Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 545 posts

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

#501

Post by return0 »

mietek wrote: post #129

http://sens.org/ . Humans need more lifespan, badly. I’d have said AI safety, but it’s already on your list. Excellent. I’d also have said basic income. Good to know you’re on it. Meta-research. Academic publishing is obsolete, and knowledge should not be paywalled. How many researchers already make use of https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar or http://sci-hub.io/ ? Bacteriophages. Antibiotics are running out, while phag…

If i could pick just one, it would be academic publishing. It's an ancient system that locks in tons of useful empirical data and rots the roots of science with its publish-or-perish/impact factor lunacy. It's also a sector (digital publishing) which YC knows well and can easily make a great contribution. This can be a game changer, as it can alter the way public funding is allocated.

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

#502

Post by zardo »

mc808 wrote: post #248
derrida wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it should most certainly not be treated as inevitable. What life never dies? What non-living thing does not change?

There is a pine tree that is almost 5,000 years old, and a number of plants "reproduce" by spreading out their root system where what we see as a multitude of plants is essentially one long-lived organism under the surface. For humans (or at least for me), I think the main concern is really more of continuity of experience than maintaining a particular body configuration indefinitely. I.e. I would like to run into an…

It wouldn't be very satisfying to undergo a procedure that resets my body but wipes out my memories in the process.

We whipe out memories every day. Your memory of your childhood is a half imagined highlight reel of moments. If you lived 10,000 years, you might only have a couple moments left from this century.

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

#503

Post by superfx »

A concerted, long-term (~10 year) effort to develop the models, theory, and tools necessary to simulate a prokaryotic cell. This is not the kind of thing that’s being funded by the NIH, given their translational shift, and it’s not the kind of thing that can be done by industry because of the time horizon. Nonetheless it’s foundational to building a quantitatively predictive biology. It’s the sort of thing that can enable entirely new applied sciences and industries. And I think it’s possible.

There’s a certain way to doing this which I believe is key to success. It can’t be about doing molecular dynamics from atoms on up, because of computational considerations, and because that’s useless anyway (one wouldn’t learn anything beyond the known physics and maybe better force fields and sampling techniques). It also can’t be like the kludgy attempts that have been made so far (e.g. Markus Covert’s paper in Cell from a few years back—it’s perfectly alright work, but won’t get us closer to solving this particular problem.) Instead, I think the key is to develop a new layer of abstraction for describing biological phenomena, much like say organic chemistry is a genuinely new abstraction built on top of physical chemistry (which is itself built on top of QM), that hides away the irrelevant details (e.g. most of QM) while capturing what’s salient about the biological phenomena of interest. It would require advances in the aforementioned areas of models, theory, and tools, that are made in concert with the aim of simulating a cell.

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

#504

Post by zardo »

derrida wrote: post #254
JoshTriplett wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've used an unconventional definition of "death" here, distinct from the one thus far used in this discussion. Lack of change seems closer to death than change does. But in any case, whatever definition of death you've used doesn't seem to relate in any way to the ones that people in this discussion have advocated eliminating.

> I think you've used an unconventional definition of "death" here, I mean the thing that everybody else means: ie "pushing up daisies", "feeding earthworms", "to dust", etc If I understand this differently, then it's this perspective I am offering :)

In that context, saying that change causes death sounds like complete nonsense. I change all the time, yet I am not dead.

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

#505

Post by Joof »

increment_i wrote: post #397
bambax wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wanting to live forever has to be the apex of egoism and arrogance and all that is wrong with the human mind. Death is good because it leaves room for new people with new ideas. Being against death reveals a profound misunderstanding about what life is about, which is: finiteness, urgency, novelty, creativity.

I suspect you're going to get hammered here but this is an incredibly important point. Aging and death forces the passing of the torch from the old generation to the new, and I think this is a crucial part of progress. A tragedy on par with death would be the rise of some oligarchical class of immortal technocrats, wielding power and influence for centuries on end.

I don't think it would ever happen, but the only real counter I can think of to that is modifying our brains to have intermittent periods where they are more plastic than normal. Honestly, our current system works really really well... I still don't want to die though.

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

#506

Post by greggman »

empressplay wrote: post #191
mietek wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why quantity over quality? That’s a false dichotomy. Please disregard my one-liner, and watch one of de Grey’s talks instead — or read his “When Quality and Quantity Do Not Compete”: http://online.liebertpub.com.sci-hub.io/doi/abs/10.1089/rej....

You can live for a thousand years and you will still procrastinate and you will still not want to die. An extended lifespan won't help those issues. You need to get over them whether you live 50 years or 500.

In my own life there are several things I'd like to do that will take somewhere between 5-10 years each. I only have 2-3 of those spans left and 100 of those things I want to do.

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

#507

Post by vinayak147 »

Ask individuals/teams to propose research projects that they want to work on.

1) What are you curious about? 2) How will you go about finding the answers you seek? 3) Why do you think this is important?

Like YC core - focus more on the people, less on the ideas. Allow the ideas to change with the research journey.

Self motivated curiosity leads to the best research.

'Funding agencies deciding what problems are important' is the broken piece of other research labs.

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

#508

Post by visualsearchsv »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #471
visualsearchsv wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do something similar. We precompute/aggregate exhaustively by following certain aggregation strategies. The aggregated statistics are further processed to ensure privacy. Differential Privacy cannot be directly applied since the underlying assumptions are too strong. An important consideration is that the error/noise added is independent of the answer. Which means that the system becomes unusable for almost all qu…

So I'm not really an expert on privacy (my main interest in differential privacy is avoiding overfitting), but isn't differential privacy by definition necessary on an individual level? I.e., if you don't have differential privacy, then by definition there is a de-anonymizing query and you can get PII out. Privacy of hospitals/providers is a separate issue, and yeah, it's pretty clear that differential privacy doesn'…

The second article is undoubtedly flawed in several aspects, that's why I put clifton et. al. first, which I think lays out the case for studying non-formal models.

Regarding

"""This also, however, ignores the fact that most statistical inference drawn from such queries will be nonsense even without differential privacy."""

This is not true. Just because the number returned by a count query on a very large dataset (~100 Million visits) is very small (~100) does not automatically means that the result is nonsense or can be disregarded as error. Doing that requires understanding the query and a hypothesis with good prior on expected outcome. E.g. intersection of two rare diseases. Where you would otherwise expect it to be very small, but there might be an underlying genetic reason / physiological process which might lead to higher prevalence. Or a group of hospitals using tainted batch of medicines leading to unexplained increased mortality.

Consider this paper where there were only 1000 cases (only 248 strokes) per 1.6 Million patients (even larger if you consider the entire 20 Million patients present in the data). However in spite of the small number the authors showed that the increase was statistically significant by comparing with same period a year later.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1311485

Again I am not denying what you wrote in the blogpost. But in medicine and the analyses for which such databases are used, the investigators have access to very good priors.

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

#509

Post by [deleted] »

nugget wrote: post #23

Mental health - specifically in a future where we may be increasingly more connected virtually but increasingly less connected physically. In one or two decades when the average urbanite is serviced by on-demand autonomous vehicles and drones, works from home (or not at all), consumes news/media in a personalized subreddit-like echo chamber interspersed with cleverly integrated native advertising, and spends 10+ hour…

[deleted]

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

#510

Post by erikpukinskis »

beefman wrote: post #468
losvedir wrote: post #128

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, tech…

Housing is expensive because it's a positional good, not because it's expensive to produce.

It's only positional because density is limited. If the market were allowed to build up wherever they wanted each "position" would basically be an infinite resource...
Post reply on HN