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Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

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Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#301

The Riemann Hypothesis! Hear me out, because I think it could serve as a great model for modern math research and collaboration. One thing that really bothered me during my PhD is that even at the Stanford math department it felt like academia is not set up to encourage work on big questions, nor is it optimal for any objective function I can think of. Is it any wonder that many of the recent breakthroughs (Perelman…

Of all the unsolved math hypothesesis, I want solutions to the navier-stokes equations.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#302
Education. Delete non useful (history, astronomy) Insert useful (logic, ethics, mnemonics(not great but better than history)) If the world has changed over 100 years, but the learning about it hasn't, you're doing it wrong.

Congressional Secret Ballot. Perverse incentives. Congress used to be able to vote privately, now when a corporation buys your vote as a congressmen, they can verify you deliver what they paid for. "Cardboard box reform"

Better candidate pool Geniuses don't go into politics, the pay sucks and you can't get much done. We can at least fix the pay. If bad voting, but good candidate pool then still win. If great voting but bad pool, only lose. What use is voting when you have choice of puppet A or puppet B both presented by the same megacorps?

Better voting by better voters. Voting licenses. If you are stupid enough that I don't want you editing the settings of my OS on my computer, why would I want you editing my democracy? Is not governance advanced enough and complicated enough to require a license to effect changes through voting, just as cutting hair is licensed? Yes, its dangerous, yes if the tests suck you get unfair amplified power to the test makers. However, if you want greatness, you must select for it. You will never having voting excellence if you don't try.

Better voting by better intel gathering. Why capture a single data point of "who do you want to win?" Choose instead "put these people in order you'd take them." Now you've captured 8x the data from the voter? Now you can combined the ordered lists to get an electorate that everyone kind of likes and few people hate, as opposed to the 51 percent voting to gouge out the eyes of the 49 for idle pleasure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method

Isolate government from currency. Peer to peer value transfer. A proper BTC/zerocoin might work here. Artificially low interest rates amply mis and mal-investment causing boom and bust cycles that harm the human psycological ratcheting effect. We prefer slow and always better to fast up and fast down pain.

Cooperation. More perverse incentives. Why must we all keep our greatest ideas secret, so that no one else runs with and executes to our detriment? If you could make a lower barrier to entry profitable collaboration, or set a standard by which idea givers were commonly rewarded, people may be less secretive. This isn't just a corporate problem, this is a science problem as well. Publish or perish? Well better keep those good research ideas to yourself. How many websites have you been on that desperately needed improvement, yet you kept your ideas a secret?

Science is broken If half the papers published produce results that can't be replicated, then lots of scientists are fucking up. At least remove the "HARKing" Hypothesizing after the results are known. Publish more of what hasn't worked and isn't interesting to save others from unknowingly going down the same dead ends. Sadly, if the science is so bad as to be unreplicable, then who cares if you publish or not as you were 50/50 wrong anyway… The math could be better, however the idea stands that bad science can and is being done to the detriment of the world. Thinking you know a thing and being wrong about it, is worse than thinking you do not know a thing and being accurate in your estimation.

Undercrowding Progress comes from humans. Through enough shit at the wall, more of it sticks. We need more humans, preferably the useful kind.

Spreading great ideas The mormans got a bible in every hotel room, what better book could be equally funded and distributed?

Luckily this can be quite a long list as the world is ripe for improvement.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#303
Water is the most essential resource to our existence (secondary to oxygen), yet >8M people die annually because of water related illnesses. Local filtration/treatment is good, but we need more cost effective and easier to deploy methods to treat water at a mass scale. We're trying to protect the worlds water, but there is a lot more research that needs to be done to solve this problem. Research can include cheap sensors to monitor bacteria in water, cost effective modular treatment facilities, better potable water routing methods and local treatment and disposal of wastewater.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#304
Queensland University of Technology (QUT) has a research project called CAUSEE where they have tracked thousands of Australian startups to find out how many got funded (a very tiny percentage of all startups), what they were planning to build, whether they succeeded or failed, how quickly they got going and so on.

Their justification was that too often we look at successful startups and then do whatever they did. Which isn't always bad advice, but there's the danger that it might be like looking at lottery winners to see what they "did" to make their win. How do we know that the stuff that those startups did actually made a difference?

For example, the CAUSEE study showed that (in Australia) retaining a lawyer is a good predictor that the startup will fail. Accessing any government service other than the R&D tax concession is a good predictor of failure. Writing a step-by-step business plan is a good predictor of failure.

But that's a bit Australian-specific. Is it the same in the USA? Is it the same in Europe? Is it the same in developing nations?

Should YC Research study scientifically what makes a startup successful in different economies? It would tie in nicely to YC's other work!

It would also help guide investment (and government policy) if we had hard data on what works and what doesn't.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#305

At 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…

Resources allocated to interplanetary redundancy enhance the survival of the people "over there" at the cost of you being more likely to die "here." I prefer to amplify the chance I and my loved ones survive, instead of splitting 4's at the blackjack table. Also, you shouldn't be sitting at the blackjack table.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Car-->fridge distance matters a hell of a lot to her. That's interesting, is there a particular reason for this or is this a nice illustration of 'first world problems'? To have both a car and a fridge, the money to stock the fridge and then to trip over the distance from the car to the fridge (which can easily be made light enough by using a luggage trolley or by asking the s.o. to assist) as a major stumbling blo…

I'd agree -- as someone living in Europe, the idea of grocery shopping by car itself is already pretty luxurious.

Worrying about the distance between car and fridge sounds silly when most of us are used to walking half to one kilometer (.7 miles) to the nearest supermarket and taking everything back by foot. Several times per week.

Not to mention that many apartment buildings don't have elevators...

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#307

Education. Delete non useful (history, astronomy) Insert useful (logic, ethics, mnemonics(not great but better than history)) If the world has changed over 100 years, but the learning about it hasn't, you're doing it wrong. Congressional Secret Ballot. Perverse incentives. Congress used to be able to vote privately, now when a corporation buys your vote as a congressmen, they can verify you deliver what they paid for…

> Delete non useful (history, astronomy)

Where to start? If you knew your history, you would realise that attempts to "reset" the education system generally go hand-in-hand with barbarism or huge social disbenefit. How on earth do you "delete" a whole area of human knowledge without burning books, killing people, or otherwise restricting our freedoms? Because free people will choose to study anything which takes their fancy, and there's no practical (humane) way to stop it, or any reason to.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#308
Although there will be people not agreeing with this, it is what I do know through my personal experiences and observations, and I will say it: today most of the whole world revolves around fear. Not the entire world but a big part of it. It is enough to look at the wars still going on, look at the children dying of starvation still on our Earth and you will know we as a whole are far from been with our hearts and minds in the right place. So what do I do? I first start with myself, and then when possible help others. I look at myself and I try to understand what I am. My fears and my loves. And I do my best to live in a such way that I do not harm anyone nor myself although sometimes might be hard. There are ways to do it, sometimes not simple ways, but there are ways. I do my best to understand and know that I am a grain of sand in the Universe yet I am a wonder of creation. Thank you for asking, if I would have your abilities I would invest in programs which help us as a whole to understad the simple truths of fears and loves which has conquered us and leads us from been what we are today: a global nation living on a planet where children are still dying of hunger and wars are killing people. I can not point to a particular program but that is the direction where we I know we supposed to go first. Not on Mars, not on Moon, not on Venus, or out of our galaxy. Good luck.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#309
Alternative education systems and their effectiveness - which can be applied to 3rd world countries as well.

Self organized autonomy - what if me and my friends buy an idland and declare it a new country, with technology oriented infrastructure, such as driverless cars, automation of government facilities, alternative currency to money? How can we sustain it?

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#310
Alternative education systems and their effectiveness - which can be applied to 3rd world countries as well.

Self organized autonomy - what if me and my friends buy an idland and declare it a new country, with technology oriented infrastructure, such as driverless cars, automation of government facilities, alternative currency to money? How can we sustain it?

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