[deleted]
YC Research
111–120 of 389 posts
Re: YC Research
#112We’ll especially welcome outsiders working on slightly heretical ideas
Are you going to require qualifications, or just sufficiently intriguing proposals?
Re: YC Research
#113YC Research, meet Megalith: http://progrium.com/blog/2015/10/05/the-next-10-years-megali...
Re: YC Research
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear would also make sense? AI might make more sense becaues nuclear seems like a hard place to do "heretical" research, but what do I know
Nuclear makes sense. The fluid-fueled nuclear company he's the chairman of (Transatomic) is considered at least slightly heretical by the nuclear industry, which is used to its solid fuel water-cooled reactors. They also use used nuclear fuel (i.e. transuranics in nuclear waste) as fuel, which could be called heretical because recycling nuclear waste was once outlawed in the US by Jimmy Carter (but it no longer is il…
Trouble is that the amounts of money we're talking about don't go far in nuclear research.
Re: YC Research
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are making a wrong correlation. Putting more money won't necessarily drive research forward. Most breakthrough researches and inventions were done with little money.
I am a professional scientist and I have to disagree. 10 million is just seed cash that I'm sure will be magnified. But do not underestimate the cost of research. While a particular project that pays off seems (and is) a great return, salaries, equipment and conference travel consume a lot of money.
It probably depends on the type of research that you do. Drug research is expensive. But I think that you can do something like Xerox PARC (it seems like YCR might be going for something similar) with relatively little money. It appears that in 2001 their budget was $65m (http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=86872). I'm not sure if their budget was larger during the 70's but that's not that much money considering what came out of there.
Re: YC Research
#116Will scientists at YC Research continue the common pattern of academic research/publications? Or are there some grander plans to disrupt traditional research?
Unless YC is promising to fund these researchers for life they'll pretty much have to, or else they'll never get back on the treadmill once the YC money runs out.
Re: YC Research
#117Re: YC Research
#118What is the patent policy?
Re: YC Research
#119[deleted]
The better yet native is to focus on quality of research outputs rather than just number. "Grant committees can't read, but they can count".
Trouble with that is it doesn't scale. It's easy to do when you're funding a handful of researchers like YC, but impossible when you're funding thousands like NSF or NIH.
Re: YC Research
#120@sama - are the members of these groups going to be selected by YC or will there be an application process similar to YC? This is awesome to see, maybe YCR could be the next Bell Labs or something (although Google probably has a hold on that now).
For now they are going to be hand-selected by me (the area we are starting with requires pretty specific domain expertise). Not sure what we'll do in the future.
"For now they are going to be hand-selected by me (the area we are starting with requires pretty specific domain expertise). Not sure what we'll do in the future."
Two words: baseband processor.
The world really, really needs a fully open baseband processor.