YC Research - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-research <comment><USER3> I love this idea.

Not sure if this is driving your thinking but this would open a desperately needed alternative to Academia if you can scale this idea as successfully as you've scaled startups.

I've watched my genius brother-in-law (PhD Materials Science & Chemistry / Biomimicry) be consumed by a very broken UC system over the past decade.

Started with an exceptionally bright, curious, and inventive man who created breakthrough science in self-healing materials for the "benefit of the world"

10 years of grant fights, personnel struggles, under-served licensing resources, conflicting lab-vs-student priorities, etc has put him out the other end hopeless and disenfranchised.

The world will probably lose one of their best "public" researchers to the bowels of commercial science as a result.

Go for it Sam, good luck and excited to see what your first projects are.

<comment><USER4> Seconded. This is brilliant. As a physics PhD student at MIT who's leaving to build a startup, I'm finding it a relief to leave a broken system.

The academic community is fraught with politics, mismanagement, and inefficiency. Researchers are driven by a need to get published and get grant funding, not to expand the frontiers of human knowledge.

Impact is currently measured by citation pagerank, and broader impact is undervalued. Outreach efforts (blogging, education) are consistently stigmatized [1]. This needs to change.

I would love to see more transparency and accountability in research. I've seen Nature papers continue to be cited despite completely wrong conclusions (the 'erratum' was published as a separate paper in PRL). The arXiv was a great first step at opening up access to papers, but the large publishers continue to hold cartel-levels of control over scientific knowledge.

I'm super excited about YC research. Would love to see a quantum computation division!

[1] [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/03/30/...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/03/30/how- to-get-tenure-at-a-major-research-university/)

<comment><USER5> Wow, I knew things were bad, but the education system must be well and truly broken when the students at one of the world's top research universities are leaving to build startups, and calling it a broken system on their way out. (No sarcasm intended; I couldn't find a way to say this better).

<comment><USER6> In fairness, all systems are broken, academia isn't much more broken than anything else involving large numbers of mortals.

The basic problem is that we need to rank one researcher's merit against everyone else's, and there's no perfect way to do this because nobody can familiarise themselves with every individual's research. Rely on peers' opinions to measure merit and you just reward back-scratching. Rely on objective measures like citation counts and h-index and you incentivise people to focus on these instead of research quality.

The thing is that macro-scale works pretty well. As an overall system, academic science produces new knowledge at an astounding rate, and in terms of dollars in to research produced I'd say it works pretty efficiently. The measures we use are correlated with research quality even if they don't measure it perfectly.

It's only at the detailed scale where it looks badly flawed.

edit: and of course whenever I spend a long time writing a thoughtful comment I get the "you're submitting too fast, please slow down" message. Time to leave this comment to sit for an hour before pressing reply again...

<comment><USER7> > Rely on peers' opinions to measure merit and you just reward back- > scratching. Rely on objective measures like citation counts and h-index and > you incentivise people to focus on these instead of research quality.

In the meantime, Google seems to have developed a pretty good ranking system that is difficult to game.

<comment><USER8> Don't citation indexes work pretty much _exactly_ like Google's PageRank, with cites taking the place of href links? A parent comment seems to suggest the same thing, so it looks like the ranking _is_ gameable.

In practice I understand this happens via citation-swapping (similar to link swapping, or paid links in blogs) and poor-quality journals accepting articles for a fee, or without review (much like paid content, or content farms) and papers that cite other articles just for the increase in rankings (similar to link farms) so the analogy to SEO (in its various hats) seems to fit.

This would suggest that the only way to fix the 'broken' citation ranking system is the same as Google, and bolt on empirically determined heuristics above the pure mathematical model of PageRank, and black-list or penalise certain journals or types of citation?

<comment><USER7> > and bolt on empirically determined heuristics above the pure mathematical > model of PageRank

The impact of Google doing this is, in financial terms, probably much larger than if the same type of approach would be applied in the academic situation. So if Google is allowed to do this, why can't we allow the same approach for research? Apparently, the system works quite well.

<comment><USER9> Honestly, funding a research team to develop a science ranking engine that was both being continually developed to thwart gaming and effectively independent of university and science-funding politics would be a truly excellent use of YCombinator's money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was hoping to answer questions here for awhile but I'm getting pulled into a crisis so I have to go.

I'm going to do an AMA on HN later this week (mostly to answer questions about applying to YC) and would be happy to answer more questions about YCR then.

<comment><USER10> My only question is where do I sign up? (as a young researcher who wants to work on important problems)

<comment><USER11> Same question here. But I guess sign up page will arrive on due time. What a fantastic initiative anyway!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It takes a special person to donate $10 million to a new project. You don't get enough credit Sam Altman. Good job and a very good idea.

EDIT: Why am getting down votes for this comment? You must know that in this world not everyone is willing to part with their money and are not that giving. So relax before you down vote me promptly:)

<comment><USER13> I downvoted by mistake! I wanted to upvote.

<comment><USER12> It will cost you a buck buddy:). I was about to weep after losing my hard earned karma point. (Just kidding).

<comment><USER14> Stop it. Don't discuss the scoring system or your downvotes or "not sure why downvoted, but ...".

Don't interrupt the real discussion to meta-discuss the scoring system.

<comment><USER12> We are not discussing the scoring system if you pay close attention. I made an initial comment and if it is misunderstood hence the edit of the original comment. Clarifying my comment does not take from the original discussion. Does it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me in some way of this tweet from PG last year:

 _> Paul Graham (@pg) — Markets are usually quite clever but one place they break is in encouraging treatments rather than vaccines. Subscription revenue._

[https://twitter.com/paulg/status/498875418527543297](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/498875418527543297)

<comment><USER16> As someone else already replied, that's an incentive problem. If you change the incentives to "pay $X a month while healthy, pay nothing when sick" then the profit would be in the cure.

Unfortunately, we switched from that a while ago (my understanding is that we used to do "pay while healthy" around the 1900s) and now the current way seems "normal".

<comment><USER17> Except that tweet isn't really accurate - vaccine research is pretty active, and modern, new vaccines have made their makers a fair bit of money.

Beyond that, vaccines _are_ a "Pay $X per month while healthy" treatment - <USER2> have to treat _everyone_ whether they're sick or not, and as long as humans keep breeding, you have a replenishing customer base unless we manage the (rare) feat of eradication.

The problem is that modern vaccine targets are _hard_. Multiple strains, dangerous responses from partial immunity (Dengue), very rapid viral evolution (HIV, flu), etc.

<comment><USER18> What about stuff that isn't very transmissible person to person?

(like Lyme disease, which had a vaccine pulled, I'm under the impression that it was not pulled for great reasons)

<comment><USER17> One of my examples, dengue, is vector born, like Lyme. That's no promise the vaccine will be easy to develop. In the case of Lyme, I'd assert there's very few drug development paradigms that are robust to anti-scientific hysterics (says the person at a conference that regularly gets chronic Lyme picketers).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This thread [0] from couple of days back on Alan Kay's views on recreating Xerox PARC seems relevant.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10322929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10322929)

<comment><AUTHOR> We talked to Alan at great lengths in the process of putting this together. He is the most insightful person I've ever met on how to structure an organization for great research.

<comment><USER19> Glad to hear that! Some of his thoughts really resonated with me although they run counter to the current corporate research culture.

I think Google managed to recreate something similar with their 20% projects

<comment><USER20> > "recreate"

Other companies have had the 15% / 20% culture, etc. long before Google. Example, [http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/1998/01/9858](http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/1998/01/9858)

<comment><USER19> I'm not saying Google came up with 15/20% culture, all I'm saying is that they got some benefit from it just like Xerox got.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> TIL that Sam Altman has considerably more personal wealth than I would have guessed, if I'd ever been inclined to guess.

Anyway, this is very cool. Exactly the sort of thing that needs to happen to push the world forward in deeper ways. I'll be very curious to see what sort of teams they put together and just how fundamental and long term and heretical they go with their research.

<comment><USER22> If every poster here had their net worth attached to their username, you'd probably cry.

We all realize founders maintain "a lot more" equity than employees, but it's almost like our brains aren't wired to recognize, remember, or rationalize how some people get really really rewarded more than others. With Sam being grand poobah of YC, he's on a life track to being a liquid-capable multibillionaire within 5-10 years after the current unicornpalooza goes through a few rounds of lofty exits.

My propositions for SF to require all equity-exited techies to tattoo their net worth on their foreheads keeps getting shot down by anonymous "concerned citizens."

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > We'll especially welcome outsiders working on slightly heretical ideas (just > like we do for the startups we fund) and we'll try to keep things small—we > believe small groups can do far more than most people think.

What's the process for an outsider to get involved? This sounds like a really cool and much needed movement. Will more information be coming soon on how to apply/join/contribute?

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll have more info on this in a month or so!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I like the idea of YC funding research. Bias free and politics free research can go a long way. A couple of questions though for @sama:

1\. Where will the research be based? Is YC providing space to setup lab?

2\. One of the problems I see with this is lack of fellow researches present on site making casual collaboration harder (compared to a research university campus). Have you thought of that?

3\. Are you planning on funding researches with track records or people with high risk/high reward ideas that are relatively new?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. SF for now.

2\. Yes, eventually we'd like to have multiple groups in the same space just for this reason--I always think the interdisciplinary stuff is underrated.

3\. Some of both, probably, but mostly we want to support people that the existing system does not support (e.g. people that are not yet famous)

<comment><USER25> FWIW, two (partially self-serving) suggestions:

1\. Try set up a lab in Cambridge at some point down the road.

2\. Pay particular attention to CS theory: it's (arguably) high-impact and very cost effective --you can practically fund an entire generation of researchers in a subfield for a fraction of the cost of, say, a major interdisciplinary initiative. See for instance what the Simons foundation is doing at Berkeley[1].

Best of luck with what you're doing. You can end up _actually_ changing the world in this way.

[1] [https://simons.berkeley.edu](https://simons.berkeley.edu)

<comment><USER26> Serious question: In what ways is CS theory high-impact?

I'm particularly interested in any arguments that complexity theory is high- impact (beyond the very useful insight that there are some problems for which no polynomial time algorithm is known). I have a pretty good idea of the impact of cryptography and randomized linear algebra (sometimes considered CS theory), but am also interested in hearing about other fields considered CS theory with useful applications.

<comment><USER27> Graph theory is a good example of this - the asymptotically fastest minimum spanning tree algorithm was made possible by Hopcroft and Karp just drawing weird data structures on a chalkboard until union-find popped out, which gives you near-linear time MST.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is fantastic. Addresses the completely broken aspects of doing research in academia, gives researchers access to top developers through the YC network, gives you a much better environment stress and pay-wise than if you're a researcher, and focuses on meaningful innovation. And the research will be free to use. Nailed it in so many aspects.

@sama - since you mention that startups aren't good at solving certain types of problems, is this something you've always believed, or is it a realisation through your work at YC?

Also was it inspired by the Shuttleworh Fundation in any way?

</comment><comment><USER29> > "To start off, I'm going to personally donate $10 million..."

Holy cow. That's real money. Sincerely very impressed by the commitment.

<comment><USER30> I don't want to minimize the awesomeness of the YCR proposal, but $10m isn't really very much in the scheme of research. NIH alone funds to order of $25bil a year in science research. Public-private funding schemes probably fund an order of magnitude more every year.

$10m is pretty much just enough to fund one reasonably sized group, doing advanced research, for about a year to a year and half. Seems to me that Sam is hedging so YCR can do its first round in about a year and get a bigger ask by pointing to the starting groups achievements.

<comment><USER31> >$10m isn't really very much in the scheme of research. NIH alone funds to order of $25bil a year in science research

Sure, but the NIH is funding near to 50,000 competitive grants a year. Some googling online gives median/average grant size at $300k/$350k. Even $25bil over 50,000 projects is $500k a project a year. An academic institution will take 50% or more straight off the top, so you're looking closer to $150k to $250k a year.

$10 million is a lot of money. Science can be expensive but that $10 million can last a long time.

<comment><USER32> I agree it's real money, enough to do some real stuff.

But:

> An academic institution will take 50% or more straight off the top, so > you're looking closer to $150k to $250k a year.

Well, that 'overhead' is paying for things like lab space, electricity, health insurance (at least for the faculty, good luck grad students), liability insurance, etc. Not to mention the actual salary of the PI and/or other researchers -- which universities in STEM schools increasingly expect to be covered by grants too. The academic institutions would argue all the 'overhead' they take is legit funding of things necessary for the research to take place, but even if you think they are spending it inefficiently or 'stealing' money for unrelated things...

I think as a rough napkin calculation, the $500K is probably still closer to that same $500K when YC Research spends it too, not twice as much.

<comment><USER31> Maybe, maybe not. I debated bringing it up, and honestly YCR is likely to have a large, up-front facilities cost (regulations, certifications, etc.). It would make sense to start easy - don't start off with infectious diseases of humans - and build from there. But still, I'd wager that YCR will run far more efficiently than your average university. Someone above brought up the UC system: management-level positions have grown over 200% the last few decades ([http://universityprobe.org/2011/03/new-data-on-management- gr...](http://universityprobe.org/2011/03/new-data-on-management-growth-at- uc/)). Even if we limit the scope to department administrators and staff, YCR won't need nearly the same sort of personnel infrastructure.

<comment><USER32> More efficiently, I'm sure.

For starters, I'm prejudiced to think any smaller org will run more efficiently than a larger one (even though I realize this is literally the opposite of conventional/mainstream assumptions!).

But TWICE as efficient?

Also, I think all those administrator salaries are probably being funded by tuition (that is, by government subsidized student loans that the students will be paying back for most of the rest of their lives), rather than research grants. :)

Or actually you didn't even suggest twice as efficient, you suggested virtually ZERO costs other than direct research costs -- would we call that INFINITELY more efficient with a zero in the denominator? :) (Not even including salaries? Aren't those also funded in part by the 'overhead'?)

<comment><USER31> It was a point of comparison. The NIH pool is large but spread very thin and, we can both agree, less efficiently than YCR is likely to be. Twice? Infinite? No of course note, but it's a point of interest in the "$10 million isn't so much" discussion.

And no, researcher's salaries (postdocs, tech, grad students, etc.) are not included. The indirect costs go to the university to pay for department/college-level utilities, facilities, infrastructure, and administrator salaries (which, admittedly, the lab does benefit from).

<comment><USER32> Well, salaries obviously WOULD have to be included in the YC case, there's no other pool of money for them to come from! So that would actually be a significant cost that the NIH grants _don't_ have to include (if it's not included in the overhead), but the YC Research seed money WOULD have to.

But I understand that research faculty in science and biomed are increasingly expected to bring in grant funding as a condition of employment/tenure. It sounds to me like the institution expects to help pay their salaries with it.

And with institutions hiring faculty _to_ do research, not caring about teaching really, evaluated solely on research, they are basically there to do research... it actually doesn't sound that unreasonable to consider a portion of their salary overhead. The research couldn't get done if they weren't getting the salary, after all.

But anyway, yeah, like I said, I do agree with your original point that this is real money that is enough to fund real research.

<comment><USER31> Point of clarification: Researcher salaries aren't included in the indirect costs aka overhead, they come out of the lab's funding. So 50% indirect costs of a $300k project means $100k to overhead/indirect costs, and $200k to research; researcher salaries, grad student stipends, healthcare, etc. all come out of that $200k. Then what's left of that $200k funds the lab.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> @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).

<comment><AUTHOR> 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.

<comment><USER14> "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.

<comment><USER34> It's true that we need an open baseband processor, but I wonder if this qualifies as the sort of blue-sky research that I'm guessing they'll want to focus on?

My feeling is that the software to accomplish this is already largely there, but the hard part of getting a design to the fab and actually getting anyone to adopt it isn't.

I think there would also be a number of regulatory hurdles to cross, since this would end up being essentially an SDR, and the FCC (for example) already seems to fear wide public availability for those.

<comment><USER35> They only care if you can make it work on channels it shouldn't, they don't care whether the code that controls it is open or not.

But yes, an open processor could help with a lot of open networking problems, even though it seems more like an engineering matter than research per se.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Hi. Seventeen-year old high schooler here, I love this idea. (@sama, anyone else behind YCR):

All my life I had wanted to go into industry, follow that classic Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel dream that many CS High Schoolers go into.

But recently, I got into research. The CollegeBoard opened up a class called AP Research I am now in, and I spent my last summer researching Machine Learning at my local private university. I was surprised by how much I loved it, the math behind it fascinates me (context: am currently taking Adv. Diff Eq and Linear Algebra my Senior Year.)

I am now trying my own Deep Learning algorithms and working on my paper. I have always been conflicted between industry and academia, since all of my fellow HS CS friends just want to found companies in industry. Things such as YCR make research a bigger dream for youth, whom I would currently argue are too under-exposed to it. It just doesn't seem as glamorous to them.

Thank you for YCR, it reminds me of the cool things research can do. I can't wait to hopefully apply one day.

<comment><USER37> If you're into any field of applied AI such as Machine Learning, you'll have no trouble transitioning from industry to research and vice versa. It is a very flexible skill set and there is a lot of demand for it.

Just go the best university you can and take as many ML and AI courses possible, there really isn't much you can do wrong.

Good luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is the biggest news since YC started. The YC model works, but it isn't churning out disruptions like Xerox PARC did... ethernet, the laser printer, the PC. It tends to produce Reddits. This could fill that gap. Bravo...

</comment><comment><USER39> > We think research institutions can be better than they are today.

I hope you'll expand on this. Is there something that YCR can do that academic research can't do? You might have more impact if you use that money to influence US and EU gov't to invest more in basic research. A 1% increase in annual gov't funding will be vastly larger than YCR's total budget.

The Gates Foundation is tackling difficult health issues that aren't profitable for companies and neglected by poor governments. They've found an underserved gap. What's the gap that YCR is uniquely suited to tackle?

<comment><USER40> To answer your first question, 1\. they can move much faster than academic research. More money in basic research isn't going to fix the antiquated process in which academics live. It's also not going to help researchers learn how to budget properly, or learn to manage people. So that alone is a value add. A 1% increase in gov spending simply adds money without fixing a problem that currently exists....not really going to make a difference in my opinion(PhD research scientist)

<comment><USER39> I agree that academic science has problems, but YCR isn't going to have any impact on academic research, funding nor publications. My guess is that YCR will attempt to be a mini-Xerox PARC: 20 people working on interdisciplinary stuff in CS. It'll be fun, but it'll be small.

<comment><USER40> How exactly are you so sure about this? And if it's small, that doesn't mean it can't have an impact. Also, perhaps I'm missing something, but it doesn't see like we have any real info about this, if you have more, I'd love to read it.

It takes someone/something with some ability to make something happen. Are they going to change how all academic science is done? Probably not, but could they have an impact and begin a process in which academic science begins to respond/change? Yes, that is probable. Between YC and Google life science, things are happening...and it's going to take us (I'm assuming you are a scientist) to support this change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This article seems to have relevance. The Recurse Center is a YC company that recently began pursuing programming language research. [https://www.recurse.com/blog/83-michael-nielsen-joins-the- re...](https://www.recurse.com/blog/83-michael-nielsen-joins-the-recurse- center-to-help-build-a-research-lab)

</comment><comment><USER42> Very interesting! But exactly how fundamental is this research meant to be? Will there be any mathematicians working on projects not at all related to cryptography or physicists working on projects entirely unrelated to fusion?

As an astrophysicist in the thick of applications for jobs in both industry and academia, I strongly identify with the points raised in the article. While I consider my research slightly heretical with the potential to solve many big problems in astrophysics, I don't have any illusions that it will really lead to any practical developments. So is this initiative meant to keep scientists like me working on the problems we're working on, or is it meant to prevent computer scientists working on a new way for cars to drive themselves from jumping ship and joining Google or Uber?

<comment><USER43> > _YC has a very high problem flux at this point_

From this statement and, more generally, YC's focus on creating high-growth businesses, I'm guessing they'll be focused on long-term research with potential to disrupt markets and have practical impact.

> _So is this initiative meant to keep scientists like me working on the > problems we 're working on, or is it meant to prevent computer scientists > working on a new way for cars to drive themselves from jumping ship and > joining Google or Uber?_

Are these the only options? You sound dismissive of scientists (computer or otherwise) working on solving practical problems.

<comment><USER42> > You sound dismissive of scientists (computer or otherwise) working on > solving practical problems.

I don't mean to be dismissive of those working on solving practical problems! There's a good chance that will be me in the near future! I suppose my concern is more that people working on those sorts of things already have many more options and resources available to them. I just mean to state that if one grants that research without immediate practical application has some (perhaps qualitative) value for society, then the relative impact could be larger if it were focused more towards that kind of research. But of course the downside to that is that the resulting research...has no immediate practical application.

None of this should be taken as criticism exactly since both strategies have their advantages (and it's not my money anyway), it's just not quite clear from the post what sort of research is going to be funded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> YC Research, meet Megalith: [http://progrium.com/blog/2015/10/05/the- next-10-years-megali...](http://progrium.com/blog/2015/10/05/the- next-10-years-megalith/)

<comment><USER45> The trick is to create a Bell Labs and not an Institute for Advanced Study. For programming related things (assuming that's the domain?), that's a hard line to draw. Getting regular interactions with the ycombinator classes would be one way to combat it.

If you're wondering about the criticism of IAS, see this quote:

"When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> "heretical" "dangerous" "free to everyone"

Strong language. Especially coming from an organization that generally touts "ideas as useless." Well here's a model based exponentially upon the promise of "ideas." I sincerely hope you disrupt the current models, which have been severely hijacked by interest groups, short-term thinking, and governance.

So yes Sam, you have some bold ideas (you're not yet sharing). Put $10m down to validate them and bring them to the world. You've earned the chance. And if you succeed, you'll create a new model that touts the power of ideas, takes responsibility for them, but does not own them.

Whatever we can do to help.

<comment><USER47> No one at YC thinks that ideas are useless.

Perhaps you're thinking of this [PG, 2005]: _Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here 's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless._

This is specific to startup business ideas, not scientific ideas. And worthless != useless. Worthless (in the narrow sense) means you can't sell it for a lot of money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Will scientists at YC Research continue the common pattern of academic research/publications? Or are there some grander plans to disrupt traditional research?

<comment><USER49> (I'm working with Sam on YCR.)

It's pretty important that YCR groups have strong ties with the existing research communities — research collaborations tend to have a multiplicative effect.

So I'd expect to see papers coming out of YCR. However, I'd also expect to see many other forms of communication (e.g. blog posts, code releases, etc). In general, we'll tune our efforts to achieve the best research results and impact, rather than to fit the existing incentive systems.

<comment><USER50> I love the accessibility and content of blog posts by members of Recurse Center. It would be amazing if scientists from YCR publish informal, yet rigorous posts for newbies.

<comment><USER48> I was at SOSP until earlier today. During the Q&A of the Chaos graph processing system, there was discussion of a previous exchange between Frank McSherry and the authors of the work ... what was REALLY cool was that parts of the original exchange happened on Twitter and via blog posts and we were hearing about it at the conference some time later :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> @sama is this targeted towards pre-PhDs who are deciding between pursuing their PhD or working in industry, as well as post-PhDs who are full-time researchers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Both.

<comment><USER41> Sweet!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Sam Altman is personally donating $10 Million to YCR. This is one of the greatest thing he could do to show some honest generosity towards the world. Bravo.

</comment><comment><USER52> Surely I'm missing something here. Won't giving YC equity to these researchers (who are working not-for-profit and releasing IP freely) incentivize research that benefits YC startups directly and hence increases the value of the equity held? Can someone explain why not? Honest question.

<comment><USER53> _> Won't giving YC equity to these researchers (who are working not-for-profit and releasing IP freely) incentivize research that benefits YC startups directly and hence increases the value of the equity held?_

That's equivalent to saying "won't paying in U.S. dollars to these researchers (who are working not-for-profit and releasing IP freely) incentivize research that benefits the U.S. Federal Reserve directly and hence increases the value of the U.S. dollars held?"

Obviously not the same scale, but you get where I'm going with this. Indirect incentives don't quite work that way.

<comment><USER52> The difference in scale is 4-5 orders of magnitude here, probably more. And at such different scales, I don't see how the same rules apply.

For instance, trying to increase the value of USD with your work when billions of people on the planet are doing the same is basically impossible and unpredictable even if you're a great researcher / business leader / whatever, to say the least. The same is not the case with YC equity, where you can expect, with a fairly high probability, a significant increase in your equity if your research contributes hundreds of millions of dollars worth to a YC startup.

I'm not trying to be poke holes in the idea or anything like that, just genuinely wondering -- and the analogy to USD doesn't seem like the right answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> It's easier to comment on something specific when you disagree than when you agree but that leaves a very critical trail after a while. Since I've been critical of Sam's airbnb position and expressed a lot of concern over the amount of power a VC would have in the "founder visa" posts in the past, I would like to chime in to say that YC Research is an intriguing and exciting development with a lot of money behind it. This has the potential to be pretty great.

</comment><comment><USER55> First, this is really great. I'm looking forward to seeing how it works in practice.

 _" We plan to do this for a long time. If some of these projects take 25 years, that's perfectly fine with us. "_

Building an _institution_ that supports this kind of long-term commitment is going to be a challenge. While there are plenty of organisations that work over those timescales, very long-term _projects_ seem to me to be unusual - and not just because results are increasingly expected in the short-term, but because 25 years is about half of a long career and few people (imo) have the commitment and self-belief to embark on such a project. I can think of some, like SETI [1] and Mass Observation [2], but they tend to be highly distributed. The danger might be that you end-up with something like the Institute for Advanced Study [3] with its debatable productivity record.

Nevertheless, this is a massively positive announcement from YC. We need more stuff like this.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_intelligence)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass- Observation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass-Observation)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study#C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study#Criticism)

<comment><USER56> J Strother Moore would disagree with you, the development of ACL [1] is going on from 40 years!

[1] [http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/acl2/acl2-doc.html](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/acl2/acl2-doc.html)

<comment><USER55> An interesting project - thanks for pointing it out.

I'm not saying that such long-term projects are impossible, just that they are rare due to institutional and human reasons. And because they are rare, we don't have much experience with how to design successful support institutions.

<comment><USER56> Yes I do agree with you. ACL is just an example of as the devotion of one or two persons can bring unexpectedly successful results. Achieving the same in bigger organisation is a much harder challenge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> This looks amazing ... a modern Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.

<comment><USER58> Bell Labs had an annual budget of over 3 billion since the 80s.

<comment><AUTHOR> Clearly if it seems promising we're going to up the funding significantly.

<comment><USER59> That is great news Sam! This is really exciting to see an incubator starting it's own research lab and on top of that, keeping it totally in the open source. I'm fascinated by Research work folks have done at Parc and Disney, you should have a look here and perhaps speak with someone at Disney as well: [http://www.disneyresearch.com](http://www.disneyresearch.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> That's great! Two questions:

\- Will the researchers need to be based in the Bay Area - AFAIK: not the best place to raise a family?

\- In the short term, how many researchers do you plan to hire?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but we're coming in on the very high end of the comp scale. We're also considering doing things like YC guaranteeing 100% mortgages for the researchers--housing prices in the bay area are a joke.

We're starting relatively small (on the order of 10) and grow from there at a reasonable rate.

<comment><USER17> While I'm somewhat skeptical of the idea (I'll admit I'm an academic researcher) this seems like a very good step - the Bay Area is becoming cost prohibitive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> > YC has a very high problem flux at this point

What does this phrase mean in English?

<comment><USER62> A significant amount of proposals are too pie-in-the-sky to take seriously _but still warrant attention_.

Honestly I'd like to see Kickstarter take a stab at this too, providing the general populace with an outlet to support research projects.

<comment><USER63> [https://experiment.com/](https://experiment.com/) \- Not sure what their numbers are though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> This is the kind of thing Silicon Valley should be doing all the time. I hope Sam's guts is replicated rather than just admired by other investors. Even if it's not, this is a great thing.

</comment><comment><USER65> @sama: is one of the intentions for this group to acquire patents, so that you may be able to use them in defense for YC companies?

<comment><AUTHOR> No--all IP developed is free to the world, so we wouldn't be able to use it defensively.

<comment><USER66> It is possible to structure it as "patent granted to everyone, but expires the moment they bring up a lawsuit against us or any of our licensees" to do doubly good for the world.

<comment><USER67> Then it would no longer be free.

<comment><USER66> It's not public domain, for sure, but it is free, for some definition of 'free', similar to GNU GPL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> This is great. I am hoping things like this will shake the dynamics of publication-oriented credentialing and ultimately the value proposition of academia/academic research.

</comment><comment><USER68> There are a few YC technical founders who were fired by their non-tech co- founders for rather flimsy culture reasons. So far YC was pretty hands-off. What makes YC think it can be effective at managing researchers? Wouldn't that be much more a function of the YC director(s) of research than the program?

<comment><USER69> The culture that exists between companies and founders in YC seems a better measurement of YC's success than the culture that exists inside any one of those companies. They run YC after all, not the companies themselves.

I have seen some difficult divorces between founders (with various combinations of technical and non-technical), and although some might suggest that YC should arbitrate those disputes more proactively, I think their policy of being willing to talk things through but not vote their shares is the right balance for their relationship with the companies.

But YC's success at fostering a positive, supportive culture between companies makes me quite optimistic that they can create a great environment when it's their responsibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Wow! This seems cool and potentially very useful.

A lot of "how do we fix academia" discussions might be (kind of) asking the wrong questions. Academia is a very wide cover over a lot of varied things. That cover is an institution. It has values, rules and ways of doing things. There might not be anything wrong with the institution per se, rather its success has brought to many things under its cover. For people, idea or pursuits that don't really belong there, it seems broken.

Take publishing. Publishing is a great practice and a lot of the conventions around it are really useful. But, it's not the only way to make information available, accessible, trustworthy, etc. There are other ways that might make more sense for some other project.

</comment><comment><USER71> I just passively started looking around for a change. My criteria is exactly what's described here: "work that requires a very long time horizon, seeks to answer very open-ended questions, or develops technology that shouldn't be owned by any one company." [1]. I have been unable to find very many places that will take non PHDs and let them participate in projects with these characteristics. I really do hope YCR relaxes the PHD constraint a bit. Look forward to it.

1\. [https://ycr.org/](https://ycr.org/)

</comment><comment><USER72> Is this more targeted at semi-cofounders/early-employees that fall by the wayside (like Aaron Swartz, poor soul) or is the plan hiring top researchers (the way Google got Hal Varian and Peter Norvig)?

</comment><comment><USER73> This sounds like a great idea, and I can't help but think of this as a very "Valley" take on Renaissance-style patronage.

Here's hoping this effort has similarly transformative results!

</comment><comment><USER74> DARPA, the publicly funded agency that generates most of the core tech that sustains Silicon Valley, has an annual budget of $3B. The National Science Foundation, which funds a large chunk of core science research, is $7B.

Where would YC Research fit in this landscape? Would it be seeking government funds, and just offer a different institutional model than universities for hosting the research? Or would it be primarily based in private funding somehow (and how?)

</comment><comment><USER75> I'd love to see research on shaking up governments and the existing political process with technology.

Now, there are flaws to the use of electronic voting systems and the level of transparency required, but that is not what I mean.

What I mean is that every time I have run a large community the social structure that naturally emerges is _not_ the one that we all allow ourselves to be governed by.

I'd like to research how tech could be used to empower lay citizens to shape their society in the way that they imagine it should be.

For example; I was interested in Google's internal experiment with voting transparency and delegation, and how it allows for a different kind of inclusive democratic process that isn't reflected in our existing systems.

One of the moonshot goals of the forum/community startup I created was to start to provide tools to support communities that shaped their own political and social structures, with an express goal of training them in the possibilities of being engaged in their society and then letting them use the tools to shape the real world in the same way that they shaped online societies.

Simply, I'd love to see research and later innovation into how societies and democratic functions could be.

When we talk about changing the world, I really mean it.

</comment><comment><USER76> This is a logical step in YC's path as the "new" university. It's a great experiment to run, and I can't think of better people to do it.

</comment><comment><USER77> This is great.

I always considered getting a PhD and becoming a researcher, but decided to remain an engineer for the time being because I've heard so much about how the academic research system is broken, both with politics and low pay.

If this model works, it might not only help existing researchers be more productive, but it might motivate other people considering this career to actually do it instead of other careers.

</comment><comment><USER78> _We'll especially welcome outsiders working on slightly heretical ideas_

Are you going to require qualifications, or just sufficiently intriguing proposals?

</comment><comment><USER79> > We're not doing this with the goal of helping YC's startups succeed or > adding to our bottom line.

Helping YC startups succeed might not be the primary goal, but it's silly to say the project isn't also aimed to help YC startups. Having access to a top quality research team can absolutely help startups succeed, so this is either disingenuous or surprisingly unimaginative.

<comment><USER80> How about "We're not doing this with the goal of helping _existing_ YC's startups succeed". If this solves some big problem, and there are no new YC startups that come out of it, would indeed be unimaginative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> I agree, making the world a better place doesn't pay well. Screwing the world over pays really well.

I remember when I was in school people would often say that to get money, you have to find something you love doing and the money would come by itself. I don't know if that used to be true, but that is certainly no longer the case.

In general, doing good is at odds with earning money.

</comment><comment><USER82> I think this is absolutely amazing.

sama has written multiple times about the 'distractions' that pull founders away from building beautiful products. Things like attending conferences, networking, fundraising, etc...

Conservatively, the academic equivalent of those things takes up at least 80%+ of the time of a professor's time - and the more successful you become, the less time you actually dedicate to research. In the life sciences, it's not uncommon to have PIs with 30+ people in their groups, and they might be barely aware of the kind of research that's being done in their lab.

I cannot emphasize enough how thrilled I am by this. One tiny concern: it's currently much easier to get H1B visas for researchers working in educational institutions than it is for people working in private for profit companies. Is there any way YC can spin this research into a legal status that would allow it to recruit researchers through the 'easier' academic H1B pipeline?

</comment><comment><USER83> It's an interesting point about fundamental research. The old industrial labs are dead and while academic institutions can do a lot someone in the private sector has to pick up the research mantle. Google X is a good example, but I think smaller efforts like this are much more interesting. If it's done right that is...

</comment><comment><USER84> Interesting. I am curious though, as to why YCR researchers will also receive equity in Y Combinator as part of their compensation? Especially given that both are organized separately and YCR discoveries won't be funneled through or used in YC. I am also assuming that YCR will pay market rate salaries.

<comment><AUTHOR> Above market salaries and also equity.

We want to get the best people in the world, and I think YC equity is a pretty compelling thing to get. We're competing against e.g. Google, and Google stock is also a pretty compelling thing to get!

<comment><USER85> How liquid YC equity is?

I assume that by getting google stock, someone can sell them easily in the public market. But how does it work with YC equity?

<comment><USER86> Probably somewhat less liquid with far greater alpha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Way to put your money where your mouth is! Kudos to Sam. You are a good man. Hope this delivers amazing results.

</comment><comment><USER88> I like this idea; it's pretty novel. Since there is just one group starting this off, which makes a ton of sense from a funding perspective, is this an MVP or a long term bet with regards to this specific group? Meaning if this group has trouble getting their idea off the ground in the next 1-2 months, do they get scrapped or are they going to have years to conduct their research?

An idea for future research may be to do almost like a round of start-ups where a bunch of groups come to SF for 3 months but unlike start-ups you find the promising ones and keep them all and drop any that do not look promising. Basically thinking of ways to not put all your eggs in one basic. Naturally this becomes quite problematic if you're researching something highly complex that won't show signs of promise for a decade!

</comment><comment><USER89> To be honest, the freedom to fail alone would make a huge difference. On one hand there's a lot of freedom for intellectual growth in academia - in the last few months I've used deep learning, assembled hardware under a microscope, performed neurosurgery and genetic engineering (this is somewhat standard for my field). On the other hand, I make less than I did as a new cable guy, won't make more for 10 years, and every postdoc and phd student in my lab works 7 days / week standard. And if I fail, I will probably be done career-wise. LOTS of talented people leave because they see startups as the 'safer' bet - at least if your startup fails you're not doomed.

</comment><comment><USER90> This sounds interesting. I'm curious to see what areas the research will be focused on.

Are there plans to provide laboratory space for areas that require it? Would researchers be housed in some space in MV, or would they work out of their own space like YC startups?

<comment><AUTHOR> The first group will be in SF. TBD on other groups. But unlike startups we fund, these people work for a YC organization, so we will provide space etc.

<comment><USER91> As I keep chiming in whenever YC and location come up - please seriously consider Australia's East Coast. Like the valley, there is a big supply of world class universities and their graduates, and there's also great weather and quality of life that keeps people from wanting to leave. What's missing is an American style risk tolerance amongst the holders of capital. That's changing, but it's something YC could change even faster with an organisation like YCR.

Our government has historically underfunded research, and even more often one side funds it then the other gets into power and cuts it again. As a result, there are lots of ex-academics looking for more interesting ways of earning a living!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> Phenomenal undertaking! When you say "Shouldn't be owned by any one company" does that imply that these releases will all be open-source? Do you have plans to develop a new form of IP licensing to go along with the research?

</comment><comment><USER93> Great job Sam! YC isn't any more only about starting new companies and making them profitable. But about improving lives for everyone on the planet. And to do that >'YCR is a non-profit.' Just brilliant!

</comment><comment><USER63> There's repeated mention of academia being broken due to issues such as politics, and mis-aligned interests between researchers and their departments. What have been the changes over time in Academia that led to this?

<comment><USER94> One of the big ones is that funding has not grown with the number of researchers, so researchers must spend a larger and larger portion of their work time on competing to get the work funded (or a longer portion of their professional life waiting for their chance at actual research-focused employment).

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> Great idea!

I decided not to go into academia many, many years ago, because a short look revealed that it seems to destroy the love of the subject matter more quickly than just about anything.

Now that I am partly back working on my PhD, I am still glad I didn't make it my main source of income, because now I have the freedom to do _real_ research, rather than gaming the system of academia with minimal viable papers and incremental research re-gurgitating old insights. ("Doing X in Smalltalk" 10 years later: "Doing X in Java" 10 years after that: "Doing X in JavaScript" Sigh).

</comment><comment><USER96> After the collapse of Bell Labs and the inefficiencies at the University level, this is an effort that can truly impact change.

True fundamental innovation takes 15+years... stable ecosystems (govt policies, strong economies etc) are needed to foster this type innovation. YC is definitely a stable environment to foster fundamental inno.

Fundamental innovation also creates new methodologies in two or three areas, whether it be technology, market or implementation. Everything else is incremental innovation (new tech enhancing products in a known market), this can be achieved in 1 to 3 years. Kudos YC!

</comment><comment><USER97> Would you be willing to let someone just participate? I have multiple lines of research and my physics background allows me to reach further into biology and computation than most biology types. And for a variety of reasons I don't quite have the same funding problems most people have, but I would _really_ like to work with the groups you are able to put together. I would be happy to fill out the same application.

Your log files should be able to unmask me but for additional reasons I'd rather not publicly associate my claims above with my identity.

</comment><comment><USER98> I love this idea. However I am not too surprised that YC is doing this. YC is a different kind of corporation. Instead of hiring engineers, they hire startups. And just like any well established company, they are now investing in R&D. Make no mistake, there will be a commercial bent to the R&D that YC does and there is nothing wrong about that. R&D should not be just about publishing papers but advancing new ideas in the market too. So overall I hope this takes off and they bring ground-breaking research out of this venture.

</comment><comment><USER99> This sounds fantastic; I'm so glad to see it.

I'm curious what areas of research will be chosen, and how. I wonder if there is any room for a voting style 'the community would like to see resources put behind this idea' decision making process. (On the other hand, its not the community's money, so do what you will :)).

I'm guessing all of this will be in the Bay Area?

It'd be great if there was a way for regular folks to help out with this. It seems to be something genuinely intended to help people and I'd love to contribute in some way.

</comment><comment><USER100> As a researcher, this is very exciting news. I can't wait to see what areas of research YC will be directing their efforts towards. I hope the world of genomics/genetics gets a nod!

</comment><comment><USER101> Will this be structured in a way where there are groups headed by "PIs" that set the research agenda, and researchers working under them, or will you be pursuing a different model?

</comment><comment><USER102> This seems weird. They'll fund open ended research and then what? Are there any metrics to guide the outcomes? Why would the average super rich guy want to put any money into this?

</comment><comment><USER103> DE Shaw gave away his hedge fund empire to start DE Shaw Research. He similarly used his own money to start a privately funded research lab. He is their Chief Scientist.

</comment><comment><USER104> Well I always wanted to be in Y funded startup. Now my dreams become bigger - now I want get to YCR.

Congrats Y team! I'm can't wait to see what you come up for next announcement!

</comment><comment><USER105> This is extremely exciting and I will apply as soon as the application process is announced. I would love to get funded to work on this open source digital audio workstation I've been working on[1]. Its goals are perhaps a little _too_ ambitious and 25 years is not an unreasonable timeline for realizing them.

[1]: [http://genesisdaw.org/](http://genesisdaw.org/)

</comment><comment><USER106> @sama: how are you thinking about evaluating progress of the groups? it seems all the bureaucracy in the current research ecosystem derives from the fact that it is really hard to evaluate progress in research/science. So you form a committee of experts to evaluate if a given researcher is doing well, and that eventually leads to politics and bureucracy. what are you thoughts on evaluation?

</comment><comment><USER107> Absolutely fantastic! It's nice to see Sam et al putting their money to good use.

I really hope that we see some development of new types of programming languages. We seem to be stuck in a rut with procedural/OO/mostly-functional languages. Some research around flow based programming, especially related to machine learning. I can't help thinking we're missing something here...

</comment><comment><USER108> I hope there will be an independent ethics review committee or similar.

The modern concept and frameworks of Responsible Research and Innovation might be a helpful starting point. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsible_Research_and_Innov...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsible_Research_and_Innovation)

</comment><comment><USER109> Would love to know which fields/areas YC will be focusing for research. Is it for only Computer Science? or Physics? Biomedical Science or behavioral economics? or combinations of few fields?

And what kind of ideas/research will be given priority? Will it be bench/desktop based research projects or applied to people lives directly?

</comment><comment><USER110> My academic friends and I are constantly talking about how we need startups to counter/disintermediate the constantly growing administrative overhead at universities. Without viable alternatives there is just no pressure to keep administrative costs from balooning. This is a great start and I hope to see more like it.

</comment><comment><USER111> Why not give YC a 7% ownership of the IP and YC the other 93%. That would definitely drive the more entrepreneurial scientists to work there and also allow YC to monetize products out it's own research.

I have some ideas on technologies that are harder to create and takes time, but actually want to own the IP at the end.

<comment><USER112> > Why not give YC a 7% ownership of the IP and YC the other 93%.

I suspect that one of these "YCs" is supposed to be someone other than YC, but its not clear which one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER113> Sweet! We'll need more things like this if we want to see our share of societal progress. I have faith that more programs like this will blossom in the coming years.

@sama -is this only for severely resource intense research projects? And do you envision this turning into an alternative to graduate school too?

</comment><comment><USER114> How do we search and see if the area where I currently do research in is something that YC Research would focus on in the near future? I am finishing up a MS in ChBE with a focus on designing materials using computational methods (eg. DFT) and would like to continue with similar projects.

</comment><comment><USER115> "You can't fall in love with the one thing being the hub for all things to come." Agree, now tell that to the dev responsible for tracking everything I do on my PC outside of Internet Explorer to be tracked in its search history, forcing me to revert to an older version.

</comment><comment><USER116> Awesome news. It's interesting to see new ways to fund research.

BTW the "Read more" at [https://ycr.org/](https://ycr.org/) point to the Y Combinator blog not to the post permalink. It will became confusing once you write a new post.

<comment><USER49> (I put together [https://ycr.org.](https://ycr.org.))

Yep, I'm planning on swapping in the permalink in a day or two, but just want to avoid making changes during this launch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER117> Hope YCR works. Suggestion: Get a board of advisors who have had a lot of experience managing research, and let them occasionally advise you on opportunities and pit falls.

I got an applied math Ph.D., just to improve the good career I already had going in applied math and computing, had no intention of being a professor, but for a while, having to do with my wife in her long illness, I was a professor.

The biggest problem I had in research was just getting the mathematical word processing done. The typing was much more difficult than the research! I published some papers in some good journals and never had a paper rejected or needing significant revision. I could have done a lot more in research, but I was really interested just in making money.

For research in academics, that is, the STEM fields, I have long had a suggestion: Borrow from research in medicine!

Why, how, in what respects? Sure: Research in medicine also has a clinical side, and a lot of the research, applied research intended to connect with applications, very much needs the clinical side.

E.g., instead of all the seminars being professors and students presenting solutions still looking for applications, have about half the seminars with people from the _real world_ outside academics present problems looking for solutions. Have professors with their students attack such problems. That way could get some problems to work on, simple, medium, and really difficult and important, e.g., P versus NP just from applications of optimization to, say, vehicle scheduling or communications network design. E.g., I was working on something applied and rediscovered k-D trees -- a few years earlier and I would have been the inventor of k-D trees. And there are other examples of starting with a real problem from the real world and getting good results for that problem, getting a good research problem, and getting some good research progress.

Besides, such research already has one application and, thus, is much more likely to have two or many more than two.

Have an expectation that a professor pursuing applications is a professional and needs to practice their profession. And the students need to be there also as apprentices.

Also, have codes of ethics, standards on how revenue is to be distributed, and professional peer review of the clinical practice.

For more, it would help if the venture capital community were ready, willing, and able to evaluate original research intended as the crucial core of startups.

</comment><comment><USER118> As long as the people hired in are more hands-on and not the Sheldon Cooper types then it's a wonderful idea, especially that the good stuff will be made free for everyone. It's also quite endearing that you are putting so much of your own money into the idea.

</comment><comment><USER119> Congratulations on this great endeavour! I've frequently mulled setting up website like patreon to help support and accelerate crucial research, which is seeing less and less progress these days. I'm glad YCombinator took note of this problem too!

</comment><comment><USER120> I wrote a blog post awhile back, I wonder whether YC is after a similar thing... [http://yansh.github.io/articles/phd- distruption/](http://yansh.github.io/articles/phd-distruption/)

</comment><comment><USER121> This is such an insanely great idea. This (alongside with the YC Fellowship and the classic YC program) makes us really have no excuse for not doing something great, that matters for us and for the world. Wow, YC, well played.

</comment><comment> pow_pp_-1_v This is really cool! I wonder, though, if YCR will accept donations? It will be nice if I could personally contribute to a research project. [Loong time lurker here. Couldn't help myself from commenting on this one.]

</comment><comment><USER122> Is there any way to participate remotely?

I am not applicable for any visa in so-called "developed" countries - too old and without higher education (lack of which does not imply much in some cases, as one might see).

</comment><comment><USER123> Will YC Research only focus on applied research ideas? Specifically, I'd like to know about whether or not researchers in pure math, theoretic cs, theoretical physics, etc will have a place at YC Research.

</comment><comment><USER124> Interesting comments by pg 1322 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3622545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3622545)

</comment><comment><USER125> What is the patent policy?

</comment><comment><USER126> This is simply brilliant n fundamentally good ... as a former Bell Lab researcher in fundamental physics, I hope this will allow people with profound ideas to pursue the ideas ...

</comment><comment><USER127> Are there plans for peer review and highly rigorous verification of results prior to publication?

Hopefully YCR busts some of the myths perpetuated by industry.

</comment><comment><USER128> Great news! Probably the only other non-university lab at the moment with this type of long-term basic research goal is Microsoft Research.

</comment><comment><USER129> Love the epic lack of perspective in this thread

</comment><comment><USER130> Ideas: Free Global Health Care, Free Global Education, Government Management Software (A to Z), or Private Secondary Government.

</comment><comment><USER131> Amazing! This may have far greater impact than all of YC's billion dollar unicorns in terms of making the world better!

</comment><comment><USER132> This is awesome. I'm really excited to see what groups are announced - this is going to gather some great minds!

</comment><comment><USER133> I get really excited about this. I left academia for the bureaucracy, and found R&D to often be too short sighted.

Best of luck!

</comment><comment> bra-ket this is great, I'd love to see something similar to the Kavli Foundation growing from this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kavli_Foundation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kavli_Foundation)

</comment><comment><USER134> Can't view the ycr.org site. Flagged as malware by OpenDNS. [https://malware.opendns.com/controller.php?url=ycr.org&serve...](https://malware.opendns.com/controller.php?url=ycr.org&server=yvr15&prefs=&tagging=&nref=)

</comment><comment><USER135> Wow, YC is realizing a dream of mine. Congratulations, it is a great idea!

</comment><comment><USER136> Hey there! Can I apply to YC Research for my AGI research project? :)

</comment><comment><USER137> this is awesome. I'm just finishing my masters, and would love to do phd in the same area, but the TA grant is measly. no way I can do that right now.

</comment><comment><USER138> YC is being brave and smart ... again. Keep it up.

</comment><comment><USER139> Thanks for making me feel good in the morning.

</comment><comment> tefo-mohapi Sounds good. Would love to see what comes out.

</comment><comment><USER140> This is amazing. Where do I sign up to help?

</comment><comment><USER7> Can we vote for projects somewhere?

</comment><comment><USER141> Nice, good luck! Good funding :)

</comment><comment><USER142> How to apply?

</comment><comment><USER143> > I'm going to personally donate $10 million

Statements like this always turn me off. I guess it's because it breaks the illusion that Sam and everyone else at YC are normal people like most of us. They're not. They're INSANELY wealthy by any reasonable standard.

<comment><USER144> The whole sama thing doesn't compute for me and has negatively impacted my otherwise stellar view of YC.

He dropped out of Stanford, founded Loopt (which raised $30 million and then acqui-sold for $43 -- and I'm sure Sequoia got the bulk of it), was then made a YC partner and finally appointed president. His Wikipedia page says he's made some angel investments in successful companies like AirBNB, but my question is: "With what money?" Maybe he sold some private shares of these companies at some point. There's nothing wrong with that. But again where did the _original_ money come from? Family?

I just don't get it. Please explain to me how dropping out of college and having your only startup fail leads to (a) being handed one of the most prestigious and influential positions in SV and (b) having so much money you can donate $10 million dollars like it's chump change. How does that make any sense in this universe?

pg started YC and deserves all the credit for basically inventing the accelerator archetype. He can do whatever he wants and I guess he thought sama was the best guy for the job. Maybe he is. Heck, I'll even admit that I think he's done a good job so far, although I also think plenty of people would be equally adept at watching a golden goose lay eggs.

I think SV -- and YC especially -- perpetrate a few huge myths which cause people to have unrealistic expectations of their lives and ventures. ("There aren't enough engineers!", for example. Just last week, sama was saying how easy it is to live in SV if you work at Facebook, make a $150k+ salary and got a $75k signing bonus... a situation he was pawning off as "average" but is actually highly above average.) These lofty, then unfulfilled expectations then cause depression in vast amounts of people, both inside the Valley and out.

To me, sama is a colossal SV myth, incarnate. "Look! If you're smart enough, you can rocket to the moon! Even if you drop out of school and your only startup fails!"

I don't understand the full story, apparently, but I just hope people aren't fooled. There is more than meets the eye, here.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is worth answering.

I made single-digit millions from the Loopt acquisition. Almost all the money I've made has been as an investor. I got lucky in that the first few investments I made in 2009 (very small dollar amounts) were really good, so I was able to raise capital to keep investing at a much larger scale with other peoples' money. I didn't have much liquidity until last year.

Takeaway 1: the easiest, lowest-risk way in the world to make a lot of money is to get fees for investing other peoples' money.

Takeaway 2: if you make money that way I think you should give a lot of it away.

Takeaway 3: FWIW this is a lot of money for me, but it's what I most want to support.

As a side note, I was pointing out that living in SV is becoming possible only if you get a job like that one, and that that's really a problem.

<comment><USER144> I respect the fact that you took a moment to add some clarity. Obviously you have a good sense for politics -- you know this is something people need to understand.

But hot damn! If you've been so successful people are _literally_ having a hard time believing it's true... that's... that's... I don't even know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER145> I want some evidence that you're actually a PhD student at MIT before I start believing that the education system there is broken.

<comment><USER146> I mean, I didn't go to MIT, but I just finished a PhD in CS from UPenn, and I'll attest that he's not wrong. Perhaps excessively pessimistic on it, but like, what he's expressed is not an uncommon sentiment. Like you'd hear the same thing from like a third of the grad students I personally know (across the entire spectrum of top-20 CS departments). I myself was fairly ambivalent on my own PhD, but ended up finishing it because

1) I had some strong publications early on in my grad career (first 2 years) so it made it much easier to get to the eventual finish line without much hassle.

2) I'm not a US citizen, and graduating means that the immigration pathway gets a lot easier (EB-1 green card application instead of EB-2, for instance, and since I'm from India that's a huge difference).

3) My advisor let me study/work on what the hell I wanted in my final 2 years (essentially some macroecon + finance research at the Wharton school, and spending a bunch of time reading up and working on large scale graph computation) so the opportunity cost was low to "finish up" the main line of thesis work, with the understanding that any future academic career was out of the question.

<comment><USER147> Why was any future academic career out of the question?</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: GardenSpace, a camera that automates growing food at home - <AUTHOR> http://getgardenspace.com/ <comment><USER2> There's nothing of substance on this landing page, just a few requests for my email address. Which I'm not going to give you until I know some more about the product.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point, I will fix this. Can I ask what is important for you to see ? e.g. \- What it does \- How is does it \- Cost benefit etc ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Update!</comment></comment></comment>


My Life Inside a Remote Chinese Bitcoin Mine - <AUTHOR> http://www.coindesk.com/my-life-inside-a-remote-chinese-bitcoin-mine/

<comment><USER2> I can never get my head around bitcoin miners. They spent huge amount of energy to find the right combination of 1s and 0s which can be converted to legal tender. Would it not be more beneficial for this energy be spent for science or medical research? Am I too cynical?

edit: spelling & grammar</comment>


I Peeked into My Node_Modules Directory and You Won't Believe What Happened Next - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/friendship-dot-js/i-peeked-into-my-node-modules-directory-and-you-wont-believe-what-happened-next-b89f63d21558#.xgxv9jlvj <comment><USER2> Guys, it's satire. Pretty good satire (the code block where he keeps mistyping bash commands should have given it away).

Also note how the author's tagline is 'javascript clickbait enthusiast' :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> That would be outrageous... if it were true.

There is no yummy when you npm install express and even if there were, the code shown would certainly not like a tweet as the POST is not authenticated.

And the author has described himself as "JavaScript clickbait enthusiast."

A joke? Bad one?

<comment><USER4> Um, he's making the valid point that none of us have a clue what all is actually in node_modules.

<comment><USER3> Yes, a valid point. But you can make the same argument against anything really.

Do you know what your language is doing in the background? Or your database? Or your web server? Or kernel? Or your CPU?

To tell obvious lies about node_modules in particular, IMHO, does not serve any purpose in raising the awareness about that particular problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you came to the comments before reading the article, congratulations! I wasted my time reading it so that you don't have to.

</comment><comment><USER6> > Imagine if the apple you were eating for breakfast had 291 ingredients, or > if the car you drove to work had 291 parts.

Someone doesn't know anything about cars.

<comment><USER7> Someone doesn't get satire. This article is clearly not meant to be taken serious and the number of car parts is therefore by far not the only incorrect fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > every time you download express, you favorite this exact tweet from Hot > Pockets: introducing their new signature Hickory Ham sandwich pastries

Now I'm curious how many of top 100 popular npm packages include the same shady monetization?

</comment><comment><USER9> I understand that this article is satire, but I don't understand what it is exactly making fun of.

<comment><USER10> Honestly, there isn't much a narrative here. I just want to make people put their egos aside and laugh. I've written a few other articles in this style: [https://medium.com/friendship-dot-js](https://medium.com/friendship-dot-js)

In a way, I'm interjecting myself into some sort of "great debate" (dependencies are nuts! web frontend tooling is nuts! CSS is the worst!) and just poking fun at both sides. Planting myself firmly in the middle, without much of an opinion, just making sure we don't take ourselves too seriously.

They're fun to write because it's really a stream of consciousness. I don't edit the posts, I don't fix typos. So it's public therapy in that regard.

<comment><USER9> Nice. Thanks for the explanation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Was the part where he can't figure out how to count the number of directories supposed to be funny?

<comment><USER10> Yeah, did you like it?

<comment><USER12>
      ~> got a light?
      zsh: no matches found: light?

[Quite an oldie]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> But it is a true problem, haha.

I know real good programmers, who ride on the "don't reinvent the wheel" train to the max.

And while the code base don't get cluttered with "ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation[s] of half of Common Lisp" we implemented ourself, we now have hundrets of modules, which themself probably contain this "ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp"

</comment><comment><USER14> Fake(?) A simple post to the Twitter API without any auth can't really do anything.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm stunned at the number of people in the comments not understanding that it's a joke...</comment>


CPU-intensive Ruby/Python code runs slower on default-configured Docker - <AUTHOR> http://mamememo.blogspot.com/2020/05/cpu-intensive-rubypython-code-runs.html <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR; nearly 2x due to Spectre mitigations on by default. Probably does not affect AMD.

The article has plenty technical details.</comment>


The Intelligent Life of the City Raccoon - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/the-intelligent-life-of-the-city-raccoon-rp <comment><USER2> The bit about creating latches that require opposable thumbs is vaguely troubling to me. Creating selection pressure for opposable thumbs in raccoons (or some functionally similar anatomy like the sesamoid in pandas) seems like a very bad idea. Raccoons with opposable thumbs are nightmare fuel to me.

ed: Misspelling. Thanks!

<comment><USER3> i've wondered what pest animals might become given a million-year urban civilization. hands for sure. racoons become elves, miniature versions of ourselves, lurking in the shadows.

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8436265](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8436265)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8435358](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8435358)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9419874](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9419874)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11410676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11410676)

</comment><comment><USER5> Another reason to fear them: Raccoon Roundworm, which they spread through their feces.

It can destroy your eyes and brain!

Sometimes raccoons crap near my house, and I practically put on a hazmat suit to clean it up (I wear disposable gloves, pour boiling water over the site and then double bag it before throwing it in the trash,)

[...] zoonotic infection of humans is rare, though extremely dangerous due to the ability of the parasite's larvae to migrate into brain tissue and cause damage. Concern for human infection has been increasing over the years due to urbanization of rural areas resulting in the increase in proximity and potential human interaction with raccoons.[1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baylisascaris_procyonis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baylisascaris_procyonis)

</comment><comment><USER6> Well they are called trash pandas for a reason. I had a family of those -- a mother with a few young live across the street. But only figured out what it was after my tall trashcans with heavy lids somehow ended up with torn trash bags in them. I had no idea racoons can be that smart & determined.

I was warned not to get close or corner them they can be vicious. What eventually stopped them was putting a heavy rock on the trashcan lid. It seemed to have worked so far.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a shot in the dark, but some time ago, someone on HN posted a link to a science fiction short story about a few animal species that thrived and became intelligent in a post-apocalyptic, post-human world. One species was raccoons, along with ravens, who built air balloons for transportation. Fascinating read. I've been trying to find it for months. If anyone knows the story, please let me know. That would be wonderful.

</comment><comment><USER8> I knew this article would be about Toronto before I clicked on the link. On a typical visit to Toronto, I will see more raccoons than police officers. The city is either over-raccooned or under-policed, depending on your perspective.

</comment><comment><USER9> If there's a problem with raccoons, why not just turn to mankind's tried-and- true friend in dealing with animals: dogs? I imagine a medium-sized pair of dogs could make pretty quick work of most raccoons. And folks _like_ dogs in their homes, so it's a win-win!

Large cats, too, might work.

<comment><USER10> >If there's a problem with raccoons, why not just turn to mankind's tried-and- true friend in dealing with animals: dogs?

so many wrong things in your statement.

Bloodbathing raccoons, highly intelligent animals, just because one is too lazy to implement simple solutions to coexist! When we lived in the duplex in Palo Alto bunch of years ago there was a large family of raccoons. It was great and fun.

Yes, the dogs would go out of their way to protect their humans and the house from whatever, raccoons included. Yet putting them into such situation unnecessary (even if dogs had good chances to avoid being harmed - and they don't as raccoons are pretty serious animals) is just a violation of that trust relationship between dogs and their humans.

<comment><USER9> > Bloodbathing raccoons, highly intelligent animals, just because one is too > lazy to implement simple solutions to coexist!

I don't think I want to coexist with something which carries deadly diseases and is violent. Alternatively, coexistence with violent, disease-ridden animals consists of me living in location A and them living in location B, where locations A & B are well-separated.

<comment><USER10> >I don't think I want to coexist with something which carries deadly diseases and is violent.

do you mean humans? :) Anything else taken together, including raccoons, deadly snakes and hurricanes, is the distant second when we talk about danger to you from somebody carrying deadly diseases and the danger of violence.

>coexistence with violent, disease-ridden animals consists of me living in location A and them living in location B, where locations A & B are well- separated.

so, you're living alone far and well-separated from other people i guess :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The value of Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://stuckk.net/post/192983451/the-value-of-twitter

<comment><USER2> I may be in the minority but I've pretty much stopped using Twitter entirely. I got sick of the weird code language everyone uses. I don't understand it. I find the trending topics are often pop-culture centric or just flat out cryptic. I don't understand probably 25-30% of the weird one sided conversations I see. It just seems like non-sense since I can't see it in context. Even with a very small number of people I was following I found a number of individuals posted so often that I would have to go back 3 or 4 pages just to catch-up. On top of that 90% of my followers were SPAM so I just started ignoring the e-mails from Twitter about a new follower. Waste of my time to go find out it's yet another spammer or self-seriving individual who offers nothing but self promotion.

I'm not suggesting they're doomed or anything but just giving all the hypers a little perspective on why I find it to be basically unusable. Twitter has some major, massive, usability problems in my opinion. As it has grown it has become a mess -- the UI has not kept up with the inflation of users & posts. Content is not accessible due to arbitrary limits on posting that requires people to use excessive abbreviations and acronyms. There's a whole lexicon behind some of the most basic features that is not immediately obvious.

<comment><USER3> Do you think a threaded view would help? I find it can be tedious having to dive backward through a chain of "in reply to XXX" links.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is anyone else getting tired of articles about "the value of twitter" or about what should twitter do next and so on?

I mean yeah, it's an interesting case-study, but shouldn't we be focusing on other stuff too instead of rambling on and on about a messaging service?

<comment> onreact-com If you are tired of it, ignore it. IMHO. Don't tell others what to do. Using your logic we've had to tell people to shut up about Apple, Google and Microsoft as well.

<comment><USER4> > _Don't tell others what to do_

Why not? Everybody does it, including you in the above sentence :)

> _Using your logic we've had to tell people to shut up about Apple, Google > and Microsoft as well_

No, that's not the logic of my post. And yes, I would prefer if fewer articles were about established businesses or about business that haven't found a business model and there's none in sight ... and more about new ways of thinking, new algorithms, new technological breakthroughs and new business models (that are actually working).

Maybe Twitter is alluring because it is a simple, yet very popular service. But you're not going to implement the next Twitter and all the low-hanging fruits have already been taken.

<comment> onreact-com "> Don't tell others what to do

Why not?"

Because it's rude, condescending and self righteous.

"Everybody does it, including you in the above sentence :)"

In German we say "how you shout into the woods so it echoes."

I won't argue with all the pessimism you uttered later but it's astounding how some people manage to deny even to most gigantic successes) A billion? Boooh!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The value of twitter is questionable at best. For example are people still quiting twitter at such large numbers? You don't see people quiting facebook all of a sudden.

I quit twitter about a day after friends got me to sign up, I used the real time search for a couple weeks after that. The problem I found was that real time search wasn't very useful (except for maybe mass panic about mj dying).

If twitter can someone grow and KEEP users then maybe they will have a business with worth but they are going to need a bigger pull than tweet what you. are doing/thinking or heard.

</comment><comment><USER6> What's up with the disclaimer?

 _"stuckk.net is a blog by Andrew Wansley and Joe Huston. We are contractually required to post 750 words a week."_

Anyone ever see that on a blog before?

<comment><USER7> My initial reaction upon seeing that is that it sounds like an up front apology. Something along the lines of "Look I know that last post was unfocused drivel, but we had to get something, anything up by midnight or be in breach of contract".

(disclaimer I have not read the blog so I know nothing of its actual quality)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> i think this article, like most, concentrates on the value of of using other people's tweets, but doesn't touch on the value of actually submitting tweets.

i can understand why submitting tweets might be valuable for celebrities and companies (to message a massive audience at once), but otherwise there isn't much value in using/switching to twitter as a platform for which you communicate with friends.

</comment><comment> onreact-com I wonder why people still have to explain that Twitter has value. After all this company is worth at least 1 billion $. Unless we're all have been abducted by aliens and brainwashed to use it there must be some value otherwise the billion wouldn't be there to back it up.

People who want to convince us that Twitter has no value wanted to tell us the same thing about Facebook a year ago. Now they earn money already, one year earlier than planned.

To me this sounds like envy. Everybody believing that s/he has the best startup idea out there but instead something "value-less" like Twitter is worth a billion. Get over it and try to copy the Twitter business model instead and make some money.

There were people who didn't believe that airplanes would ever fly. They're too heavy! The same kind of mentality abounds when it comes to Twitter critics.</comment>


Microsoft launches Project Bonsai, an AI development platform for industrial sys - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2020/05/19/microsoft-launches-project-bonsai-an-ai-development-platform-for-industrial-systems/ <comment><USER2> This is going to be amazing to see how you can teach a machine to learn.</comment>


100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Man's Library - <AUTHOR> http://artofmanliness.com/2008/05/14/100-must-read-books-the-essential-mans-library/ <comment><USER2> The Top N lists feel so much like digg. Books are pretty personal decisions - the first page included a few large, challenging books that personally I couldn't be bothered with, and it really felt like stuff was shoehorned in just because it was "supposed" to be there. But I have read other large challenging books and been rewarded, so maybe that's just me.

Personally I'd recommend

\- read more than 100 books.

\- read "Catch 22" - the blurb here does not do justice to how funny the book is. I still remember how much my sides hurt.

<comment><USER3> Yay, I'm going to model my library after someone else's opinion of what I ought to read! Literature ought to be a popularity contest!

I think I've read over half of the volumes mentioned there, and disliked a lot of them. I thought "The Grapes of Wrath" was awful, and never did figure out why anybody was ever impressed by "The Catcher In The Rye". To me, both of those were good examples of books that people read because other people read them, and nobody can really describe why they're so profound, but since everybody else has read them, they must be. And, among all these "profound" works, they included "Into Thin Air". I enjoyed it, and I used to be a climber, but what's it doing on that list?

Then, there are the many titles not found on the list. How about "The Decameron", for one? "Pale Blue Dot"? "A Brief History of Time"? "Cosmos"? "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam"?

And, I'd argue that reading should be done as much for enjoyment as for edification. So, why not some "Calvin and Hobbes"? Or "Words I Wish I Wrote"? Or some Neil Gaiman or Greg Bear or George RR Martin?

I'm not ranting at you; I agree with you 100%. Your comment just seemed like an appropriate place to attach a rant against the article. :-)

<comment><USER2> Just to illustrate the gist of what both of us are saying, I loved "Catcher in the Rye." It was my disaffected youth, so I identified strongly with Holden Caulfield.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hate to agree with "artofmanliness.com", but aside from the obligatory Ayn Rand bullshit, the list wasn't too bad.

<comment><USER5> Why is Ayn Rand bullshit?

<comment><USER6> You don't need to write a 600 page book to convince people to be selfish.

<comment><USER3> Aaaargh. According to her own words, Rand didn't set out to convince anybody of anything. In fact, if a particular reader needed to be convinced of any of Rand's ideals, then that reader probably wouldn't understand what Rand was writing about anyway -- and indeed I find that that describes the bulk of people commenting on her stories.

From the introduction written in "The Fountainhead":

"Was The Fountainhead written for the purpose of presenting my philosophy? ... This is the motive and purpose of my writing: the projection of an ideal man. The portrayal of a moral ideal, as my ultimate literary goal ... Let me stress this: my purpose is NOT the philosophical enlightenment of my readers..."

...and so forth. Emphasis was hers, BTW. Having read both "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead", I didn't need to read an author's introduction to know that they were both simply works of fiction intended to glorify ideas that she thought were important. What's most frustrating is the way people conflate those ideas; the notion of a society without any regulation at all was only a minor element in a work of fiction intended to describe this complete exaltation of creativity.

I would have expected that reverence for the creative human spirit would be better received here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fiction books are overrated. I've read most of the books listed there and I don't have an impression that they've changed my life or my way of thinking. The only reason why I did so was social pressure to be an erudit. 100 of these books will change you less than Blackswan etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> most hackers are already anarchistic and or libertarians so it isn't surprising that we think Ayn Rand is bullshit. We're already individualistic and questioning of the status quo. But for people whom aren't like this Ayn Rand can be an important author to read. For example women tend to be more caring and communal instead of selfish and rational. It doesn't surprise me that successful business women really like Atlas Shrugged. They need to hear a justification for the pursuit of selfish aims moreso than a libertarian does.

The things that hit close to home but are slightly off bother people a lot more than things from left field. evangelical christians touting their creationist museum bothers me more than muslims beating women, even though the latter is worse. The evangelicals are in my backyard. Likewise libertarians are bothered by Rand because she espouses some of our ideals but horribly twists others.

<comment><USER9> Hackers are more liberal than libertarian. Rand embodies libertarianism. I assume that's what you meant?

<comment><USER8> what definition of liberal and libertarian are you going on?

<comment><USER9> I don't know of a definition of libertarian that Ayn Rand doesn't fit into. Technically she was an objectivist and spoke out against the anarchist libertarians, who are mostly gone from the movement now. By today's standards she'd be a true libertarian.

<comment><USER8> Ayn Rand was a strict Laissez-Faire capitalist while libertarian political ideology encompasses a broader swath of positions on government regulation. Anarcho-libertarians believe in the totally free market while more moderate libertarians believe that the primary purpose of governmnet is as an intermediate between an individuals natural rights and the repercussions of the free market (externalities).

<comment><USER9> Go ahead and Google "Ayn Rand libertarian". You'll see quotes immediately like "Russian-born Ayn Rand (1905-1982) brought more people into the libertarian movement than anybody else."

Also from her Wikipedia bio "Rand is considered one of the three founding mothers (along with Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson) of modern American libertarianism"

Rand was too intelligent to be an anarchist.

<comment><USER8> I think I get what you're saying. Rand was a minarchist in most senses. The waters of libertarianism are very muddied.Just browsing wikipedia you get liberalism, libertarianism, calssical conservativism, capiatl L Libertarianism, minarchism,and calissical liberalism. and the terms mean different things internationally.

<comment><USER9> I love how I somehow get downmodded for pointing out a relatively simple fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow is that the worst website I've ever seen. It's like someone took this Skin Bracer advertisement and turned it into a blog:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9znxZRWQc4>

</comment><comment><USER10> I never liked long lists of books, they tend to freak readers out too much. I think someone should pick one and if that one is any good, then it will lead you to the next, whatever it may be. Repeat as necessary :)</comment>


Ask HN: Why golang doesn't have ternary operator? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> A fairly short answer: code readability.

People seem to try to write their code as compact as possible, not realizing that they usually only write a piece of code once, but they and others will have to decipher and make sense of it a dozen times in the near future.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, when the logic is very complicated to be represented in a line of code.

<comment><USER3> (I use "conditional expression" in place of "ternary operator" here.)

I have no idea why GoLang doesn't have conditional expressions.

I find a conditional expression to be much easier to parse than if-else statements.

If it's too hard to read, then why is LISP written almost totally as expressions, and is still considered viable?

      a ? b ? c : d : e

is much easier for me to read and understand than

      if (a) {
        if (b) {
           r = c;
        } else {
           r = d;
        }
      } else {
        r = e;
      }

GoLang is supposed to be designed to remove "boilerplate code" and reduce code size, so I don't know why it doesn't have conditional expressions.

Without conditional expressions, C++11 (but not C++14 and later) constexpr functions wouldn't be Turing-complete.

<comment><USER4> Lisp is unambiguous, whereas:

       x = a ? b : c;

Oops; that assigns x = a, and tests it. Not if that = is that of an initializer, though:

       int x = a ? : b : c;

so now we have an expression that changes meaning if we have to split the initialization off into an assignment.

You're often better off if you put it behind a macro:

      #define IF(X, Y, Z) ((X) ? (Y) : (Z))

In C coding, a lot of ternary action happens behind the curtain of preprocessing, where expression is almost fully parenthesized.

<comment><USER3> C non-sequitor. Assignment is always lower in precedence than conditional expressions.

CPP macros is red herring.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>