Nutrition. A lot of this might just be meta-research, but I feel like we still don't really understand what an optimal diet looks like, and if optimal diet might differ from person to person. We learn more every day about how big of a factor it is in disease processes, especially the two biggest ones in the US - heart disease and cancer. I think preventive care in general is a great area to dive into, and this seems…
Not only that, it's hard to think of an area with quite so much "common sense" and "bro science", but also an area that should be so easy to research. Take people away on a residential and you can control exactly what they eat, their exercise etc. One of the nice things is that it'd be hard for anyone to patent findings either (I imagine).
If I ever have enough money to dabble in my own research, it'll be there. How great would it be to be able to distribute nutritional advice to the world that was actually true, rather than whatever fad diets are being dreamt up or common-sense "wisdom" is being passed down.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#138Healthcare currently consumes 18% of our GDP and is projected to consume 34% by 2040. This will be absolutely devastating for us. The ability to accomplish anything meaningful as a society will diminish as more and more of our wealth is directed towards what is the most wasteful healthcare system in the modern world. What is causing this and what can be done?
My wife is a therapist and one day we were talking. A patient was discharged from their hospital and I asked who was in charge of follow up. "No one."
Turns out, there is very very little money in "healthcare" while there is a great deal of money in "sickcare".
If we are going to reduce the amount of money in sickcare, we're going to have to start caring for people before they are 60 years old, 325 pounds, have diabetes and hypertension and a McDonalds craving.
Because by then we have already lost.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#139At the risk of being too ambitious, I would absolutely love to see YCR fund research on terraforming Mars. Based on the recent climate change data here Earth[1], this is important for 2 reasons: 1) We might be in a position of needing a new home sooner than expected 2) Humans seem to be better at affecting global environments than we originally thought It can only help us to have a better understanding of what a real…
Let me go one step further: why not research terraforming Earth, to figure out how to undo the damage we're doing to the climate?
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#140Academic research/funding is broken - it'd be cool if there was a way to create something to fix the incentives.
I think that's kind of the goal of YC research in a narrow sense, but it'd be interesting if there was a way to align the incentives so scientists collaborated more instead of hiding research so they don't get 'scooped'. At this same time this could get rid of the academic journals that charge huge amounts of money for access to publicly funded research by selling prestige to desperate researchers (so they can get more funding).
If research was somehow more like open source development where people got credit for their contributions and hypothesis, experiments and papers were worked on in the open (all open access) maybe science and research would be better.
I think scientists want this and universities would want this - there needs to be a better way to get credibility than publishing papers in famous journals.