Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

Easy bioponics DIYs kits for everyone in the world.

An initial supply chain for seeds, then self-sustainable endless production.

Help with getting good food into everyone hands, and easy means to obtain it, basic nutrition knowledge.

The issue is that with copyright and patent law the way it is written software is heavily biased towards proprietary development for profit, by restricting what the user can do with the software they run. It is also an issue of users not caring that they are being given the equivalent of a car with a sealed engine compartment. The average consumer can understand why that is bad, even if they themselves would never open up the engine, because it would mean they could not let their local mechanic fix their car, they would have to submit to the manufacturer at whatever price they want to charge because there is no competition anymore.

They just don't correlate that to proprietary software at all, which is understandable because most people cannot internalize concepts related to information transfer, scarcity, transformation, or preservation. They exist in the real world and more easily relate to the physical and ignore the implications of ignorance in all that is not presented to them in that medium.

That still remains a political problem, one with your system of economics. I guess since YC is funding that UBI research it may also be relevant to research alternatives to US IP law that can optimize for productivity and social utility of the results, because we are obviously not close to a maxima right now.

Are you talking about Robocop?

(1) A detailed study of cost in the (building) construction industry.

(a) What are the components of cost? What is their relative size? Labor, land, materials, permitting, architecture/engineering, regulatory compliance,

(b) The housing value chain. Parties involved, who's adding the most value/earning the highest markups. How the cost of commodities (wood, steel) compares to the final, built value of a structure.

(c) Why it costs more to build in some places than others (materials availability? labor)?

(d) The true cost and benefits of various types of regulations, e.g. SF's Affordable Housing Bonus Density Program, various types of zoning ordinances, height limits. Quantifying the cost of regulatory uncertainty in extending project lifetimes. The extent to which a regulatory/uncertainty premium influences investment behavior.

(2) Effects of technology on mental health. I've been happier since giving up facebook and I wonder the extent to which this is a placebo, or something more widespread and generalizable.

(3) Computer security. A study of what actually causes breaches, data theft/loss, and other high-impact disasters/outages and how we can fix it, with detailed cost metrics. Things like "employee malfeasance", "unpatched software", "configuration error", etc. As a sysadmin, I'd like to know "what are the 5 top causes of breaches" and "what is the highest ROI investment I can make in software/procedure/etc. to keep my large-scale computer system safe/confidential" (I wanted to do this one in grad school but never got around to it)

(4) A true study of the early-stage ecosystem. Kind of meta, but I'm tired of people making vague hand-wavey generalizations like "99% of companies fail". How much return do venture funds actually earn? What are their biggest economic drivers? How do VC returns as a whole correlate with other benchmarks like the S&P 500?

If anyone wants to discuss these further my email is in my sig. I used to be a researcher and think of questions like these all the time when walking the streets of SF ;)

YC Brain.

While the current deep learning hype is strong, the models are still either primitive (e.g. gradient descent) and have little to do with how brain works, or they are too complex (e.g. spiking neural networks) and operate on a wrong level of abstraction to be of any use. Neuroscience made some great progress collecting tons of empirical evidence in the last decades, but there is a large disconnect between research communities. Fund a small team of generalists that analyze heaps of neurophysiological data and reverse engineer the brain.