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Comment by hbhakhra | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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)

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

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.

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.

type theory has broad applicability, since it serves as the basis for all modern programming languages design and research. another nice example is kripke logical relations, which can be used to give a model for a programming language in which you can prove certain safety lemmas for critical code.

Again I'm being a bit self-serving, but I think Neil deGrasse Tyson put it better [1, from 1:35-2:30]:

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0SUpwIAjQs&t=1m35s

Can't stress this enough, but a lot of TCS research only becomes valuable once you put it into the wild, and that takes a lot of interdisciplinary work.

A lot of the stuff in TCS is theory for the sake of theory, and one would want to avoid too much of this.

> Try set up a lab in Cambridge at some point down the road

MA or UK, though? Both would be awesome, I think, but I don't believe YC has any offices outside the US at the moment...?

Interdisciplinary work is incredibly hard to pull off in academia due to tribal affiliations. I think the MSR NYC lab (where I work), which consists of computer scientists, economists, and other social scientists, is one of the few places I've seen it actually flourish.

I don't think interdisciplinary work has to be between fields that disparate to begin with either. From personal experience, I think there are definite benefits from just having different fields of engineering collaborate and share ideas.

How will this research remain bias-free when salaries are being paid for by YC?

What happens when some of the research that is done paints some of the activities of YC or their companies in a less-than-positive light?

It's not really that different from work in another corporate research division (IBM, PARC, MSR, Bell Labs..). Even in academia you are still getting paid, and your work is influenced by funding frameworks, citation index and faculty interests.

Peer review has long been the traditional validation mechanism in science. I don't see why it wouldn't be applicable here.

Because as much as it is true that funding influences how some projects get started in academia, professors do get tenure. And they can and do things which would be totally offensive to a corporate parent. There is a totally different kind of publication coming out of even the old research labs and an academic institution, much less a modern corporation. A typical research lab does not need to worry about a bottom line - which a company (like YC) is obligated to care about.

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