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Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
171–180 of 545 posts
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#172Elder care. Demographics is destiny and with declining birth rates — especially in the developed world — the population will inevitably be graying. How can we provide them with effective and humane long-term care without crashing our economy or occupying a huge fraction of our labor force?
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#173http://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 Academic publishing is obsolete, and knowledge should not be paywalled.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…
> Humans need more lifespan, badly. Do we? Or do we need more realistic perspective about death? Why quantity over quality? Seems there's a lot of quality improvements that could be made [1]. For instance, I read recently (can't recall source) that San Fransisco's homeless is the least happy in the world. Also that the top 1% in the world make over $35K a year, but there are far happier people than exist in middle Am…
> 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....
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#174Cannabis Health.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#1750. Bounties. Bounties for specific small step goals. Even bounties to define these. I like to vote with time, which we often exchange as money.
1. Open source advocacy on why it matters (in the end, it's because human brains will rely on software more and more, and if we cant self-inspect 'it'... bad things). In the short term, OS distros that make the user experience slick. Custom distros that wrap all the best astro/bio/fea are excellent to show others what is possible and get people involved.
2. Things that give power to individuals. All individuals. Even ones we label to say they are not us. Dont rely on adding laws to accomplish it. Closed source self-driving 'connected' cars being an almost exact opposite.
3. Open source hardware. Really, not just hardware we can hack, but hardware we can replicate. (hard problem)
4. (to make #3 happen) Bounties (which others can chip-in to) for 100% open small scale lithography (a goal at a time; 8088@home) and biological computing (pie in the sky, but will happen, maybe faster than is generally assumed; 22k Rat neurons can pilot a F-22 sim).
5. Promote information sources that make the raw data available.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#176Research methods and how to produce quality research.
Also, basic science.
Basic income is an expensive subject, look for some cheaper, but still impactful stuff.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#177I think we should find a way to take the best content from Math Circles and get that to far more students in a digestible format. Drilling down even further, if the Question is "what is the _single_ most useful thing that can be done to increase future scientific literacy and accelerate technological progress ?" .. then I think the answer must be to teach multiplication by drawing rectangles. vis : https://quantblog.…
So, replicatable teaching methods.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#178Honestly, I think something that would be super interesting to YC and Silicon Valley and the world would be creating a technology prediction market. Using markets to gauge consensus about the future is super useful for any company or government making decisions under uncertainty.
You could have contracts about all sorts of technology predictions, such as "Will more than 1% of cars be self-driving by 2025?" or "Will MOSFETs have gate widths SciCast.org was a technology prediction market that I participated in for a few years, but it was an academic project and ran out of funding.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#179Remote work. We need research to give us answers about productivity tradeoffs and also specifics like what kinds of jobs are well-suited for remote work? how does it affect the life satisfaction of workers? Does it increase employee retention? What effects do cultural and language differences of employees have on productivity when working remotely? etc...
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#180Large Scale Medical Data Mining research, similar to OpenAI. Specifically Computational Healthcare a Search and Aggregation Engine for Medical Records & Claims. We believe that this is a classic Software eating the world situation and the time is perfect for it. Here is the link http://www.computationalhealthcare.com We have access to almost 130 Million de-identified medical records from approximately 36 Million pati…
Out of all the proposals I'm reading, this seems to be one of the most realistic, for one reason only: this is something where a little money and a lot of computer science knowledge can go a very long way.