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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?

#451

Post by harigov »

petke wrote: post #415
harigov wrote: post #64

Policy enforcement and law automation - It's ridiculous that we spend so much money and time dealing with legal issues - both in terms of creating new laws, and in terms of enforcing those laws. Because of the delineation between those who create laws and those who enforce them, we came up with a way of encoding law so as to avoid misinterpretation errors. What if we were to automate the enforcement by programming la…

Are you talking about Robocop?

No, more like replacing judiciary/lawyers with programmers and software. Imagine that law is encoded as a program that validates the conditions and gives out a judgement. Lawyers from both sides get together to program what happened in an event and the computer processes that and gives out a judgement.

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

#452

Post by Jemaclus »

Hearing aids.

Hearing aids that sync seamlessly with Bluetooth. It can really transform the way hard-of-hearing people converse on phones.

Hearing aids whose battery life is supplemented by body heat (Battery life is currently ~1 week, and they represent the primary reason hearing aids are so big, even as small as they are).

Smarter or more customizable software to adjust hearing aid ranges and frequencies. Right now I have to go into an audiologist, but it'd be nice if I could see my own hearing data and make minor tweaks without having to pay time and $$ to see an audiologist.

Initiatives to teach mobile app makers about how to help their apps appeal to people with hearing aids. (Hint: subtitle everything)

In short, think of Google Glass but for hearing instead of sight -- and think of it was a product you can sell to the normal hearing public as well. Augment regular hearing, as well as assist with hearing loss. Imagine being able to go to a restaurant and silencing everything but the people at your table. How nice would that be?

/rant :)

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

#454

Post by zdrummond »

Government - How do we change politics, so it is more engaging, transparent, and driven by the strategic (rather then emotional or tactical) needs of the country.

How can technology reach people disenfranchised. How can we slice through the FUD spun by the masters of bad/corrupt information.

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

#455

Post by sospep »

evolve2k wrote: post #386
solresol wrote: post #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. Whi…

Have a direct link to the research you could share with us?

https://www.qut.edu.au/research/research-projects/the-compre...

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

#456

Post by pjscott »

biofox wrote: post #318
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…

I couldn't agree more about funding SENS related research. I think focusing on extended lifespan misses the point though (although it's a nice side benefit). The diseases of old age cause more suffering than everything else combined. Seeing people I love deteriorate to a state of constant suffering is unbearable to watch. Seeing signs of ageing in myself hammers home just how helpless I am to do anything. I don't und…

I don't think this point gets mentioned enough: since physical degeneration due to aging is such a big risk factor for so many diseases, anything we can do to reverse that degeneration could end up being hugely effective at preventing some of the diseases of old age. And there's a surprising lack of investment in this, probably because discussions tend to get bogged down in lengthy, heated philosophical digressions about how long people should want to live.

If you're looking for medical miracles, this is a very plausible place to find them.

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

#458

Post by bpicolo »

Abraln wrote: post #437
increment_i wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can see the job description now: "75+ years of relevant experience required." At the same time, allowing the Einsteins of society to continue their work indefinitely would provide a net increase in the rate of scientific advancement. Unfortunately climbing the corporate ladder would be nearly impossible as positions would almost never go vacant. It has both pros and cons, but allowing a larger fraction of the popul…

> would provide a net increase in the rate of scientific advancement

And then we existentially argue "Does any of it matter?" :)

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

#459

Post by jcr »

jcr wrote: post #96

sama, my apologies if quoting you is too over the top, but the following comment of yours from last year is just wonderful, and it's a great answer to your question: "I think figuring out how technology can encourage empathy is one of the more interesting and important open research problems in the world right now." -- Sam Altman, July 10 2015 [1] There is one group at Stanford that's been working on the empathy-tech…

I sent the following info to someone who emailed me about the comment above:

The main site for the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab is here:

http://vhil.stanford.edu/

Most their papers can be downloaded from the "Publications" page.

If you need more lightweight/mainstream news coverage, CBS, NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, and similar have all done articles on the VHIL work/people. Most of these are available through the VHIL "News" page.

I submitted a few of their papers to HN, but they all received little or no discussion.

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10020374

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9982928

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

#460

Post by zepto »

ams6110 wrote: post #447
dineshp2 wrote: post #152

Education. Everyone knows it's broken,not effective anymore and literally a waste of time and money. More so if you had the oppurtunity to experience what education means in third world countries.Spoiler alert : it's a joke that will make you cry. It needs to be fixed as quickly as possible and research needs to be done for alternatives to help people in the process of learning.Online education is a good start, but w…

Education was pretty well figured out 100 years ago. It's broken now because of all the effort to try to improve it.

What model from 100 years ago are you talking about?
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