
Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research? - sama
So far we&#x27;ve supported OpenAI and we will soon start the basic income project. We have a few ideas about what to do next, but we&#x27;d love to hear from the community about what we should be considering. Thanks!
======
mietek
[http://sens.org/](http://sens.org/). Humans need more lifespan, badly.

I’d have said AI safety, but it’s already on your list. Excellent.

I’d also have said basic income. Good to know you’re on it.

Meta-research. Academic publishing is obsolete, and knowledge should not be
paywalled. How many researchers already make use of
[https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar](https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar) or
[http://sci-hub.io/](http://sci-hub.io/)?

Bacteriophages. Antibiotics are running out, while phages have been tested by
the Soviets, and are available as an over-the-counter treatment in certain
countries.

Open-source infrastructure. How many ‘unicorns’ were only possible because of
years of prior volunteer work? See @nayafia’s recent post:
[https://medium.com/@nayafia/how-i-stumbled-upon-the-
internet...](https://medium.com/@nayafia/how-i-stumbled-upon-the-internet-s-
biggest-blind-spot-b9aa23618c58)

Feynman’s and Drexler’s molecular nanotechnology. Smalley muddied the waters,
and the National Research Council dropped the ball. We can do better than just
nanoelectronics.

See also “Ask PG: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea You Have Been
Pitched On?”, paying attention to the Yudkowsky Ambition scale:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4509934](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4509934)

~~~
derrida
> Humans need more lifespan, badly.

Do we? Or do we need more realistic perspective about death? Why quantity over
quality?

Seems there's _a lot_ of quality improvements that could be made [1]. For
instance, I read recently (can't recall source) that San Fransisco's homeless
is the least happy in the world. Also that the top 1% in the world make over
$35K a year, but there are far happier people than exist in middle America
living in poverty [2]. Looking at populations that are happier - but in
poverty - is perhaps an interesting study. Imagine a cross disciplinary study
between (perhaps) techniques used in epidemiology/health informatics &
anthropology / the humanities.

\---

[1] Notice that cancer, heart-disease, Alzheimer, etc research also falls into
this category - allowing people to live with less suffering.

[2] Yeah, 3 assertions, no sources, sorry - just my word & unreliable memory
of something someone said in a book once folks :)

~~~
JoshTriplett
> Or do we need more realistic perspective about death?

We do: we need to realize how horrible it is that we treat it so casually,
rather than as a tragedy. Perhaps then we'll _do_ something about it.

> [1] Notice that cancer, heart-disease, Alzheimer, etc research also falls
> into this category - allowing people to live with less suffering.

All three of which (especially the first and last) have heavy ties to aging.
It isn't just about living longer; it's about not aging. We're not talking
about getting a few more decades like those in your 90s; we're talking about
getting a few more centuries like those in your 30s-40s. (And hopefully that
will buy us enough time for the _next_ such improvement, and the next.)

~~~
bambax
Wanting to live forever has to be the apex of egoism and arrogance and all
that is wrong with the human mind. Death is good because it leaves room for
new people with new ideas.

Being against death reveals a profound misunderstanding about what life is
about, which is: finiteness, urgency, novelty, creativity.

~~~
increment_i
I suspect you're going to get hammered here but this is an incredibly
important point. Aging and death forces the passing of the torch from the old
generation to the new, and I think this is a crucial part of progress. A
tragedy on par with death would be the rise of some oligarchical class of
immortal technocrats, wielding power and influence for centuries on end.

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

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

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

~~~
zardo
More time to think about that too.

------
nugget
Mental health - specifically in a future where we may be increasingly more
connected virtually but increasingly less connected physically. In one or two
decades when the average urbanite is serviced by on-demand autonomous vehicles
and drones, works from home (or not at all), consumes news/media in a
personalized subreddit-like echo chamber interspersed with cleverly integrated
native advertising, and spends 10+ hours/week in VR, what are the implications
for their mental health? As physical community and socialization are often
pointed to as the greatest predictors of happiness, how do we best translate
that deep seated human need into the future? As medical science continues to
improve treatments for cancer, worn out joints, failing organs, and other
physical ailments, I think the mind will eventually emerge as ''the final
frontier'' of health care and well being.

~~~
codeshaman
That.

We still don't know what long-term exposure to highly condensed, highly
customized information does to our brains and social systems as a whole.

For example, there are signs that social network users are actually unhappy -
in other words - are experiencing all kinds of mental health issues.

It is well known that programmers experience "burn outs", which, from personal
experience, is a terrible and debilitating state sometimes even leading to
suicide.

There is addiction to gaming, chat, porn, social networks.

Mobile phones have exposed everyone to the infinite stream of
information/communication and I think this will lead to many more mental
health issues.

I think we are not yet prepared for the kind of impact that current and future
tech will have on our minds, so this would be a worthy field to invest in now.

------
dineshp2
Education.

Everyone knows it's broken,not effective anymore and literally a waste of time
and money. More so if you had the oppurtunity to experience what education
means in third world countries.Spoiler alert : it's a joke that will make you
cry.

It needs to be fixed as quickly as possible and research needs to be done for
alternatives to help people in the process of learning.Online education is a
good start, but we need something more effective.

By not fixing education, we are creating generations of people with just
pieces of paper(called degrees), having no real knowledge or even the thirst
for knowledge. Maybe I am not vocalizing my thoughts well enough, but you just
need to look at the state of education in third world countries to understand
my depression about education.

~~~
aylmao
Education isn't ideal now, but I don't think online education is a good start
or even a viable model.

Training more and better teachers is the way to go, especially in "third world
countries". Not only is there big issues with motivation and the whole
social/interactive/distant aspect to moocs; what do you do when you don't have
internet, or your device breaks? Now your education depends on a machine that
costs a couple hundred bucks, instead of a notebook, pencil and early morning.

Idk, I don't see online education as any more than just a sometimes-useful
alternative.

~~~
germinalphrase
I believe education will find a natural middle-ground.

In many instances the benefit of having an in-person instructor has much to do
with the social interaction/interpersonal support that they can give to a
struggling/minimally motivated student. That said, motivated learners don't
always need that kind of personal interaction and would benefit from self-
guided learning opportunities. This is obvious, but is hard to manage well.

In the end, I believe students will learn along a fluid spectrum from 'one-on-
one' to 'fully distributed online learning' \- both of which will heavily lean
on better tools.

There are tens of thousands of lessons, activities, individual interventions
and curriculum modifications created every day by instructors in this country
- but all of that knowledge and all those artifacts are effectively lost (as
almost nothing gets distributed) and the same creative labor is repeated over
and over.

So - we should be looking for better ways of mediating in-person instruction
to both improve that kind of instruction and as an engine for the creation of
universally accessible learning materials. Students who have the
ability/proximity to a physical schools get the benefits of personal
interaction, while students who cannot get to school (or are underserved by
that school) can get the benefits of time shifted lessons/activities/etc. from
anywhere in the world.

~~~
aylmao
^ That sounds viable. I want to point out though, that I hope this doesn't
mean states will stop trying to get more schools closer to people, or more
teachers trained. As good as one-to-one, "personalised" instruction can be,
students gain a lot from learning and working together with other students in
a classroom.

Tech should be a tool, and not a replacement for teachers IMHO.

~~~
germinalphrase
Absolutely - and I make these suggestions as a high school teacher. I also
have downriver concerns about mass, compulsory data collection on the
cognitive development of our youth (though that is not a concern exclusive to
education).

------
tryitnow
Aubrey de Grey's SENS approach to creating and maintaining a state of
negligible senescence in humans.

Every advanced society faces an aging population. This population will put
massive strains on healthcare expenses. It could also strain the economy as
the elder population collects public sector pensions and slowly depletes its
savings (i.e. retirement funds). The latter effect could be mitigated by
automation.

Paradoxically our success in treating diseases that kill us now will merely
make us victims of potentially more terrible diseases in the future. Look at
the experiences of centenarians in the last decade:

[http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db233.htm](http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db233.htm)

Alzheimer's will become increasingly common as will cognitive decline in
general. What happens to all those people who don't die of cancer or heart
disease? They will often succumb to slower acting chronic diseases involving
long-term states of suffering and mental anguish.

The way out of this mess is to treat aging itself, not just the diseases that
currently kill us. SENS targets the underlying mechanisms of aging.

Research into negligible senescence can also lay the foundation for
potentially profitable therapeutics. Unlike the disease-centric model the
total addressable market is nearly everyone.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
I'm not sure it makes sense to put effort into these kinds of programs. As an
example, a specific approach SENS wants to develop is lengthening telomeres in
your body. But scientists are not even sure that shortening telomeres
contribute significantly to aging-related diseases.

Derek Lowe (who knows drug development better than any of us) made a very
interesting comment recently on the cancer research "moonshot" funding
presented in the State of the Union speech:

""" Trying to cure cancer in this way would be like trying to go to the moon
without really knowing how rocket engines actually work, without being quite
sure if Newton’s laws of motion would hold up, and with some real uncertainty
in the position of the moon. """

The disparity between what we know today, and what we would have to know to
"cure" cancer, is quite unfathomable to us computer hackers.

~~~
reasonattlm
Perhaps ironically, lengthening telomeres such as via telomerase therapies is
one of the things that a lot of other researchers are hot on and is not
actually on the SENS agenda.

Since those other researchers are definitely advocating progress towards the
use of telomerase therapies in humans, and it is inarguably the case that
telomerase gene therapy extends life modestly in mice, probably by stimulating
stem cell activity, your point still seems incoherent. See for example this
position piece by Maria Blasco:
[http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.7020.1](http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.7020.1)

From my position telomere length looks a lot a measure of aging rather than a
cause, and telomerase therapies are something I'd consider risky at this point
in humans - our telomere dynamics and telomerase setup is very different from
that of mice, and I don't think it is safe to assume that slowing of aging and
induced regeneration in mice without cancer risk is necessarily going to
happen in humans. You don't know until you try, of course, and there is a
contingent that will be trying. Note that at least one human has already
disagreed with that assessment and had telomerase gene therapy, the CEO of
BioViva.

From the SENS perspective, telomere length is something that will take care of
itself if you create rejuvenation by repairing the causes of aging. Average
telomere length in tissues is a product of stem cell activity and cell
turnover rate, and aging diminishes the former, and that is a reaction to
rising levels of damage. Get rid of the damage and stem cells should get back
to work because the signaling environment will revert back to how it is in
youth.

~~~
DrScump
<From my position telomere length looks a lot a measure of aging rather than a
cause>

Sure, so they need to just keep in mind that the goal is not to lengthen (or
protect) telomeres for their own sake. But telomeres could at least help serve
as a metric or proxy for therapies that _do_ slow or arrest aging overall.

Meanwhile, Metformin is crazy cheap.

------
visualsearchsv
Large Scale Medical Data Mining research, similar to OpenAI. Specifically
Computational Healthcare a Search and Aggregation Engine for Medical Records &
Claims. We believe that this is a classic Software eating the world situation
and the time is perfect for it.

Here is the link
[http://www.computationalhealthcare.com](http://www.computationalhealthcare.com)

We have access to almost 130 Million de-identified medical records from
approximately 36 Million patients (~10% of US population) this includes all
Inpatient, ED, Ambulatory Surgery records between 2006-2011 from California.
To put simply if you lived in California and went to a hospital there is 95.9%
chance that we have your data. This data has been available for quite some
time but its use has been hindered due to lack of good software. The data has
led to significant research, e.g. my collaborator (not me) published a paper
showing risk of strokes following pregnancies in New England Journal of
Medicine last year.

At Cornell Tech & Weill Cornell Medical College, we have developed a Search
and Aggregation engine that will revolutionize how researchers and physicians
use this data. Imagine your mother with Leukemia in Remission just got
admitted for Pneumonia. With our software, the Physician will be quickly able
to asses likelihood of this occurring and rule out any confounding adverse
events. Or consider that there is a rare combination of diagnosis e.g. Graves
Disease and Clotting disorder that is indicative of a unique genetic mutation
likely to offer novel insight into disease process. With our software
questions like these can be answered within second, Today & Right now.

The Data, Legal structure and fully functional prototype are available right
now. We were counting on support from AHRQ, but sadly the agency has run into
trouble due significant budget cuts.

~~~
zo1
>" _We have access to almost 130 Million de-identified medical records from
approximately 36 Million patients (~10% of US population) this includes all
Inpatient, ED, Ambulatory Surgery records between 2006-2011 from California_ "

Not to put a spanner in your works, as I agree your goal is worthy of a lot of
effort from the general public. But, how exactly did you get access to this
data, and is it legal?

Additionally, from my point of view, even if my medical "records" were de-
personalized and made anonymous, I still want to have full control over
who/what get's access to it.

~~~
yummyfajitas
By suitably modifying queries to make them "differentially private" (technical
term), one can allow queries on the data set which have an arbitrarily low
probability of releasing personal information.

[http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/74339/dwork_tamc.pdf](http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/74339/dwork_tamc.pdf)

Building a database which can be locked down to differentially private
primitives (differential privacy composes) would allow researchers to
partially unlock this data while ensuring that your medical records are
private.

As long as we choose epsilon (the privacy parameter) sufficiently low there is
then no ethical need to ask a bunch of fickle data points for permission.

~~~
visualsearchsv
We do something similar. We precompute/aggregate exhaustively by following
certain aggregation strategies. The aggregated statistics are further
processed to ensure privacy.

Differential Privacy cannot be directly applied since the underlying
assumptions are too strong. An important consideration is that the error/noise
added is independent of the answer. Which means that the system becomes
unusable for almost all queries other than general trends.

By restricting the query structure, we no longer need large amount of noise.
Privacy of hospitals and providers is also very important and cannot be
encoded in the Differential Privacy framework. Again this is still a hotly
debated issue. But even the most vocal supporters of differential privacy
agree that it might not be directly applicable for healthcare domain.

Following are some of the paper that discuss this:

[http://www.openu.ac.il/personal_sites/tamirtassa/download/co...](http://www.openu.ac.il/personal_sites/tamirtassa/download/conferences/anonymity_dp.pdf)

[http://www.jetlaw.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/Bambauer_Fi...](http://www.jetlaw.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/Bambauer_Final.pdf)

~~~
yummyfajitas
So I'm not really an expert on privacy (my main interest in differential
privacy is avoiding overfitting), but isn't differential privacy by definition
necessary on an individual level?

I.e., if you don't have differential privacy, then by definition there is a
de-anonymizing query and you can get PII out.

Privacy of hospitals/providers is a separate issue, and yeah, it's pretty
clear that differential privacy doesn't work for them. Thanks for the links,
I'll check them out.

Edit: after reading your second article, it's deeply misleading. They assume
that to compute a mean, one must compute 2 queries - sum(x) and len(x), each
of which must be differentially private. But that's totally wrong! You can in
fact run the query mean(x) + noise, and this last query itself can be
differentially private.

The article also notes that queries on small data sets require more noise to
be differentially private, which is totally true, and obvious.

This also, however, ignores the fact that most statistical inference drawn
from such queries will be nonsense even without differential privacy. See,
e.g., this article for an example of why:
[https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2015/ab_testing_segments_...](https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2015/ab_testing_segments_and_goals.html)

This is a very bad critique of differential privacy.

~~~
visualsearchsv
The second article is undoubtedly flawed in several aspects, that's why I put
clifton et. al. first, which I think lays out the case for studying non-formal
models.

Regarding

"""This also, however, ignores the fact that most statistical inference drawn
from such queries will be nonsense even without differential privacy."""

This is not true. Just because the number returned by a count query on a very
large dataset (~100 Million visits) is very small (~100) does not
automatically means that the result is nonsense or can be disregarded as
error. Doing that requires understanding the query and a hypothesis with good
prior on expected outcome. E.g. intersection of two rare diseases. Where you
would otherwise expect it to be very small, but there might be an underlying
genetic reason / physiological process which might lead to higher prevalence.
Or a group of hospitals using tainted batch of medicines leading to
unexplained increased mortality.

Consider this paper where there were only 1000 cases (only 248 strokes) per
1.6 Million patients (even larger if you consider the entire 20 Million
patients present in the data). However in spite of the small number the
authors showed that the increase was statistically significant by comparing
with same period a year later.

[http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1311485](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1311485)

Again I am not denying what you wrote in the blogpost. But in medicine and the
analyses for which such databases are used, the investigators have access to
very good priors.

------
robbrown451
Explore game theoretically sound ways to start new companies as "worker co-
ops" and to reward participants. The idea being to aim toward a future where
there is a large gray area between "employee" and "entrepreneur."

The companies formed don't have to be start-ups per se: they could be as
simple (and low risk) as a group of people who build web sites and apps for
clients, but would like to have a stake in it rather than just "working for
the man."

Since it is research, it is ok if things are explored that would require
changes in laws.

I can imagine a site (or better yet, a standard protocol) -- sort of
Kickstarter-ish, but different -- where people start projects, gather
contributors, "pay" those contributors by giving them equity (or actually pay
them, if the company is bringing in revenue).

There would be ways of holding votes (presumably voting power is weighted by
how much you have contributed), and various checks and balances to prevent
participants from gaming it. Everyone would probably be able to weigh in on
the contributions of others, in a carefully designed way that encourages
everyone to be productive, cooperative, and creative.

The idea is that there are a huge number of people out there with talent,
creativity, and a willingness to take some risks, but most of them aren't
really entrepreneurial types per se. This would be both a matchmaking site for
getting people with complementary talents and personalities together, as well
as a service for handling equity calculations as people contribute hours (and
various other things that streamline the process so people with talent can
spend their efforts using their actual talents).

Obviously there is some overlap with what Y-Combinator does, but this is a way
of scaling it out much larger, in ways that could dramatically increase
innovation as well as increasing job satisfaction.

~~~
shrikrishna
There have been some attempts at this - assembly.com and one other company
that I don't remember the name of. Has not worked out yet, as the contributors
usually lose focus after a while

~~~
rorykoehler
I was sad to see assembly.com close down. Seemed like a pretty solid structure
for this kind of endeavour.

------
losvedir
Low cost, high density housing that's safe, clean, and comfortable. I think
this goes hand in hand with the basic income research: what good is a basic
income if any decent housing is more expensive than the income?
(Alternatively: how do we fund basic income when the basic cost of living is
so high?)

I think there's a lot of ways housing could be made cheaper via building
materials and techniques, architecture, technology, policies, and processes.
One of the issues with extremely cheap housing is keeping it safe and
desirable for tenants, e.g., dealing with drug abusers and dealers (which
frequently make our current low-cost housing dangerous).

~~~
beefman
Housing is expensive because it's a positional good, not because it's
expensive to produce.

~~~
erikpukinskis
It's only positional because density is limited. If the market were allowed to
build up wherever they wanted each "position" would basically be an infinite
resource...

~~~
jononor
What are the good arguments for keeping it so?

Of course if one could build anything anywhere, it would be unreasonable to
demand the water/el/internet/sewage grid to be extended there at no costs, so
some alternative mechanism to ensure such services would be necessary. Same
goes for other communal services like healthcare and education, I guess.

~~~
erikpukinskis
All the arguments basically boil down to "it would change the character of the
neighborhood/city".

------
timr
Clean water and/or sewage. Almost a billion people don't have access to
either, because the infrastructure doesn't exist for municipal sewage or water
treatment. Huge numbers of people die from preventable diseases, simply
because their water is fouled.

Until cellphones, most of the world didn't have reliable communications,
because nobody could build the necessary infrastructure. Wireless changed
that. We need the equivalent breakthrough for water treatment.

Dean Kamen is doing interesting stuff in this area (a stirling-engine based
system for water distillation [1]), but his approach is still limited by costs
and distribution.

Solving this problem would literally change the world, and unlike many of the
suggestions here, it's an area where there's hope that a small research team
could make a dent (for example, Kamen wanted to raise $1M for Slingshot.)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingshot_(water_vapor_distill...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingshot_\(water_vapor_distillation_system\))

~~~
siosonel
Simple, appropriate, low tech solution for the sewer issue - sawdust toilet:
[http://humanurehandbook.com/humanure_toilet.html](http://humanurehandbook.com/humanure_toilet.html)

------
a_bonobo
Research into "weird" species

There's a ton of money that goes into research of well-known plant species
like rice, wheat, maize etc.

However, there are myriads of species where we know not much beyond the
taxonomic assignment and getting funding to research these species is a drag
("How do you want to monetize that?"). Yet there's a wealth of novel
resistances, food sources, medicines, biochemical pathways etc. hidden away in
these species, there's just no funding.

There are some companies which sponsor small research projects into organisms
like that (edit: mostly for advertising purposes), for example PacBio awards
one genome assembly project of the "most interesting species" (read:
underfunded). This species won last time:
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature15714.html)

It's a weird tiny grass which can completely dry out and then come back to
live, imagine what we could do when we'd take this pathway out and put it into
wheat! Completely unresearched (Google Scholar has 122 papers mentioning the
name, edit: Oryza sativa (rice) has 387,000) yet massive potential.

It may not be the best fit to your funding scheme because research like this
goes far beyond 5 years.

Disclaimer: I work in plant bioinformatics (canola)

Later Edit: There's also experiment.com for crowdfunding research, but it's
really hard to get a project crowdfunded if it's unpopular (compare: "We have
this tiny plant we know nothing about" vs. "We have this tiny plant that may
cure cancer", maybe the plant you know nothing about does that too?). YC could
fit its funding scheme above "single project" and below "decades long funding"

------
elcritch
Scaling and automation of biological, medical, and biomedical research. There
are huge tracks of research areas which essentially are technologically
backwards. From poor usage of statistics (see all the the replication issues
in cancer research, psychology, and etc) to the lack of high quality
programming tools to efficiently solve problems. More startups building cheap,
applicable, and open-specification hardware with open source software could be
a huge boon. The hardware and equipment situation of many scientific labs is
stuck in the 90's at best and often based on equipment developed in the 50's
and 60's.

Having just finished a master's in material science in applied bio-mechanical
research I am personally aware of the lack of basic equipment and tools.
Machine learning techniques for example could be applied to many areas of
experimental research in biological settings but most labs do not have the
time, money, or expertise to apply it. Another possible option would be a sort
of "professional software development co-op" for scientific research. Being
able to buy (subsidized) development resources might be incredibly helpful.
The cost could possibly be offset by forming partnerships to commercialize
valuable research, similar to a YC model where the few successes could fund
the other.

The system for basic scientific research also seems broken. Much of the data
used in many fields (especially nuclear research) is based on (very excellent)
research from the 50's. We're essentially riding on accrued capital which will
likely reach a limiting point in the coming decades.

------
cperciva
Software engineering. There has been very little _experimental_ work done
here, simply because it's incredibly expensive to perform interventional
research. But if we had solid research which said "software development method
X produces software faster and with fewer bugs than software development
method Y" it would be a great boost to startups, and YC is ideally positioned
to perform such research given that it is surrounded by (and funds) lots of
software development projects.

~~~
eldavido
I agree. For how much scientific education many software developers have, it's
fascinating how little we actually understand about defect rates,
productivity, and a whole host of other issues.

------
fossuser
Academic research/funding is broken - it'd be cool if there was a way to
create something to fix the incentives.

I think that's kind of the goal of YC research in a narrow sense, but it'd be
interesting if there was a way to align the incentives so scientists
collaborated more instead of hiding research so they don't get 'scooped'. At
this same time this could get rid of the academic journals that charge huge
amounts of money for access to publicly funded research by selling prestige to
desperate researchers (so they can get more funding).

If research was somehow more like open source development where people got
credit for their contributions and hypothesis, experiments and papers were
worked on in the open (all open access) maybe science and research would be
better.

I think scientists want this and universities would want this - there needs to
be a better way to get credibility than publishing papers in famous journals.

~~~
HandleTheJandal
Science Exchange (YC S11) is solving this problem. The basic idea is that
instead of the "authorship bartering" model that's pervasive in research today
we move towards a market-based collaboration model. Basically we encourage
researchers to collaborate because it's financially lucrative to do so. By
making researchers wealthy they're able to release themselves from being
dependent on prestige publications for generating funding. As a result of this
we can start to deprecate the somewhat toxic "public or perish" incumbent
system. If your entire livelihood relies on being published in a high impact
journal you're incentivized to do anything to make that happen. That is not a
system that promotes accuracy of information.

~~~
fossuser
This sounds like a good idea and is solving part of the problem (getting
funding), I suspect solving prestige will be harder though - it's not just
money that drives it (YC may be in a unique position to be able to grant
prestige).

Scientists want to be published in 'Nature' because it's good for their career
(citations) and respect from peers. If there was a way to fix that incentive
where it was more prestigious to do the research in the open and by
collaborating (like FOSS development) that would be a big win.

------
jakecarpenter
Addiction. It affects so many of us-maybe all of us-greatly. Our legal system,
education system, healthcare system are all heavily burdened by it, and they
all treat it differently. Good solid science (and a health dose of PR) in the
name of ending addiction could go a long way towards making the world a lot
cooler place.

------
lhh
Nutrition. A lot of this might just be meta-research, but I feel like we still
don't really understand what an optimal diet looks like, and if optimal diet
might differ from person to person. We learn more every day about how big of a
factor it is in disease processes, especially the two biggest ones in the US -
heart disease and cancer.

I think preventive care in general is a great area to dive into, and this
seems like a good place to start.

~~~
peteretep
Not only that, it's hard to think of an area with quite so much "common sense"
and "bro science", but also an area that should be so easy to research. Take
people away on a residential and you can control exactly what they eat, their
exercise etc. One of the nice things is that it'd be hard for anyone to patent
findings either (I imagine).

If I ever have enough money to dabble in my own research, it'll be there. How
great would it be to be able to distribute nutritional advice to the world
that was actually true, rather than whatever fad diets are being dreamt up or
common-sense "wisdom" is being passed down.

~~~
sandGorgon
Agree on this. Especially research on Soylent like nutrition products for
third world countries. Or the cheapest way to build muscle. Or a Crossfit
alternative that's free and does not need equipment.

~~~
peteretep
CrossFit is already free - they've been posting the WOD on their blog for free
since forever. You could just take their body weight exercises and pick one
randomly every day and you'd be doing CrossFit.

~~~
sandGorgon
hence the research. Yes - I have been following people like Layne Norton, Lyle
Macdonald, etc. for years. And Crossfit has a huge number of critics for its
program. It would be see results of research on a safer, better program/diet.

~~~
DrScump
But even people who read research diligently (like Lyle) are only as informed
as the research is accurate. Look back to what Lyle was writing 16 years ago
(strict caloric arithmetic, the discovery of leptin will make dietary
obsessions obsolete, microbiome doesn't matter, etc.)

~~~
sandGorgon
agreed - which is why I think YC should spend on fitness/nutrition research.

I personally think this has the potential to be a moonshot - if an unbiased
entity (with no ties to entrenched interests) would spend money on research.

------
monk_e_boy
Robotic or automated environment clean up. Open source. Fish plastic out of
the sea. Oil out of water. Things like that.

Solar powered (or wind etc) little machines that communities can buy (e.g. the
local surfing club) and we can let lose into the problem area.

~~~
joeyspn
Along with clean nuclear fusion (already well funded), this is another great
idea. I think there are already a couple of big projects working on this...

[http://www.theoceancleanup.com/](http://www.theoceancleanup.com/)

~~~
monk_e_boy
A little robot that would patrol a beach picking up small plastic bits 5mm -
15mm in size would be amazing. There is so much of that crap on our beaches.
It's crazy. Also making a robot move on sand, rocks, pebbles, keep out of the
way of people and dogs. Navigate sand and rivers and the tide. It's hard for
people to do, we see people fall over, or get wet feet from a big wave washing
up the beach or get cut off by the tide quite often.

------
Alex3917
I want to see someone do forest gardens / permaculture at scale. Right now the
largest projects have only been a handful of acres. I'd like to see someone
setup a forest garden that's 1000+ acres, so that we can learn more about the
economics, viability, and best practices for actively managing entire
continents to passively produce food the way the native americans supposedly
did.

I realize this is out there, but I also think it's something that's viable
from a cost perspective, and also has the ability to capture people's
imagination like few other things. I'd also like to see an emphasis on
promoting fungi in the ecosystem. Right now there isn't a single park in the
entire world that's actively managed to promote the growth of edible
mushrooms. And while setting that up would take 20+ years, it wouldn't be that
expensive and again I think there would be something kind of magical about it.

------
ratpik
Corruption.

Bureaucracy is responsible for a lot of corruption. Getting things done in the
government is meeting a lot of people and filling a lot of forms. Bribing is
sometimes the shortest path to get work done.

Having interoperable data systems, forms that can be filled online and an easy
way for citizens to understand the law and fill the papers without a human
touchpoint would make things much more seamless and transparent.

P.S. - Low level corruption might not be such a big deal in the developed
countries but is an efficiency drain on about 70% of the global population
living beyond that.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index#/...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index#/media/File:Transparency_international_2014.png)

~~~
effie
So the root problem is oversized bureaucracy, corruption is a consequence?

~~~
ratpik
The root has more to do with the socio-economic status of the population. In a
country where everyone made more or less the same and worked about the same
and respected each other the same, corruption would be an anomaly.

Long term solution is to improve the fundamentals - education, inequality,
access to basics.

------
rmason
How do you reboot a city?

I think you should research urban agriculture. Take Detroit as an example
because I grew up there and return often. Detroit currently has hundreds of
vacant acres of cheap land that you could leverage to boot a new city. I think
there are large opportunities in urban agriculture. Parts of the city are a
food desert, until three years ago there wasn’t a single supermarket in a city
with close to 700,000 people.

While best practices are pretty settled for regular farming, it’s decidedly
not so for urban Ag. Detroit has a quite high rate of unemployment, especially
for teenagers. There’s an opportunity to provide those kids with their first
job and create value for the community where currently there is none.

There are people who want to do it, but the risk is too high because there are
so many unanswered questions. Create a handbook of best practices and I think
you could use it just as easily in Los Angeles, Philadelphia or Chicago as
well as in Detroit.

~~~
eldavido
I've never understood "urban agriculture". Cities have one of the highest land
prices due to their proximity to people/commercial centers, I don't know why
turning that into a farm, which takes tons of land, makes sense.

On the other hand, I'm very interested in studying the very long-range
evolution of cities (500+ years). It fascinates me that Detroit was kind of
this pre-Silicon Valley area with high concentration of a single industry and
tons of wealth, and after that's left, what happens now? How does a city
reconfigure itself when its tax base drops by, say, 50%? How does it deal with
its pension obligations, massive infrastructure bill from all the now-not-
needed roads, parks, water pipes, city lights, and buildings? In short, how
does a city "scale down" in a way that isn't damaging to its institutions or
retirees?

------
joeyspn
Another vote for Aubrey de Grey's SENS. It means funding indirectly fields
like alzheimer research, cancer research or cardiovascular disease research
with radical and different approaches, more startup-like. Conventional
academic research in these fields is slow-paced like things inside a big
corporation, and is also constricted/handicapped by the "Publish or Perish"
dogma..

As Sean Parker said, _the problem is essentially hackable_... (the problem is
in the process).
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFqovaiSfJI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFqovaiSfJI)

PS: Peter Thiel funded SENS, but clearly it won't be enough...

------
aman-pro
Food.

The food production is not keeping up with the boom in population, specially
in the developing nations. In India, where I come from, farmers are running
away from Farming. (Because it's not profitable enough to even feed a family
and pay for school fees). We desperately need ways to increase the food
production, without increasing the land or water usage. A way of doing it can
genetic engineering (Supercharged Photosyntesis?), but even this solution
looks like a distant reality. May be not enough people are working on it or
there is a lack of funding here...

Food is the most basic requirement for survival for any life form. Fund this
research... YC will be eternally blessed! :D

~~~
thangalin
Yes.

Vertically plane production within vertical farms, low-watt high-luminance
light-emitting plasma bulbs, full-spectrum plant health monitoring systems,
fully automated growth (from seed to crop) and harvesting, highly-efficient
HVAC systems for cooling and CO2 regulation, aeroponically grown foodstuffs,
and electric self-driving delivery vehicles.

A six-storey, 64m^2 (approx. 1 acre) vertical farm can sustain 1,000 people
using ~1,500 kilowatts (assuming certain inevitable leaps in lighting
efficiency). Or approximately 1,200 homes. New Jersey has a population density
of 1218.1 people per square mile. A $2.7 million geothermal power plant would
provide sufficient energy for the farm's annual lighting, to give an idea of
costs. That power would not be enough to provide the energy for automation or
recharging delivery vehicles.

Plants don't absorb much of the green spectrum. If they could be biohacked to
use more of the spectrum, the energy requirements could be cut substantially.
(Another option is to dramatically improve either laser light or plasma light
in the optimal spectrum for a particular crop.)

Additionally, a lot more research needs to be made in finding out how to grow
food aeroponically. Currently, I think it's limited to tomatoes, greens, and
possibly some tubers.

To introduce minerals into the aeroponic water supply (Nitrogen, Phosphorus,
Potassium, Calcium, Sulfur, Magnesium, Boron, Chlorine, Manganese, Iron, Zinc,
Copper, and Molybdenum) requires fish (salmon, catfish, tuna), seawater,
crustaceans (crab, lobster), shellfish, fungi, seaweed, and captured elements
from an open-loop geothermal plant. Nickel might have to be mined. Ammonia can
be coaxed from air, water, and sunlight.

It should be possible to grow, harvest, and deliver food based completely on
renewable energies.

Furthermore, certain food crops (cotton [dual-carbon batteries], moss, corn,
small citrus fruits) can be used to remake infrastructure components. Like a
newt that eats its own tail to grow a new one. Moss and corn waste, I believe,
can make carbon fiber or stretched carbon nanotubes. Small citrus fruits, if I
recall, can be used as a completely organic (cradle-to-grave) polymer
substitute.

</soapbox>

------
Uhhrrr
Voting is very broken. You only do it once a year, for candidates with
2,4,6-year terms. Even if the voting machines aren't hacked the political
machines are: it's expensive to run, and tons of interest groups have to be
appeased.

Social media is quickly becoming a powerful parapolitical means for
distributing resources, but it's also broken. It's subject to balkanization,
waves of outrage and other attention span-related problems, and authentication
is hard.

Figuring out how to improve democratic resource management for even small
(<10k pop) communities would be an interesting problem.

------
lacker
To me most of these suggestions seem like awesome things but not logical fits
for "research". I think the key question is not "what is awesome" but instead
"what projects would be a better fit for YC Research than for a startup". For
example, areas where an open standard would be great, but right now it seems
like companies are bickering and trying to control it.

Bitcoin is one example of this. So is the IoT space, both in APIs and in
actual hardware designs.

Another situation is things that are fundamentally valuable yet unprofitable.
Like drugs that are out of patent and have multiple uses but are not FDA
approved for all those uses. Or figuring out how to make more existing
research actually public and shared as widely as possible.

Another situation is areas where the existing research establishment is
busted. Reproducibility is a big one here. Try finding articles in Nature or
Science that you can't reproduce and then make a big stink about their results
being false.

Overall though I think every answer to this question should include an answer
to, "why is this a better fit for YC Research than for a new startup".

------
jallmann
The ocean. Pollution, cleanup, how we are affecting the oceans, how changes in
the ocean affect us, and ultimately harnessing the oceans for greater good,
preferably without destroying them in the process. Space gets a lot of
attention, but the oceans are rightthere and we are (rather carelessly) only
exploiting the low hanging fruit.

Nukes. I know YC has funded a few nuclear power companies, but this seems like
an area that still needs a lot of basic research, especially with newer
reactor designs. Maybe even some more speculative stuff like fusion.

Developing new types of antibiotics. Nobody is really trying, and iChip style
devices seem pretty interesting. Even with that, there's still be a ton of
work needed to bring new drugs to market. New tools and techniques for
evaluating efficacy and pharmacology? For something more exotic, you could
study phages.

Aging reversal.

------
jcr
sama, my apologies if quoting you is too over the top, but the following
comment of yours from last year is just wonderful, and it's a great answer to
your question:

"I think figuring out how technology can encourage empathy is one of the more
interesting and important open research problems in the world right now." \--
Sam Altman, July 10 2015 [1]

There is one group at Stanford that's been working on the empathy-tech
problem. I don't know any of them, but I've read a few of their papers. I've
submitted a few of their papers/projects to HN in the past six months.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3cudmx/i_am_sam_altma...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3cudmx/i_am_sam_altman_reddit_board_member_and_president/csz2vis)

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

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

[http://vhil.stanford.edu/](http://vhil.stanford.edu/)

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

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

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

    
    
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10020374
    
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9982928

------
harigov
Policy enforcement and law automation -

It's ridiculous that we spend so much money and time dealing with legal issues
- both in terms of creating new laws, and in terms of enforcing those laws.
Because of the delineation between those who create laws and those who enforce
them, we came up with a way of encoding law so as to avoid misinterpretation
errors. What if we were to automate the enforcement by programming law into a
computer rather than writing down the rules in a book? How would we go about
accomplishing that? Would we always struggle because computers lack "empathy"?
Is there a middle way that automates 90% of the cases while retaining some
human control?

~~~
autopov
This is an excellent idea.

I spent a year at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The number of statutes and regulations for just CEQA (California Environmental
Quality Act) [1] for example fills 425 pages. The department also oversees
building codes, liquid pipeline infrastructure, wildlands defense, fire &
rescue, etc.

Whenever a new or amended statute is introduced it takes months to evaluate if
it replaces or conflicts with existing code. If passed and signed into law it
can take a year or more to integrate.

Every year a newly-elected legislator introduces a bill akin to simplifying
existing laws. Every year these bills never make it out of committee (i.e.,
they are shelved) because it would require years of pulling committed
resources (SMEs, analysts, support personnel and millions of dollars) out of
threadbare operations.

Every department in the State draws up a similar analysis, and the cumulative
cost scares the legislature/governor. But it's a good way to introduce the
green legislator into how the state government works.

The joke in the halls of the Natural Resources building is that there _are_
too many rules and regulations, but there are not enough resources to correct
the situation.

F&FP had no central repository of its own codes. Analysts had to use keyword
searches of the public California Codes website!

[1]
[http://resources.ca.gov/ceqa/docs/2014_CEQA_Statutes_and_Gui...](http://resources.ca.gov/ceqa/docs/2014_CEQA_Statutes_and_Guidelines.pdf)

~~~
harigov
I think programming evolved from math oriented folks, which is why we find it
unnatural to reason about law and other societal constructs using a
programming language. I wonder how it would look if it were built for an
entirely different purpose. It would be really interesting if Y Combinator
invests in that research effort.

------
aakash58
We should look at how we can improve the ROI for education.

Millions across the world, especially in developing countries, drop out of
school because they (and/or their guardians) see no benefit from long-term
investment in education. Others who somehow manage to stay in formal
institutions are exposed to decontextualized education that they cannot
realize their full potential.

There will be many different solutions to it. One of them could be a large-
scale, technology-immersed learning system that teaches a broad range of
topics to students through a vocation. The vocation could be decided based on
the learner's interest and the local resources. For example, in northern
Nepal, child walk through perilous snow-covered hills and mountains to recover
Yarsagumba ("Himalayan viagra"), a fungus with aphrodisiac and medicinal
value. Instead, the kids can be educated progressively in details about
different aspects surrounding Yarsagumba - mountain climbing, biological
systems, business, marketing (where they could sell the collected Yarsagumba),
greenhouse and high-tech farming systems, technology, etc. - without
disturbing their Yarsamgumba collecting activity.

This is a simple example. Since a diverse topics are being taught and
practiced, learners would not be restricted in the same vocation.

------
rfurmani
The Riemann Hypothesis! Hear me out, because I think it could serve as a great
model for modern math research and collaboration.

One thing that really bothered me during my PhD is that even at the Stanford
math department it felt like academia is not set up to encourage work on big
questions, nor is it optimal for any objective function I can think of. Is it
any wonder that many of the recent breakthroughs (Perelman with Poincare,
Zhang with prime gaps) came not from establishment mathematicians, but ones
who couldn't or wouldn't play the academia game and ended up almost destitute
on the fringes, working away at these problems that they knew inside could be
resolved.

Now, why specifically is the Riemann Hypothesis a great place to start? Math
problems are like a maze. There are many paths to take, and while you can take
satisfaction in exploring one part, you won't know your progress until you see
the exit in front of you. In the case of RH the branch factor is absolutely
massive, but once you pick a direction, it doesn't take long (relatively) to
get to the forefront of what's known. But as it stands it is very hard to get
perspective on the problem, or know which ways are good or bad. A
mathematician who is not an expert in the field may experiment with various
ways of bounding Zeta away from zero, but a domain expert would right away
point out positive vertical density results for all a-sets, and bounds on
moments of 1/zeta(s). Worse: if you have an idea for a new approach, there's
no good way to share it because it will likely be too small for the quantum of
academia: the academic paper. Building a collaborative atlas for the Riemann
Hypothesis would help solve both of these problems, and could provide a more
structured way of working on hard problem than even the polymath projects.
It'll be a challenging use-case but at least with 150 years' of work there
will be no cold start problem. And I've seen many analytic number theorists
who are incredibly smart, hard-working, insightful, great with programming,
happy to get their hands dirty, eager to teach others, but neglected by the
system and lacking an outlet for their skills. PS: There's still no clear
reason to believe RH to be true rather than false.

~~~
dnautics
Of all the unsolved math hypothesesis, I want solutions to the navier-stokes
equations.

~~~
JupiterMoon
Is this even possible? Should we think outside the box and see if a more
tractable formulation exists? Or should we just accept that approximate
numerical solutions are what is possible and concentrate on efficient software
and hardware?

------
realcr
Research Distributed Internet.

Our current model of the internet is some kind of hierarchy, and access to it
is controlled by a few selected players. While some celebrate their new
hipster web programming language libs, the underlying Internet is dying.

The Internet used to be a place where you can pick a remote address, invoke
connect() and have a TCP connection. Now you need a Phd to be able to connect
two computers on the internet. If you want an address, so that other computers
can connect to you, you have to pay. This money goes to people at the top of
the pyramid, for real estate they have invented.

Internet companies recently began "protecting us from bad websites", but this
is just the beginning of a larger scale censorship, of governments that tell
us what is good for us to read and see. I don't know if this applies to you,
but at the place where I live, this has already begun.

In my opinion the main unsolved problem of this domain is how to route packets
in unstructured big networks. We really don't know how to do this, and this is
one of the main reasons for the current structure of the internet. Solving
this problem is a game changer.

I summarize results about this subject at
[http://www.freedomlayer.org](http://www.freedomlayer.org)

------
huevosabio
If everything goes, please research a viable way to open borders globally. Not
only is there tremendous economic potential energy there, but national borders
are sadly one of the few openly discriminating policies out there, a major
source of inequality and injustice. I would love to see progress towards that
end.

~~~
FD3SA
How can HN promote capitalism on one hand, and open borders on the other?

Open borders is the classic pre-cursor to a worldwide Tragedy of the Commons.
Currently, we have problems keeping public parks clean. Imagine if all of the
earth was a shared commons, and no group of people could restrict access to
any plot of land. It would be chaos. I can think of no better way to destroy
the world than open borders.

Look into tragedy of the commons, and see why this idea will never be feasible
due to human nature.

~~~
huevosabio
Perhaps you can elaborate in how you see open borders as a case for tragedy of
the commons? I do not mean that all plots of lands can be accessed by any
individual, but more like any individual can access any jurisdiction of any
country. A situation more akin to the EU, but in a global scale.

------
dnautics
Burnout.

YCR should fund a longitudinal study of a cohort of say 100 entrants into the
tech field, and watch them over the course of 4-5 years. Periodically
subjecting them to fMRI scans. Of particular interest would be the
relationship of motivation/reward pathways (I'm thinking the striatum) during
the transition through burnout. Burnout could be quantitatively measured
through techniques such as tracking with body motion trackers, etc.

A follow-up study could attempt to use knowledge gained in this with several
treatment strategies.

SamA: If you are interested in something like this I know the right
researcher, she has incredible scientific integrity, IMO important for
cogsci/socsci research especially of late, although she and I have not been in
personal touch for years.

------
chubot
I feel like the world runs on several billion dollars with of insecure code,
like GNU/Linux, Apache, OpenSSL, OpenSSH, etc. This code will last decades,
and YC startups in particular rely a lot on it.

It's not clear that the current processes for writing code and then patching
security holes will bring us into the future. Powerful governments and
companies are routinely hacked.

Can we move all this code to a secure future without rewriting it all?

On the other hand, there are existing efforts, like
[https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/](https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/)

I'm not sure how well they are funded.

~~~
Alex3917
In addition to security stuff, it would also be good to see projects get
funded that have the potential to save massive amounts of electricity. PyPy
might be a good example of that.

------
mekarpeles
+1 for YC Research's basic income (and standard for quality of life)

Meta-Research. +1 for @mietek's Meta-research; creating a distributed, open
ecosystem (not a website, but a protocol) for publishing and navigating
interdisciplinary research.

Medicine. +1 for Bacteriophages @mietek & open-medicine (e.g. Counter Culture
Labs - Open Insulin) [https://experiment.com/projects/open-
insulin](https://experiment.com/projects/open-insulin). Additionally, cancer
and heart disease research.

A distributed, persistent, interoperable world wide web. (e.g. IPFS)

A sensible distributed DOI and identity system for people.

A meta exploration to determine the world's hard problems and impending
catastrophies (e.g. www.metaculus.com)

Alternative energy and renewable energy.

~~~
effie
IPFS has some really great ideas. It could enable huge projects of major
public interest, like open publication platforms, robust knowledge sharing and
corruption-free news service. News sites are currently engaging in silent
edits ordered by minority interests; in an IPFS-kind of web, edits of
documents would be transparent since you can't rewrite distributed content
without people noticing.

------
xemdetia
Education: Vocational retraining effectiveness for work for 45+ people. I am
not one of them, but there seems to be more and more left behind with no
strategy/known good answer. I personally can't figure out how to teach and
elevate people to do good work so it tends to be they end up being a long term
on social security/unemployment/draining savings. So the question would be:

\- What are the most effective ways to retrain people of that age? I don't
know of any techniques to motivate people that are not lifelong learners to
acquire skills. Is it a demographic thing? This can be warped into 'what's the
best way to make expert users of that category' that leads to gamifaction and
other things.

Market study: \- What is the barrier to entry to start businesses as a
platform?

I feel there isn't enough innovation in pooling the resources to make starting
a business. Yes money can solve a lot of problems, but how do you make it so
there is a shared stack of resources of logistics, space, pension/benefits to
let businesses of <$1MM gross revenue (basically cottage industries). How do
we mitigate the risk of the individual to try? What is the best settings for a
particular region to accelerate the progress? What can we remove from the
equation to increase the growth of wealth of individuals?

Interoperability: This is something that I was partially pursuing as a
research topic- how can we make the transfer of technical information (CAD
drawings, models) easier to convert between. A UNIX system works wonderfully
because of how piping works, but for highly complex program there is not a
wonderful model to build such pipelining without serious grunge work. A lot of
value gets lost plugging these things together, and sometimes this work is
done by very nontechnical people. There is a lot of work for this in message
processing but less in the context of file processing, but really it's a
knowledge representation and transfer problem.

~~~
ilaksh
I'm going to be 45 in a few years. Your ageism is a big problem.

The thing is, as artificial general intelligence advances, everyone is going
to be left behind. Give it 4-6 decades. Anyone essentially Human 1.0 at that
point will be irrelevant.

But a few decades out, you can count on your OWN skills to become outdated,
and regardless of whether you are a motivated learner or faster learner, it
will quickly become very difficult for anyone to keep up. Even the young.

~~~
xemdetia
I am not making an ageism argument, it's a request based on my direct
experience in my life. Retraining people in that age bracket I find extremely
difficult and I cannot find good resources about teaching and helping them in
the most effective ways.

The fact that it is difficult to keep up is the problem I want people to look
at.

------
jgord
I think we should find a way to take the best content from Math Circles and
get that to far more students in a digestible format.

Drilling down even further, if the Question is "what is the _single_ most
useful thing that can be done to increase future scientific literacy and
accelerate technological progress ?" .. then I think the answer must be to
teach multiplication by drawing rectangles.

vis : [https://quantblog.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/distributive-
rule...](https://quantblog.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/distributive-rule-
understanding-rectangles/)

Its a really good antidote to 'math is magic, a set of rules you apply without
knowing why'... its based on physical intuition we already have, and it leads
very naturally to deeper more abstract thinking :

You can go quickly from counting out areas of integer sides via grouping, to
multiplying fractions and decimals, to expanding (a+b)*c, to (a+b)(c+d), you
can introduce 1+3+5+7+...+n = n^2 and 1+2+3+..+n=n(n+1)/2 , you can introduce
primes as 'non-rectangle' numbers .. all the while improving facility with
basic computations, and developing better math intuition.

Kids who believe they are dumb at math can relate to this kind of
physical/visual construction - if you play tennis or basketball or fold paper
or saw wood you already have a good intuition of area.

It seems not much math is being taught in school before age 12 .. We don't
have to wait or invent anything groundbreaking - we can take concrete steps
now, we know what works - ie. we have the vaccine, we just need willpower to
get it to everyone.

~~~
Joof
So, replicatable teaching methods.

------
harigov
Research on organizations and possible improvements through software -

An important aspect of organizational building is to structure it in a way
that enables free flow of information, while at the same time, enable people
to accomplish their productive best. Having a good understanding of what sort
of organizational structures enable such goals, and what policies and
procedures in such organizations can be automated and improved upon, can bring
in significant improvements. One of the big reasons as to why poor countries
remain poor is that there aren't enough people to employ and build large
organizations. The small number of talented and motivated people are
handcuffed because of lack of human resources to power their ambitions.
Enabling even those small number of people to accomplish something great will
lift everyone else from their dire situations.

~~~
jbpetersen
Have you looked into autonomous organizations?

~~~
harigov
No, I didn't. What is that?

------
csomar
I'd be interested in empowering people from third-world countries with little
access to opportunity. Having started, 7 years ago, basically from nothing (a
$150 laptop). I've grown to a 6 figures (usd) fortune today. That wouldn't be
possible without the internet.

There are many areas that third-world citizen can tap into and work remotely:
Programming, Community Management, Writing, Design, Translation...

Most of third-world workers do cheap work (less than $10/hour), with
unfavourable terms and unstable revenue. This kill the potential for growth
and savings.

I think the challenge can be summarized to the following point:

\- Helping them get opportunities to start.

\- Embracing a growth and continued learning mindset.

\- Helping them grow their skills.

\- Helping them open doors for more opportunities.

\- Helping them setup simple and safe structures to save, invest and grow
their capital.

~~~
iambateman
First of all, congrats! Could you talk a little more about your story of going
from $150 laptop to six figures? Also do you live in a third world country?
I'm curious about your perspective. Thx.

------
ph0rque
How about carbon sequestration tech? Seems like the world is starting to move
towards renewable energy generation, but that alone won't prevent the adverse
effects of CO2 levels rising.

A rigorous survey of what the current possible carbon sequestration tech and
methods would be really helpful. Another organization might already have this
survey done, but I haven't seen anything online (in my admittedly trivial
search efforts).

~~~
terramars
[http://www.virginearth.com/finalists/](http://www.virginearth.com/finalists/)

~~~
ph0rque
That's a great list, but I'd love to see a table of carbon sequestration tech,
and how much it costs per ton of CO2 sequestered.

~~~
rch
Coal bed CO2 sequestration can be profitable, depending on the price of
natural gas.

------
petra
1\. A lot of industries are concentrated and monopolistic, which leads to both
issues of high prices, control and lack of local resilience.

So how do we build a more decentralized economy ? What are the missing
building blocks ?

2\. Our current remote-work isn't good enough from the psychological
perspective. No eye-contact, no body language, isolation, etc.

But solving this is one of the only things thing that can bypass politics as a
way to decrease housing costs and transportation costs , which are ~50% of our
living costs.

3\. Is it possible to go to some empty space in the u.s , and establish a city
from scratch , a city that would be purposely designed for low living costs ?

4\. There was a study , in 2004, measuring happiness, which showed the Amish
we're considerably more happy than regular people , and as happy as the
"forbes 400" billionaires. How do we create such happy communities, while
still living in a technological world ?

~~~
jacquesm
> So how do we build a more decentralized economy ? What are the missing
> building blocks ?

Venture capital companies are normally in the opposite business, they want to
_create_ monopolies.

As for '4', this report might shed some light on that:

[http://worldhappiness.report/wp-
content/uploads/sites/2/2015...](http://worldhappiness.report/wp-
content/uploads/sites/2/2015/04/WHR15_Sep15.pdf)

~~~
petra
Is this effort as part of the VC arm of YC ? or just the independent research
arm ? because open AI doesn't seem like a VC effort .

------
harigov
Learning through experiences -

One of the hardest skills to ever master is the art of putting oneself in
others shoes. It's hard to imagine how it feels to live like a woman in a man
dominated world because you can never experience that. Our solution to most
crimes is to restrict ones freedom and hope that somehow that person will
figure out why what he did was wrong. Does it have to take 15-30 years in
order for someone to learn from his mistakes? Can we do better?

I believe we can. We should be able to put someone in an entirely different
life by using hypnosis, VR, drugs, etc., and let them live a life so s/he can
see the other side of world and learn things on his/her own. What sort of
technological changes do we need to enable this? How do we model that virtual
world to make people believe that its real? How would it impact someones life
after such an experience?

------
shuzchen
research research. there are a lot of things wrong with publishing and
accessing research that really shouldn't be the case: public access to
research is locked into expensive journals, while we already have tons of
cheap distribution methods; published research almost never includes full
datasets for third party analysis (storage is cheap, and distribution again);
we never see research with unexciting results; researcher tools are crappy and
expensive (there needs to be a free, user friendly, cross platform SPSS). The
scientific method is great but it could sure use a tooling overhaul on all
levels.

~~~
Satifer
^ This.

Send us mail at contact@satifer.com if you want to talk about any of these.
We're working on fixing "we never see research with unexciting results" and a
few others.

We've set up an email list, we're hoping to get some conversations started
soon at satifer.com

Cheers!

------
solresol
Queensland University of Technology (QUT) has a research project called CAUSEE
where they have tracked thousands of Australian startups to find out how many
got funded (a very tiny percentage of all startups), what they were planning
to build, whether they succeeded or failed, how quickly they got going and so
on.

Their justification was that too often we look at successful startups and then
do whatever they did. Which isn't always bad advice, but there's the danger
that it might be like looking at lottery winners to see what they "did" to
make their win. How do we know that the stuff that those startups did actually
made a difference?

For example, the CAUSEE study showed that (in Australia) retaining a lawyer is
a good predictor that the startup will fail. Accessing any government service
other than the R&D tax concession is a good predictor of failure. Writing a
step-by-step business plan is a good predictor of failure.

But that's a bit Australian-specific. Is it the same in the USA? Is it the
same in Europe? Is it the same in developing nations?

Should YC Research study scientifically what makes a startup successful in
different economies? It would tie in nicely to YC's other work!

It would also help guide investment (and government policy) if we had hard
data on what works and what doesn't.

~~~
evolve2k
Have a direct link to the research you could share with us?

~~~
sospep
[https://www.qut.edu.au/research/research-projects/the-
compre...](https://www.qut.edu.au/research/research-projects/the-
comprehensive-australian-study-of-entrepreneurial-emergence-causee)

------
Glench
I really think YC Research, given its mission of funding long-term fragile
research, should think hard about reworking the fundamental institutions that
we live in now.

For example, what would a school for children look like if it was re-imagined
without the century of cruft that's built up. What do we do with children and
how do we judge what we've done.

Another project might be re-imagining a hospital. Due to economics, advances
in technology, current scientific advances, etc, we've come to a rather
agreed-upon notion of what healing looks like that is only one answer in a
huge space of possibilities. What would it look like if people truly, actually
healed and maybe weren't worked on solely as the "medical bodies" they are
now.

Hillary Cottam's career (link to TED talk, sorry:
[https://www.ted.com/talks/hilary_cottam_social_services_are_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/hilary_cottam_social_services_are_broken_how_we_can_fix_them?language=en))
points in the direction of the type of thing I'm thinking of. These kinds of
services seem fundamental to how humans work (we have to learn, we have to
heal), so we should really use this opportunity to understand these things
deeply.

------
AlexWest
\- Antibiotic alternatives (we're going to need them fast)

\- As another poster mentioned, how do we suck the carbon from 150 years of
burning fossil fuels out of our atmosphere?

\- Cognitive enhancement

\- Re-wilding - rebuilding devastated ecosystems in the Anthropocene with
engineered biodiversity

~~~
reasonattlm
The best alternative to antibiotics is more antibiotics - a flood of more
antibiotics, more than we could ever use up. The best way to do that is
support automation and other efficiency gains and individual projects in
mining the bacterial world for novel antibacterial weaponry. That used to be
impractical, but now that there is, as of 2015, a way to culture the 99% of
bacteria that couldn't be cultured before, it is now very practical to look
for everything we might need in biomedicine in the bacterial world. See:

[https://edge.org/response-detail/26701](https://edge.org/response-
detail/26701)

[http://www.the-
scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/41850/...](http://www.the-
scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/41850/title/New-Antibiotic-from-Soil-
Bacteria/)

~~~
AlexWest
I should have said "alternative antibiotics"

------
kresimirus
Transparent lobbying fond that would be used for the interest of majority.

Currently in US there is a problem of buying political power that is hard to
counter with standard democracy instruments (e.g. voting). When the specific
political problem is discussed (like finance regulation or incarceration
rates) there will usually be some corporations or interest groups that will
have much higher incentive to lobby for a specific solution than average
citizen. Also, they have much more resources than average citizen. This means
that in long term there is a trend of political decisions that are not in the
best interest of majority of population (you and me).

How to counter this? We can wait until ~50% of population realizes that this
is a problem and votes for someone that will solve it. Or we could start a
fund that would work relatively transparent and in those cases would lobby for
solutions in the best interest of majority. Fond would be mostly financed by
community (donors) - people that realized that the only way to tackle this is
to group. Most of us have high incentive for making better society and
together we have a lot of resources...so let's use it to make our societies
better.

~~~
eldavido
This is a great idea. Stuff like the sugar tariff [1] are a perfect example of
what you're talking about, a well-organized but tiny minority using the
political process to affect an outcome that's bad for people as a whole. I
would contribute money to this if it existed.

[1] [http://sugarcane.org/global-policies/policies-in-the-
united-...](http://sugarcane.org/global-policies/policies-in-the-united-
states/sugar-in-the-united-states)

------
JDiculous
Land Value Tax.

I think this is the next big thing after basic income (especially when the
question of how to pay for basic income comes up).

The land value tax is universally seen by economists as the most fair tax, yet
for whatever reason we continue to ignore it in favor of income, sales, and
property taxes - all of which distort markets (unlike the land value tax).

The lack of research and real life case studies on this topic is a huge
obstacle to this entering the mainstream.

------
jakeogh
0\. Bounties. Bounties for specific small step goals. Even bounties to define
these. I like to vote with time, which we often exchange as money.

1\. Open source advocacy on why it matters (in the end, it's because human
brains will rely on software more and more, and if we cant self-inspect
'it'... bad things). In the short term, OS distros that make the user
experience slick. Custom distros that wrap all the best astro/bio/fea are
excellent to show others what is possible and get people involved.

2\. Things that give power to individuals. All individuals. Even ones we label
to say they are not us. Dont rely on adding laws to accomplish it. Closed
source self-driving 'connected' cars being an almost exact opposite.

3\. Open source hardware. Really, not just hardware we can hack, but hardware
we can replicate. (hard problem)

4\. (to make #3 happen) Bounties (which others can chip-in to) for 100% open
small scale lithography (a goal at a time; 8088@home) and biological computing
(pie in the sky, but will happen, maybe faster than is generally assumed; 22k
Rat neurons can pilot a F-22 sim).

5\. Promote information sources that make the raw data available.

------
karmacondon
You could research the funding of startups. Or more broadly, how should
capital be allocated?

Admittedly I have no idea how something like that could be quantified, and the
study of economics has been trying to figure it out for decades. But if YC
Research is looking to make maximally impactful investments, it seems like
studying investing itself would make sense. There's a high risk of not
producing anything useful, but also a huge upside if you get just a little
better at figuring out who to fund. YC Research is in a position to bring
together people from the worlds of business, machine learning and economics
who might be able to make a dent in the problem.

Practically, it seems like navigating the financial investment process is the
core skill of YCombinator, so you'd already be pretty far down the learning
curve. And you don't have to convince people to adopt your ideas right away,
you can try out whatever ideas your research produces simply by making
investments. Better capital allocation of all forms could have a really big
impact on society at large, if the right systems can be developed.

------
reasonattlm
You are right across the road from the SENS Research Foundation; you should
invite Aubrey de Grey and Michael Kope across for tea and ask their opinion.

Creating working, cheap, mass-produced rejuvenation therapies is the best way
to save the most lives and eliminate the greatest amount of human suffering.

The most exciting areas right now are senescent cell clearance (and oh look
there's a startup called Oisin Biotechnology seed funded by the Methuselah
Foundation and SENS Research Foundation), and glucosepane cross-link
clearance, which I recently wrote a long blurb on the current state of at
Fight Aging! That is at a point at which research is highly parallelizable and
even small investments above the current funding will greatly speed the
process of finding either a small molecule drug candidate or bacterial enzymes
at the Spiegel lab at Yale.

Other areas making real progress and which could be further diversified and
sped up are transthyretin amyloid clearance, where the current best approach
there is locked up in the glacial GSK development process, and mitochondrial
DNA repair, which is another one subject to great gains in speed due to
parallelization of research.

Any of these are only a couple of years away from low-cost seed funded
startups, and all are and have been dependent on philanthropy to move ahead in
the lab. None of these incredibly promising lines of research are in any
meaningful way supported by the existing funding establishment, which is crazy
when you look at the data in mice and the supporting evidence. E.g. senescent
cell clearance even in its first few animal studies has already produced
better and more compelling benefits than any of the alleged calorie
restriction mimetic or other age-slowing drug development efforts that have
consumed billions over the past decade or so.

------
untog
At least ten of the suggestions that I've read already are better than what I
have in mind, but hey, why not...

How do people stay informed in the 21st century? By which I mean informed
_well_. We are all naturally drawn to echo chambers, and I don't think I'm
imagining people becoming more polarised over time as they surround themselves
with news outlets that tell them what they want to hear.

This will only get worse as more media companies collapse - only the
opinionated ones will get the audience to survive... if they even do. There's
a business model question but also a broader philosophical question: how can
anyone help citizens be informed about the world around them? How is it
sustainable?

------
slantedview
Healthcare currently consumes 18% of our GDP and is projected to consume 34%
by 2040. This will be absolutely devastating for us. The ability to accomplish
anything meaningful as a society will diminish as more and more of our wealth
is directed towards what is the most wasteful healthcare system in the modern
world.

What is causing this and what can be done?

~~~
iambateman
My wife is a therapist and one day we were talking. A patient was discharged
from their hospital and I asked who was in charge of follow up. "No one."

Turns out, there is very very little money in "healthcare" while there is a
great deal of money in "sickcare".

If we are going to reduce the amount of money in sickcare, we're going to have
to start caring for people before they are 60 years old, 325 pounds, have
diabetes and hypertension and a McDonalds craving.

Because by then we have already lost.

------
unusximmortalis
Although there will be people not agreeing with this, it is what I do know
through my personal experiences and observations, and I will say it: today
most of the whole world revolves around fear. Not the entire world but a big
part of it. It is enough to look at the wars still going on, look at the
children dying of starvation still on our Earth and you will know we as a
whole are far from been with our hearts and minds in the right place. So what
do I do? I first start with myself, and then when possible help others. I look
at myself and I try to understand what I am. My fears and my loves. And I do
my best to live in a such way that I do not harm anyone nor myself although
sometimes might be hard. There are ways to do it, sometimes not simple ways,
but there are ways. I do my best to understand and know that I am a grain of
sand in the Universe yet I am a wonder of creation. Thank you for asking, if I
would have your abilities I would invest in programs which help us as a whole
to understad the simple truths of fears and loves which has conquered us and
leads us from been what we are today: a global nation living on a planet where
children are still dying of hunger and wars are killing people. I can not
point to a particular program but that is the direction where we I know we
supposed to go first. Not on Mars, not on Moon, not on Venus, or out of our
galaxy. Good luck.

------
mtrimpe
Collective Intentionality / Consensus Building

I know it's not easy and not sexy; but as a species we're in the process of
transitioning from a centralized hierarchical model (inherently arising due to
costs of communication) to a collective decision making model.

Apart from society collapsing wholesale I don't see any way we won't have
global consensus building / decision making in a hundred years; and helping
speed that along is _the_ most powerful thing you can do for humanity's
benefit right now.

------
hanniabu
OpenHarvest - Research into food growth and optimization

There's a lot of research being done currently, but it's all private research
so every new company has to rediscover what somebody has already done. For
startups that have great potential in this space, this is a major issue as the
it takes a very long time to perform testing of plants(each crop cycle is ~4
weeks) and that burn through their runway easily. Another issue here is that
some of the openly available information out there is just for conventional
soil farming. There's nothing really out there for hydroponics/aquaponics. So
when you're direct seeding new crops in hydroponics/aquaponics, you have to
completely guess on the density of the seeds and the amount/frequency of the
watering. There's no way to convert recommended seeding directions for soil to
hydroponics. There's no more rows, access to water isn't the same since water
is easily available, density affects lighting and lighting affect density.
This is a huge problem keeping the hydroponic and aquaponic community moving
forward with innovation because it's hard to compete with yields when the
yields haven't been optimized for your new growing medium yet. It's also hard
to test your new growing apparatus or technology when you're struggling to
find the most optimal way to grow the plants. Not sure if this is making much
sense, kind of rambling right now. If you'd like more information you can find
my email in my profile. I've been working in hydroponics/aquaponics my whole
career and this is a problem I've seen at every facility.

------
murrayb
My wishlist in no specific order. You should consider crowdfunding some of the
research- I would be interested in options to support these kind of issues and
I'd have no issue with the results being commercialised provided there was
some form of "open sourcing" the technology.

    
    
      * Green energy
      * Battery technology
      * Water cleansing (ie pollutants from rivers & oceans
      * Water purification
      * Air purification
      * Food production
      * Medical technology

~~~
uglysexy
Nice list! Has some similarities to mine.

------
danblick
I guess most research ideas here will focus on technology. Just a thought: how
about supporting research on economics?

YC is in a great position to spawn a small "think tank" focused on technology
startups.

A couple ideas: how about studying the effects of software patents on
technology startups? What government policies would really support innovation?
How should startups approach intellectual property?

Alternatively: how about ideas in industrial organization that relate to
startups or Silicon Valley? (I'm sure if you supported research on technology
clusters, governments around the world would love to work with you to help
nurture startups at home.)

Concrete suggestion: Find an economics professor who you could support as a
"visiting fellow" for X months?

------
jules
Research into future programming languages, particularly into dependent types
and future development environments. A relatively small amount of money can
have tremendous positive impact on the world in this area.

~~~
cdvonstinkpot
Distributed Computing networks like 'MaidSafe' appear to have potential at
disrupting how software projects have worked up until now.

~~~
jbpetersen
Sadly there's an economy of scale to performing a Sybil attack on MaidSafe as
well as any other autonomous organization based on resource sharing that uses
a global reputation system (Safecoin in this case) instead of a localized one.
Another knock is using something like IPFS with an incentive layer on top is a
significantly more flexible approach to distributed and decentralized storage.

That said, I think there's a huge amount of promise in the field.

------
vonklaus
Stack Risk. We need to know how much CPU power entities have at their
dosposal. If statistics aren't available, find data centers and energy
breakdowns backout those costs and use sqftage to find amount of servers.

COmputing power growth rate is likely biggest metric tp assess how the tech
industry is doing and possibly better at measuring an economy than GDP.

The risk asdociated with having elephant flow like ownership, e.g 20%
controlling 80% could be catastrophic for numbers of reasons:

Lack of fault tolerance of core services

Lack of provacy due to vertical stack ownership

Ability to map users on internet

Ability to break cryptography

Extension of above, ability to control alt currency.

Ability to attack networks.

Etc. we need to get a pulse on this and it is a bigger existential threat than
ai in short term.

~~~
seiji
_Stack Risk. We need to know how much CPU power entities have at their
dosposal._

That's actually a great idea and almost impossible to make reliable.

We could measure "stack risk" for registered, 100% above board companies with
their own data centers and employees, but we can't really measure the risk of
some guy in eastern europe with access to a 1 billion node, globally
distributed and illegal obtained, Android bot net.

~~~
vonklaus
Correct. However, we could see who has a legal android botnet, and see how
easy it is to take over.

Not to mention, if someone did have access to even 1million phones they could
topple a cell network by spam sms amd calling to tie it up.

I think someone should look at it.

------
jacquesm
Get us out of advertising hell.

More and more surfaces are covered with ads, they are nigh on inescapable. In
my life I've seen the world go from relatively clean to visually incredibly
polluted. I'd love to find a way for companies to be able to reach consumers
without having to take over every surface in sight.

------
wsetchell
YC research brings (a little) money and hackers. You should focus on stuff not
being worked on by hackers, or that is un-fundable by others.

Politics and incentives: The FDA was invented to keep people safe from bad
food and drugs. How do you incentivize the FDA to be conservative, but not too
conservative? Is there some way that we can allow people to opt-out of the FDA
that would be better for everyone?

Mental health: Psychology research seems to be in the dark ages. It is
expensive, ineffective, and often totally invalid (published results are often
not reproducible). Can you figure out a new way to do psychology research?

------
GraffitiTim
In addition to things with long time horizons, it makes sense to look at
things that have little profit-incentive for startups or companies to work on.

One example would be nutritional supplements. It's fairly expensive to do a
good nutritional study, and there's no good way to make money off of the
results (since companies can't patent supplements). So, no one funds good
studies on supplements.

At the same time, finding out that certain supplements have positive or
negative effects would be great for humanity as a whole.

This also goes for nutrition in general, though supplements are easier to
research.

------
mc808
Codifying the legal code(s).

I suspect this is already being done to some extent, but I think it would be
really useful to

1\. Input a list of facts and receive a list of laws pertaining to those
facts.

2\. Automatically detect language that is too vague to resolve or that
conflicts with other parts of the legal code.

3\. Suggest optimizations or refactoring opportunities that could guide
legislators in simplifying the code.

------
aswanson
Young researchers in the medical research sciences. It seems, at least from
everything I read, that the NIH et al are heavily incented to keep the inertia
and old researchers doing incremental, low-impact studies in charge. Cancer
research needs a DARPA, maybe YC can spark it:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/opinion/young-brilliant-
an...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/opinion/young-brilliant-and-
underfunded.html)

~~~
BadCookie
Relatedly, it seems like we are getting close to having gene therapy working
safely in humans. It would be fantastic to help speed that up.

------
thedevil
1\. Intersection analysis: Get traffic patterns with smart phones. Get traffic
accidents and latency statistics by different intersection designs. Determine
which intersections are most ripe for improvement. Give free access to
departments of transportation. Traffic is a huge problem for society and self-
driving cars are realistically a long way off from a total rollout.

2\. Programming humans: When you train a neural network, you give it as
carefully chosen data labeled as clearly as possible. When you train humans,
they listen to a teacher and hope to collect 5-6 useful examples of a concept
per hour somewhere in the thousands of words spoken by the teacher. What if
you turbo charge that? One related experiment I'm considering is collecting
thousands of images of different body language cues and making an app to train
my brain (and that of other social handicaps like myself) to read body
language more effectively.

------
leoc
Vasalgel, a 100% effective, permanent but (hopefully) fully reversible non-
surgical, non-hormonal male contraceptive. It's a variation of the Indian
RISUG formulation, being pushed through the US testing gauntlet by a non-
profit organisation. They're specifically looking for "social investors" at
this time as they approach clinical trials:

> But now that Vasalgel has passed the “proof of concept” phase, it’s time to
> kick it up a notch — without selling out or losing the social mission of
> affordability and wide availability. We’re starting an all-out push to hire
> top medical device people and bring in social investors interested in both
> moving things forward quickly, and in keeping the end result affordable.

[http://www.parsemusfoundation.org/contraceptives/clinical-
tr...](http://www.parsemusfoundation.org/contraceptives/clinical-trials-
inching-closer/)

------
emhac
Cheap Virtual Reality behavioral therapy. There is research that show great
promise in VR phobia therapy. VR seems to be quite a potent medium for
modifying habitual patterns and emotional reactions. And soon it will be a
popular hardware. It would be quite interesting to research the possibility of
delivering working (open source? / mental health as an app?) behavioral
therapy solutions for home VR ecosystems. There is a possibility of a great
improvement of therapy costs and the quality of life.

~~~
GraffitiTim
I'm working on this as a startup called Fearless.

[http://FearlessVR.com](http://FearlessVR.com)

------
Tycho
It would be great to set up an institute for upholding scientific/research
integrity. Have one division focussed on reproducing published results, and
another focussed on checking publications for statistical errors, and a third
on the look out for academic fraud (fudged numbers, undisclosed funding,
citation rings, etc.).

------
dvainsencher
Proof based trusted computing.

seL4 and similar applications of coq proof assistant. Existing academia is
funding some development of tools like coq, and also some core applications
like seL4, and more accessible applications will happen as open source. But we
need to make these techniques more accessible for larger applications that
will affect the real world.

Example: A webserver proved to respond only to correctly authenticated clients
(covering the end to end: kernel, server, protocols, for every client).

Also fund making this research more accessible: try, compare, file usability
bugs on, and then highlight the different technologies for achieving trust.
For example Haskell Liquid types as a lighter weight complement to proving
stuff in coq. Maybe fund research meshing these techniques with languages that
provide different type-system guarantees, such as Rust.

------
fr11
SENS, first.

Then maybe human gut microbiota and their links to allergies, digestive
problems, and mental health.

~~~
DrScump
and degenerative disease... and the immune system... and obesity...

------
ohashi
Education seems like a big one. I know there are lots of big places putting in
lots of money (eg Gates Foundation), but it's such a critically important part
of every human beings -- well being. And I think there is this deep sense that
it isn't working as well it could/should.

------
chubot
YC should fund research into the foundations of the open Internet and web. The
Internet was created decades ago as a public research project. Decades later,
tremendous amounts of that value was captured by Internet startups.

The thing that distinguishes the Internet and web from other technology is
that it is open and interoperable. Its style is just profoundly different.

Individual companies have no incentive to create such technology. They create
things in the style of Apple, Facebook, or much of Google's later technology.

The Internet was funded by the military. Unix was created by a telephone
monopoly. The web was created by a benevolent researcher. I think it would
make sense for YC to fund the next system along these lines.

This kind of innovation takes place on a time scale not accessible to most
organizations.

------
sharemywin
I call it robotworld. It's a giant warehouse filled with robots, 3d printers
other machine shop things and a few humans at first. You control the robots
via telepresence which gets recorded and can be used for MI later. And you
build and ship things. It's a lab that any one in the world can rent time in
and work on automated factories. Should be open source open data probably.
Maybe it's a marketplace where people contribute old robots or parts and
pieces that you rent. Not sure about patent rights if you build something in
the lab which is patentable. You rent peoples time in the lab to fix things
robots can't video cameras everywhere. If you think it more of a company let
me know. I'll be happy to submit it as a startup. Lol.

------
tedsanders
Honestly, I think something that would be super interesting to YC and Silicon
Valley and the world would be creating a technology prediction market. Using
markets to gauge consensus about the future is super useful for any company or
government making decisions under uncertainty.

You could have contracts about all sorts of technology predictions, such as
"Will more than 1% of cars be self-driving by 2025?" or "Will MOSFETs have
gate widths <10 nm by 2020?" or "Will virtual reality be a market worth over
$1B by 2018?" or whatever you're interested in (and can define precisely).

SciCast.org was a technology prediction market that I participated in for a
few years, but it was an academic project and ran out of funding.

------
abecedarius
Tools for thought, along the lines of Engelbart and Bret Victor and the rest.
Especially strategic: helping people think better in groups. This stuff seems
to be getting funded some lately, like at CDG, and much of the work could be
done as startups, but there's lots of room for more basic research. (I'm
biased by wanting to work in this field.)

------
ocdtrekkie
Gun control. I'm actually largely against gun control, but the issue is we
have almost no good research on what factors we can implement to curb violence
in our country. What causes people to want to say, do a mass shooting? How do
people acquire the guns they use in crimes? (Are new background check laws
actually solving a problem, or should we be focused on preventing people from
stealing others' guns?) Rather than scattershot regulations to impede gun
owners, how can we scientifically target laws to reduce crime?

The CDC is forbidden from conducting research on this, allegedly, so it seems
like a ripe opportunity for a private option.

------
ericb
* Methods to Effectively Spread Rationality

A scientific approach to spreading rational thinking could be world-changing.

If rational thinking became more prevalent, you'd have more allies--more
people asking questions like this about how to best direct their efforts
toward the right problems. Rational thinking is a force-multiplier. At the
same time, problems resulting from irrational thinking would be reduced.

In the early stages, the research could focus on how to teach rational
thinking. From there, research could focus on how to pitch a rationality
curriculum to school boards, or how to effectively convert adults to more
rational ways of thinking.

------
jrieke
Small research grants for students/independent researchers.

I'd suggest something like 5k for a 3 months project. Applicant has to hand in
a short proposal in the beginning and publish his code/data/results as open
source. There are many great research ideas to work on independently today (e.
g. in AI), but it's pretty much impossible to get money/recognition for that.
For example, such a program would enable students to work on their own idea
during the summer break (and in some cases produce something valuable for
others), instead of doing some meaningless stuff at an internship.

------
yousifa
Water is the most essential resource to our existence (secondary to oxygen),
yet >8M people die annually because of water related illnesses. Local
filtration/treatment is good, but we need more cost effective and easier to
deploy methods to treat water at a mass scale. We're trying to protect the
worlds water, but there is a lot more research that needs to be done to solve
this problem. Research can include cheap sensors to monitor bacteria in water,
cost effective modular treatment facilities, better potable water routing
methods and local treatment and disposal of wastewater.

~~~
sospep
> Water is the most essential resource to our existence

Michael Burry seems to think so as well and has made it the focus of his
current work.

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

------
falcolas
Linux reverse engineering efforts (i.e. Open source drivers to replace closed
source drivers). We use Linux all the time, how about supporting its future?

~~~
Ao7bei3s
Linux is really important, but it's the best-funded FOSS project already. No
other project gets a comparable amount of time by comparably skilled
developers.

An open source driver for any particular piece of hardware is only useful for
that exact piece of hardware, and maybe a few generations after it. But it's
usefulness dies with the usage of the hardware. Contrast with basic research,
which stays around forever and can be meaningfully built on for much longer.

Research is more about underlying concepts than about actually building
concrete implementations (be they software or whatnot) (though that may be
part of the research process - but only as the means to an end).

------
aabajian
Interventional radiology (IR). Most people don't know it exists until they
need it. IR procedures range from acutely life-saving (strokes, heart attacks,
DVTs, etc.) to cancer (burning/freezing tumor lesions). Other procedures have
a major impact on quality of life - embolizing the prostatic arteries for BPH
treatment, embolizing uterine fibroids, and draining abscesses.

From HN's perspective, this is some of the most technologically advanced
medicine. If you've never seen an IR procedure, I encourage you to see an
aneurysm coiling. The patient is situated on a table that moves in 8
directions (up, down, left, right, forward, backward, tilt-left, and tilt-
right). A C-shaped X-ray machine surrounds the patient to help the physician
guide the treatment. The X-ray arm itself is able to move circumferentially to
generate 3D images. Note that X-rays have minimal radiation delivery relative
to CT scans. The physician will construct a 3D model of the brain's
vasculature, find the aneurysm, and stick a reinforcing coil at the out
pouching. The entire procedure is performed within a vessel from a single
needle prick.

The common analogy is, "It's like a video game." Here's a picture of the
setup:

[http://www.polytechae.com/consierge/docs/images/882_polytech...](http://www.polytechae.com/consierge/docs/images/882_polytech_project_77_project_detail_image_0_2425%20IR%20OR_2.jpg)

------
musha68k
Nothing "scales" better than education - the trick is to think "outside of the
box" which is also easier said than done..

Asking questions that are orthogonal to how we see education today might be a
good way to get started:

Could school become all-play? Do we need _teachers_? Do we need grades?

and so on and so forth...

------
edanm
Mind uploading.

It's definitely far off. But it seems to me this could be an amazing
shortcut/hack to achieve a lot of other things here: once we have mind
uploading, we've basically conquered death. We can also _probably_ figure out,
at that stage, how to run the minds faster or with extra memory or something,
increasing the standard human intelligence.

This is also a way to achieve "superintelligence" via _human-based_
intelligence, rather than through artificial intelligence.

That would be where I'd bet my money.

~~~
r0s
Like a transporter on Star Trek, I'm afraid there would be no upload without a
copy. Could we really then delete the original?

~~~
edanm
That's definitely one of the things the research group would need to research.
I have no idea of how to solve the philosophical questions around this, and
neither does anyone else yet.

------
nickysielicki
OpenRISC, lowrisc, RISC-V

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/the-death-
of-...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/the-death-of-moores-
law-will-spur-innovation)

------
lqdc13
Research into productivity using different programming languages + frameworks.

There is almost no research into which languages are best and a lot of
guesswork. This is also directly related to ycombinator itself so you guys
have plenty of incentive.

------
asafira
1) Quantum Technologies.

a) Quantum communication has some awesome communication privacy protocols, can
make a huge impact on global privacy.

b) Quantum computing and simulation. similar to the startup rigetti that I
know was funded, but from a research level. Quantum computation and simulation
hardware can be a huge breakthrough for our understanding of physics, being
able to perform computations never even close to possible with a classical
computer in a decent amount of time.

2) Refreshing education research. How could we, for example, make high quality
learning content (think coursera) something that's used by schools around the
US, and would not be compromised by bad teachers?

3) Reinventing the current political system. Somehow we live in a time where
political figures can honestly say anything and have little accountability ---
both of their previous stances on the subject, and future actions taken. we
need to do better here. America can't keep choosing political figures cause
they are popular. That information needs to be made easily accessible and a
rising cultural norm, like wikipedia.

------
DanielBMarkham
+1 for Meta research. The way we do research needs to be completely
overhauled. An outside body could help kickstart this in a way that insiders
couldn't. You could also set the bar high and challenge the industry to meet
it, whereas something put together by insiders would have a lot of compromise
built into it before it ever saw the light of day.

I'd like to see somebody pull out tech at the roots and start over with a new
processor or SoC design. There are a ton of problems in the community that all
have their roots in the way CPUs process data. There are also a ton of new
technologies that become more and more powerful the closer to the metal
they're implemented. Even running the whole project as a whiteboard-only,
blue-sky effort could produce some conceptual ideas that others would want to
follow-up on. I think if this is not done, all the separate techs continue to
develop on their own, and we miss out on a huge chance of making a significant
leap forward.

------
dorianm
Delegative democracy -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy)

------
danr4
Alternative education systems and their effectiveness - which can be applied
to 3rd world countries as well.

Self organized autonomy - what if me and my friends buy an idland and declare
it a new country, with technology oriented infrastructure, such as driverless
cars, automation of government facilities, alternative currency to money? How
can we sustain it?

------
abakker
I vote for better building materials with lower total carbon footprint -
lighter, renewable, durable, safe, cheap, etc. we need to improve both energy
efficiency of homes, cost to build, and time to build. New materials and
methods could go a l0ng way toward helping emerging economies and poorer
Americans alike build better housing.

------
pavornyoh
How about;

1)Can racial balance in business, education, military be achieved without
policies that promote Affirmative Action?

2)Placement by age vs. placement by academic ability

3)Are children smarter (or more socialized) because of the Internet?

4)How has United States censorship changed over the decades?

5)How did gunpowder change warfare?

6)What is “normal,” and to what extent is psychology reliant on culture to
define this?

~~~
dragonwriter
> Can racial balance in business, education, military be achieved without
> policies that promote Affirmative Action?

No, because Affirmative Action is simply a term of art (originating in a set
of executive orders mandating such action) positive action taken with the aim
of achieving such balance. If you take active steps targeting that balance you
are _by definition_ engaging in affirmative action.

------
petke
Automation of common medical lab tests. Not just for the sick but for the
healthy. How cool would it be to every week send a drop of blood by mail and
get to see a nice graph on a website how the different hormones and proteins
etc in your blood has changed throughout the year. It could help you live a
healthier life.

~~~
jacquesm
No, it would cause a lot of un-necessary procedures and visits to doctors.

~~~
petke
Its kindof strange that we see doctors time as so valuable that we shouldn't
bother them unless we are sick enough we cant function. Its like taking the
car to the mechanic only when the engine has come off because we don't want to
bother them with the small stuff. But waiting for small problems to turn big
... Is also a waste of medical resources. And it might be too late to fix them
then.

~~~
jacquesm
The idea is to go see your doctor when you have symptoms. If you go see your
doctor every time some parameter is out of what you consider to be your
personal error bands you'd be spending all day in the doctors office. Tests
are useful to rule out things you don't have and to close in on the things
that you do have once you have something that doesn't function well enough to
notice. Until then it is a waste of resources to spend a ton of money and
capacity on testing people without symptoms. Eventually those will clog up the
system to the point where those that _do_ need medical attention will end up
without it.

------
RockyMcNuts
MOOCs.

I see Andrew Ng's class is being offered again for the first time in a few
years ([https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-
learning](https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning)), but other great
classes aren't, like LAFF [http://www.ulaff.net/](http://www.ulaff.net/) ,
Thiel's startup class etc.

Seems like a travesty that these incredible classes are created by our best
minds, but then aren't continuously offered. (the materials are available for
self-study, but not the graded homework, support forums, TAs, certificates of
accomplishment etc.)

Coursera, the prof, the university, have no incentive to keep it going.
Philanthropists should really fund continuing development of the best-of-the-
best MOOCs so students can keep learning, best practices can keep improving.

There is no good central discovery and reputation for MOOCs. There needs to be
a place I can go and see that e.g. LAFF is the most popular / highest rated
for intro to linear algebra, and here's how much work it represents.

There are universities who start online programs, but what we really need is
an online 'degree' grantor who can say, OK, you've taken these online MOOCs
from various institutions, I can tell from the fact that you logged in with
your finger, your device's camera, metrics like typing style, word frequency
for essays, etc. that you actually did the work, these courses are worth X
number of points, here's a 'degree' or a few numbers describing the quantity
and quality of your work in various disciplines at various places.

And then the best of the best should be able to tap funds to be continuously
offered.

It seems more like an object for a non-profit startup (should be self-
sustaining but doesn't seem like the sort of thing that should be in IPO
candidate or revenue-maximizing, will turn into University of Phoenix)

------
vonnik
Topics around climate change:

For example, why is it that many people doubt that humanity is responsible for
global warming? Some work has been done on agnotology -- the study of the
spread of doubt and ignorance -- already.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology)
And then: how can we offset the forces propagating doubt and ignorance? One of
the goals of adding annotations to news with tools like
[https://hypothes.is/](https://hypothes.is/) would be to fact-check
misinformation.

Energy: The cost of energy is asymptotically approaching zero particularly in
solar. While free energy in itself is great, more interesting questions are:
what are the limits of what we can make with it? What are the social
repercussions of free energy and its corollaries? To what extent can we
subsidize yeast factories -- which we know can manufacture everything from
methyl halids (gasoline) to LSD -- to create other substances necessary to
society?

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16989-yeast-and-
bacte...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16989-yeast-and-bacterium-
turned-into-gasoline-factory/)
[https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2011/jun/21/scienti...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2011/jun/21/scientists-
make-lsd-from-microbes)

Geoengineering: Let's assume we can't stop the forces creating the CO2 that is
warming the planet in time to avert catastrophic ecological collapse. What can
we do to remove that CO2 from the atmosphere? Let's get serious about studying
man-made carbon sinks via the iron fertilization of algae blooms:

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

------
corin_
Drug safety initiatives for illegal substance users. Mix of scientific
research, knowledge distribution and legal lobbying.

As much research into mental health as possible.

How to use technology to better inform the population of political matters and
allow them to more directly influence the actions of politicians.

~~~
Alex3917
I know Rick Doblin has proposed a drivers license type system for gaining
access to different classes of drugs. It would be nice to see the creation of
an evidence-based system.

------
akvadrako
A lot of the ideas here are good, but each of them on their own could take all
the resources of your initiative and you'd still only be able to start solving
one issue.

The biggest meta-problem I see is the difficulty organising our thoughts and
digital resources. For personal use, I use Devonthink, but it's far from
ideal. For collaboration we use a hundred ways like comment threads and
wiki's, which are all rather painful.

But I really feel being able to organise our (collective) ideas is the key to
solving all the other problems better and faster, so we should work on it
first. Possibly the solution looks like a content-addressable, distributed
semantic web with privacy and massive federation, on which multiple user-
friendly apps can share pieces of data.

------
BIackSwan
Deriving (almost) limitless energy from geothermal wells can enable energy
independence for practically every nation. This can be a huge game-changer in
geopolitics and concept of nation states. Perhaps on how to do it and then
open sourcing the technique.

Got this idea from Manoj Bhargava's project of using graphene cables to
conduct heat from the earth and then convert to electricity. (link:
[http://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/could-a-new-approach-to-
therma...](http://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/could-a-new-approach-to-thermal-
conductivity-revolutionise-geothermal/)) He claims that they have already
figured out the basic mechanics for it - i don't know how far it actually is
tho.

------
cissou
Alternate models of representativity / democracy. Party systems, direct
representation, lobbying, etc. there is so much to investigate there!

------
eli_gottlieb
Applied and computational statistics, especially related to learning/inferring
latent representations and causal inference.

Basically, there's a big complicated world out there, and the data we can
collect about it using any fixed amount of human labor is _really noisy_ , and
so we need _vastly_ better statistical techniques than are usually applied
(see: p-hacking/NHST-worship) to help us figure out what the heck is going on.

Example:
[http://www.isi.edu/people/gregv/practical_methods_discoverin...](http://www.isi.edu/people/gregv/practical_methods_discovering_meaningful_structure_complex_systems)

------
pws5068
Climate Change. We need to do more than reduce tomorrow's emissions to have a
meaningful impact on the damage we've already done

------
hackercomplex
How about figuring out how to advance Open Education in some meaningful way ?

For example: Would it be possible to create a YC branded online University
which confers honorary degrees ? Even if the degrees are not fully recognized
would it even matter so long as the professors carry enough weight ? I know
this might sound crass but basically it might look better on someone's
LinkedIn profile than a "recognized" degree, and perhaps over the long term
the University's stats would be impressive since you could be selective.

Perhaps it can be scoped to CS post-grad only as a way to make it less
controversial. It's not a very pie in the sky vision either.. just onboard
some of the world's top college professors, rotate in unique "star power"
professors (examples: Paul Graham, Eric Ries, Brad Feld, David Heinemeier
Hansson, Bruce Schneier whoever has the time for a professorship), then build
out the curriculum, the web IDE / screen-sharing / webcam platform. If it were
me I'd have an emphasis on pair-programming throughout the technical bits
because it's an exciting way to learn.

You could think of it almost as another accelerator program but without all
the messy bits. This would allow YC to have more of the "full stack". Maybe
there could be some kind of a VC-backed scholarship program for it.

You might end up biting the hand that feeds you (Standford, etc) but maybe
they wouldn't look at it this way, either way that is how it goes with tech
innovation.

Think about all those programmers who applied to YC who were executing
brilliantly but who YC dismissed simply because the market conditions were not
ripe for their particular startup idea. Now you can capture them in a
different part of your funnel and maybe by the time they graduate they'll have
a more palatable idea. In my view education has always been YC's core
competency, the venture stuff feels more like a monetization layer to me, it's
kind of a hack isn't it ? j/k

p.s. All jokes aside, I am merely a programmer, so I don't know if there is
actually a market for this, but if it existed I'd probably apply

------
DrNuke
Virtual prototyping and probabilistic design of mechanical components. This
would lower the costs of very big projects like nuclear power plants and make
big nuclear more affordable. Small Modular Reactors are going there but there
are proliferation issues and therefore the interest in mammoth plants is not
dead yet. One tool nowadays is the CAE suite Tosca by Dassault Systems, which
can work with both Abaqus and Ansys. May we have an open source Tosca please?
One other issue is data homogenisation, that is to say a template to make the
most out of past, present and future applied research in the field. They call
it manufacturing 4.0 today.

~~~
DrNuke
Adding that this would also come good for space big shuttles and Moon or Mars
colonisation so SpaceX.

------
jbpetersen
Autonomous Organizations

Blockchains are nice and all for automating paperwork, but they're only one
component of a much broader set of technologies.

Building the infrastructure of an organization solely through programmed
economic incentives makes it possible to seamlessly draw on talent from
anywhere in the world without being subject to the limitations of personal
bias.

AOs also present an existential risk given that once they're up and running as
a distributed network, it can be effectively impossible to hold them legally
accountable for anything they do. Imagine someone trying to sue the bitcoin
network.

Current work surrounding Ethereum is one place where the field is developing
quickly.

------
r0s
Cognitive science and human computer interface research.

1) Every problem you're working on will be improved by better learning
systems.

2) The direct challenger to AI's potential is human augmentation. There's an
evolving hardware component to that, but the software needs to keep up, and we
can greatly benefit from that now.

We're still reading, thinking and learning with computers as if they were
books. That has to change. I want to fully realize that potential, I consider
it the most valuable contribution I can make in my lifetime. I would jump at
the opportunity to fully invest myself in that goal. Please contact me for a
deeper conversation.

------
joslin01
Better transportation infrastructure to move stuff across the the globe. We
currently use ships, planes, and trucks which aren't sustainable from a fuel
perspective or good for greenhouse emissions.

------
superfx
A concerted, long-term (~10 year) effort to develop the models, theory, and
tools necessary to simulate a prokaryotic cell. This is not the kind of thing
that’s being funded by the NIH, given their translational shift, and it’s not
the kind of thing that can be done by industry because of the time horizon.
Nonetheless it’s foundational to building a quantitatively predictive biology.
It’s the sort of thing that can enable entirely new applied sciences and
industries. And I think it’s possible.

There’s a certain way to doing this which I believe is key to success. It
can’t be about doing molecular dynamics from atoms on up, because of
computational considerations, and because that’s useless anyway (one wouldn’t
learn anything beyond the known physics and maybe better force fields and
sampling techniques). It also can’t be like the kludgy attempts that have been
made so far (e.g. Markus Covert’s paper in Cell from a few years back—it’s
perfectly alright work, but won’t get us closer to solving this particular
problem.) Instead, I think the key is to develop a new layer of abstraction
for describing biological phenomena, much like say organic chemistry is a
genuinely new abstraction built on top of physical chemistry (which is itself
built on top of QM), that hides away the irrelevant details (e.g. most of QM)
while capturing what’s salient about the biological phenomena of interest. It
would require advances in the aforementioned areas of models, theory, and
tools, that are made in concert with the aim of simulating a cell.

------
rorykoehler
Globally open borders. Allowing people move freely (globally), following
opportunity, seems like the best way to reduce global inequality. We allow
everything else to move quite freely but if you've ever dated a foreigner or
god forbid had to flee home you will understand the struggles people face when
trying to move across restricted borders. It seems like a study into how
globally open borders would affect inequality and the general well-being of
global society would be a valuable endeavour.

~~~
kavalg
What are the positive effects that you expect? Saying "reducing global
inequality", do you mean something like communism, where everybody shall be
equal? Please, don't take my question negatively. I have myself lived in a
communist country and I think it had both good and bad parts. Essentially it
boils down to whether everybody becomes equally miserable or equally happy.
Another problem that I could see with globally open borders, is that people
may not actually want it. They tend to side with similar ones (race, language,
religion,sexual orientation, income, mentality etc). This has been shown
scientifically in 1971 in Thomas Schelling's segregation model. We are
actually witnessing this on a very large scale all over the western world.
Have a look at Germany for example. There are about 2-3 generations (~3
millions) of Turks that have not dissolved in the German culture and are
actually quite compact from a social networking perspective. People have been
like this for centuries and I don't think it is realistic or even fair to
expect they will change (e.g. Kurds, Gipsies ...). Even in the US, which has a
good reputation of being able to dissolve immigrants into the US culture, we
see Chinese and black neighbourhoods. That said, I do think that it makes
sense to do research on how such segregated groups may live together (in close
proximity) peacefully and sustainably. I guess that to some extent these
problems are a subject of the military science, although it is probably trying
to solve the opposite problems as well (i.e. divide and conquer).

~~~
rorykoehler
The goal is not to dissolve but for everyone to respect and accept. Canadian
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau puts it perfectly in this video:
[https://www.facebook.com/quartznews/videos/1097902360243465/](https://www.facebook.com/quartznews/videos/1097902360243465/)

------
ag24ag24
My attention was just drawn to this. Yes Sam - our address is 110 Pioneer Way
Suite J, phone 650-938-6100. We might be able to do better than Reason's
suggestion of tea :-)

Aubrey D.N.J. de Grey, Ph.D. Chief Science Officer, SENS Research Foundation
[http://www.sens.org/](http://www.sens.org/)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey)

------
eslaught
I hope there will also be room for researchers to pitch their own ideas. This
more focused approach that you've been pursuing certainly has it's advantages,
but I'm guessing that the researchers themselves will also have ideas that you
(and HN) won't have thought of before.

(I know you're just starting to build out YCR, so I won't be surprised if it
takes a while to get to the stage where you can do this. But still, I wanted
to put the idea out there.)

------
bedros
Fund open source hardware design tools, such as synthesis tools, or
simulators, place and route, etc

------
ilaksh
Can't help but promote my own beliefs and ideas here a bit. I have started
integrating some sustainability concepts and technologies together into
something I call a tiny village. I am hoping to spread the ideas and maybe
have people use many of these ideas in real developments someday. It is all
open source (work in progress)
[http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage](http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage)

------
lifeisstillgood
\- automated psychology for families (if every home has audio and video
monitoring of every argument and discussion we will soon be able to tell what
is normal and what is best practise)

\- mesh wifi and local networking

\- something around either making it really easy for people to move country or
work remotely. When companies and countries have to compete for global talent,
many things will change from Syria to salary negotiations. I cannot see _how_
to do this but ...

(Contributed whilst drunk)

------
Houshalter
I spent a while reading all the ideas posted here, and I think most of them
are not great. Not that they are bad, just they seem like they would be really
difficult to make progress on, even with tons of funding.

I tried to come up with some ideas myself, but I also couldn't. Changing the
world is hard! Why aren't there more low hanging fruit?

There is one idea that sticks in the back of my mind, and I keep seeing
applications for it everywhere. An idea that I think would make the world a
lot more efficient.

I really think that there are applications all over the place for automated
optimization. This is a common, recurring problem, that there are basically no
tools for. And I believe a simple tool could be made that even an idiot could
use for their weird problem.

Imagine you are have a bunch of parameters that need optimized. Like for a
machine learning model. You could plug those parameters into this tool, and it
could suggest the optimal next test to perform. Or if you are designing an
airplane wing, or a chemical mixture, or a food recipe, etc. A ton of things
have parameters that can be optimized, but there are no simple tools for doing
it.

Of course that doesn't fit into the YC research model. It's more of a startup
idea, or even better an open source tool.

------
plinkplonk
A way to teach people how to do research (without doing a multi year
"apprenticeship" at a few limited locations). Research skills as one of the
"R" taught as a fundamental skill.

Like you can learn programming without really apprenticing yourself to a
specific master programmer, people should be able to learn do research without
doing a PhD. If this problem is cracked, all kinds of non-traditional people
will be able to contribute to progress.

------
Thriptic
Figure out a way to break translational research out of the academic science
model at scale! There is currently a huge decoupling of supply and demand in
academia, especially in life sciences which is my home domain. Incredibly
talented individuals are forced to invest 6-14 years building the credentials
necessary to apply for grant funding / self-sufficiency, all the while (at
best) earning what a new grad would make if they became a tech in pharma
straight out of college. Most people cycle out before hitting their prime, at
the expense of our economy.

This decoupling between supply and demand has also motivated other negative
trends, such as changes in employment incentives for labs (large push for
postdocs / foreign students at the expense of grad students); increasing
importance of publishing in high impact, for profit journals (more paywalling
of knowledge); sabotage of the peer review process; and a deliberate siloing
of what should be public knowledge to prevent "competition" (among other
things).

Ultimately I see most basic science being performed in an institute model
existing in parallel to academia. In such a model, investigators should own
their own ip, would have their salaries uncapped, and would be able to employ
qualified people at a fair market wage. In my eyes, the biggest barrier to
enacting such a model is startup capital. Most universities give new faculty
members a "startup package"; essentially an angel investment to allow them to
buy equipment / reagents and pay salaries before they need to support
themselves off of grant funding. A new institute would not have the capital
required to support this (unless it received extensive funding from
foundations / industry / NIH etc).

I envision crowd funded startup packages with caveats. One potential model
could mimic angel investment / old school patronage: an investigator receives
$X in exchange for a percentage ownership of whatever IP they create within Y
years, distributed among the investors. Another model could mimic kickstarter:
people crowd fund an investigator with small investments and are rewarded by
being part of the process. They are given regular updates, walked through
experiments / data, invited to the lab if they are local to see work being
done etc. I'm sure other funding mechanisms exist that I have not considered.
I would love to chat further about this issue if you are interested; please
feel free to contact me.

------
jostmey
Free, high-quality, open source text books for the world.

------
pjmorris
As another exploration of wealth and inequality, you might consider helping to
fund Bill Black's 'Bank Whistleblowers’ Group' [0].

When Milton Friedman argued that 'The Social Responsibility of Business is to
Increase its Profits' [1], he presumed that his argument was true in an
environment where a firm 'stays within the rules of the game, which is to say,
engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.'

I think it's plausible that there is room for funding referees of the capital
game who are not (or at least, less) biased in their analysis and reporting
than what is available in our present environment.

[0] [http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/01/bill-black-
announcing...](http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/01/bill-black-announcing-
the-bank-whistleblowers-groups-initial-proposals.html)

[1]
[http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/fr...](http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/friedman-
soc-resp-business.html)

------
vinayak147
Ask individuals/teams to propose research projects that they want to work on.

1) What are you curious about? 2) How will you go about finding the answers
you seek? 3) Why do you think this is important?

Like YC core - focus more on the people, less on the ideas. Allow the ideas to
change with the research journey.

Self motivated curiosity leads to the best research.

'Funding agencies deciding what problems are important' is the broken piece of
other research labs.

------
bobbygoodlatte
Open source voting machine software and hardware.

The status quo here is embarrassing. Diebold & the like should not be trusted
with such a cornerstone of our society

~~~
Dowwie
This is happening in CA

------
HandleTheJandal
Genetic rescue & de-extinction. The Genetic Rescue Foundation
[https://www.geneticrescue.science/](https://www.geneticrescue.science/) and
Revive & Restore [http://longnow.org/revive/](http://longnow.org/revive/) have
research projects that are advancing the scientific techniques required to do
this. Having YC Research also take an interest in this would help to expand a
field that already has the attention of some pretty talented individuals e.g.
George Church.

Human beings are now the curators of planet earth. This is the Anthropocene
era. We can either continue to intentionally and unintentionally destroy the
earth's biodiversity; or through technology we can develop the means to
preserve it.

We're not preserving biodiversity because panda's are cute and starving polar
bear pictures make us sad. We're doing it because biodiversity is useful to
humans and it takes a very long time to get it back when it's gone.

------
rajacombinator
The biggest opportunity for impact would be to find some politically incorrect
/ heterodox studies in areas where existing power structures have no incentive
to fund. Nutrition comes to mind but it's a pretty crowded field. Alternately
I think funding more open source legal docs like the SAFE could offer huge
social ROI. (Perhaps in non startup legal areas.)

------
vijucat
+1 for basic income +1 for the safety of AI

I came here to write "basic income" and was pleasantly surprised to find it
already on the agenda.

Other suggestions:

\- Desalination / easy clean water

\- Related : Cleaning the oceans. This may sound noncommercial, but if the
profit-motive needs to be addressed : a worldwide clean-the-oceans tax will
become palatable if the situation with the world's oceans worsens.

------
jondubois
Remote work. We need research to give us answers about productivity tradeoffs
and also specifics like what kinds of jobs are well-suited for remote work?
how does it affect the life satisfaction of workers? Does it increase employee
retention? What effects do cultural and language differences of employees have
on productivity when working remotely? etc...

------
Jemaclus
Hearing aids.

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

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

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

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

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

/rant :)

------
uglysexy
Not sure if these are within the scope of what you guys do (a couple are 'out
there') but here's some:

\- digital currency that doesn't need network connectivity nor blockchain to
do a transaction (just device to device)

\- systems that actively monitor for suspicious/anomalous network activity and
respond in real-time (security that can prevent Sony & OPM hacks) or simply
put: security products that will stop the Chinese from hacking US networks

\- urban farming

\- fish/seafood farming

\- batteries from garbage

\- products that save rain water - from your home's rain gutter or from the
roadside curb - and into a cistern

\- a way to lift third-world countries out of their situation so there are no
more third-world countries (all of Bill Gates' and Oprah's money have barely
made a dent)

\- underwater or ocean based communities

\- cleaning up the 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch'

\- more women/female programmers/engineers (it IS the pipeline and perhaps
even the culture)

\- an actual, real hoverboard

Are you really going to read all these comments or did I just waste my time
writing this??

------
yk
A Warpdrive. (Just because I am currently playing with GR as a side project.)

Actually serious, I believe the transmission of information between the
frontiers of science and the public are broken. On one hand the university
system is geared towards producing specialists, on the other hand the media is
geared towards spectacular as orthogonal of important, due to a mixture of
science journalists being the product of the university system and market
forces. So one would need a reliable process to produce the one book to read
about X.

In first approximation one could try to produce a four volume series
"Frontiers in Physics", were the volumes are "Particle physics," "Atoms &
Nuclei," "Solid state physics" and "Astronomy and Geophysics" and then distill
it into a single volume. (As a illustration of Universities producing
specialists, I could not name the four titles for chemistry, let alone
linguistics.)

------
shanacarp
Genetics and Epigenetics research at scale on humans. Just getting the
database together in a machine readable form would be a huge accomplishment

There is a huge (missing) sample problem in genetics. This creates problems in
epigenetic research, even with gene variations where there are accurate sample
sizes, because it becomes extremely difficult to figure out if it is the gene
that it is the trigger or an epigentic factor turning on a gene, and if so,
what sort of epigenetic factors are we looking at in the first place. Turning
off genes through behavior changes is mostly off the plate without getting
accurate data first.

Part of the reason: It is still expensive to decode every genome in a human
(around of $250k per person right now) That cost will drop radically in the
next 10 years because it is only 1-5 parts that really need to drop in cost to
make it around $250/person. Then matching that data to health and other
related records en mass is huge- especially because most basic health records
in EHR are geared towards billing procedures and short term case discussion,
not tracking people, families, and communities _.

Furthermore, it is a true ethics issue. To donate part of your full genome to
science means parts of your genome will be bought and sold for research
purposes. The going rate for simple stuff is about 1k/genome, with more money
to the market with more interesting medical histories and family data
attached. Creating a really big database that is open means this data stops
being in a market and could push for innovation in the field.

_I'd like to remind you that we have no idea why the county that Ycombinator
sits in is among the top counties in the country for Breast Cancer rates. Just
getting an accurate sample size of Marin, San Mateo, and San Fransicio
counties's genetics and true medical history could make a huge impact on why
people get cancer period, because we have no idea why there is a cluster
there.

------
cinquemb
I'm biased because of my work, but neural interfaces for general purpose
tasking or entertainment. Alot of fMRI/EEG/MEG research is focused on medical
applications, but the funding cycle is tied heavily into medical related
grants, and current applications meditation tasks that are popular generally
wont get people excited (I've ran a lot of novice/experienced mediators who
have started to fall asleep or become disengaged from a research task and who
need continues human engagement to keep them in the mood…), nor convince
people that what they are buying is worthwhile, unlike say buying $500+ gaming
system and games people play for hours on end without having to convince
someone of it working when they just get the immediate benefit. This could
also help get more people from software or other engineering backgrounds more
exposed to the field now and help push things forward faster.

------
trengrj
I'm not affiliated with this project but ucoin would be a great idea to fund.
Basically combine basic income + Bitcoin - mining costs.

It requires a trust graph currently but a centralised authority would be ok in
my view (we interact with them everyday - government organisations).

[http://en.ucoin.io](http://en.ucoin.io)

------
tuyguntn
Peace.

When people live in peace, when countries live in peace, creativity of people
will boost, number one priority of each person would be how to impact peoples
live in better way.

Every single research will be shared across countries to make lives of poor
even better than ever.

Imagine a world, where you can go anywhere without fear and help anyone, even
more, get help from anyone.

[Some kind of Utopia]

------
akshatpradhan
YC Research into LSD and Psilocybin would be great. These drugs have been
making major impact in the psychotherapy community, especially war veterans
and rape victims with PTSD.

MAPS is leading the charge [https://www.maps.org/research/psilo-
lsd](https://www.maps.org/research/psilo-lsd)

------
beefman
* Macroeconomics

Attempt a blank-slate reboot of macroeconomics. Using data, build a framework
for evaluating macroeconomic models. Develop and test models without
prejudice.

Human civilization operates at a higher power density than the core of the
sun. We should understand it. But economics is stuck a natural philosophy, and
most of it is actually anti-knowledge.

Success here will unfortunately require significant effort (10-15%) be spent
on evangelism, including criticism of existing economics.

The main consumer of economics is government and there are strong incentives
to exaggerate the effectiveness (either positive or negative) of economic
theories and policies based on them.

You will have to work very hard to avoid politicization.

Recent work in thermodynamics (Tim Garrett, Jeremy England) may be helpful on
the theory side; machine learning on the empirical side. To get financial
data, homomorphic encryption: [https://numer.ai](https://numer.ai)

------
ghufran_syed
Innovative but (superficially) crazy sounding ideas about campaign finance
reform e.g. "Voting with dollars"
[http://amacad.org/publications/bulletin/summer2004/ackerman....](http://amacad.org/publications/bulletin/summer2004/ackerman.pdf)

------
bshanks
Focus on things that can't be funded in traditional academia, yet which are
public goods and so cannot be funded by startups.

Project that have one or more of the following characteristics:

1) requires a large amount of implementation work and real-world trials before
you know if it's a good idea

2) a long project, but if it fails, there may be no publishable intermediate
results (in academia, we stay away from long projects unless they are
publishable no matter what the result turns out to be; b/c at the end of grad
school, or your postdoc, or your tenure clock, you need a publication in order
to remain in academia)

3) reform of academic funding (it's not advisable to pitch an NSF government
official to fund a project that only makes sense if NSF government officials
are unnecessary)

4) success criterion is a matter of taste, rather than objective (or, maybe
the true success criterion is objective but too expensive to measure, so taste
must be substituted as a proxy success criterion)

5) creation of useful artifacts, rather than new knowledge

6) requires ongoing maintenance in order to remain useful to society

7) more a matter of putting together or implementing existing ideas in a
wholistic way than discovery of novel ideas

Examples:

* alternative systems to allocate research funding (satisfies #1,3,4)

* creation of new programming languages (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7)

* open-source software development (5, 6)

* creation of new software-supported governance procedures (1, 4, 7)

* creation of new legal structures (for remote working open co-ops, etc) (1, 4, 5)

* direct attacks on the Millennium problems in math (1)

* upgrades to the academic peer review process (1, 4, 6)

* alternative systems for hiring professors (1, 3, 4)

------
knite
Knowledge stewardship. The world's knowledge is growing exponentially, much
faster than the tools to aggregate, catalogue, and filter that knowledge.

Khan Academy is a good start. And Google is, well, Google: you can find what
you need, if you ask the right question. We need the 21st century library-
teacher-guided learning system.

------
johan_larson
Would modest funding for legal defence make a real difference for poor-to-
middle-class people?

One of our nastier social problems is that the legal system assumes people
have realistic means of defending themselves when prosecutors charge them with
crimes. But for people without savings -- which is a lot of people -- that's
not really true, so they end up taking all kinds of crappy plea-bargains
rather than actually contesting the government's accusations in court.

There's legal aid, of course, but it tends to be funded at very low levels,
and done by either wildly overworked staffers or contractors paid at such low
levels they rarely deliver a spirited defence.

If the down-and-out were given enough money for a real defence, would the law
deliver results that are more just? By what metric? And how much money would
it take to make a real difference?

------
zw123456
Racial equality, especially in tech. Develop a disruptive and innovative way
to help bring more diversity into the technology field. How to break down
racial barriers to more people of color, especially blacks to enter STEM
fields and level the playing field for access to education needed for that.

------
caspin
There are still millions of UK people - young and old - who either do not use
computers at all or are barely beyond beginner stage, and therefore cannot
make intelligent, relevant use of it. See statistics at
[http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/rdit2/internet-access-
quarterl...](http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/rdit2/internet-access-quarterly-
update/q1-2014/info-internet-usage.html) This is despite the work of Martha
Lane Fox's Digital by Default project, very generously government funded and
rewarded by a seat in the Lords. The obvious solution was not acted upon, and
I would like to put it to you, having already done small scale research on it.
Anita Pincas a.pincas@ioe.ac.uk Univ. College London

------
harigov
Better way of sharing the state of the world (upgraded news sites and/or
journals) -

If you open newyork times or any news website, its clear that they are stuck
in the 19th century. They are organized on the basis of time rather than on
topics/people/metrics. What if we have a news website that's actually a
dashboard? It can

\- Highlight the current metrics of the world -
crime/stocks/happiness/weather, etc., \- Highlight the currently active topics
and people - what's happening/what did people say, etc., \- Journal the world
in different axis - geographical, temporal, personal, emotional, national,
topical, cultural, etc., And let people see the trends in each of these
dimensions.

How does such a thing look like? How does journalism evolve in that kind of a
world?

------
raymondgh
I perceive that US Citizens feel disenfranchised when it comes to national
politics. Is the popular apathy related to our 2-party system or other
factors? I believe we have the technology today to effect meaningful change,
but it hasn't been done yet, and I don't know why.

------
winterismute
My very humble opinion.

\- Having had a number of friends doing research in the field of anthropology,
I recently got to think it represents a bag of knowledge we could leverage on
to answer very important questions, for example, "what is really the role of
religion in our societies?". Governments are spending huge amount of money to
defend from/attack terrorists that let themselves explode in name of a
religion, but no money is spent to understand deeply how this is possible, and
whether it is really what is the real role of religion in that.

\- "Nutritionism", or whatever other word you like to mean "how what we eat
impacts our well-being". We need to eat, but information on how we should do
it to be healthier seems very contradictory.

------
mrdrozdov
Fund more programs like Tamid [1].

Tamid is a student run non-profit that helps students get internships in
Israel. It's different from a program like Birthright in that it facilitates a
cultural exchange through business rather than religion.

Another commenter brought up that teaching empathy has been something you,
sama, have personally thought is an interesting and difficult problem, and a
Tamid-like program is one approach. There's nothing quite like living with a
foreign family and working for a foreign business that makes you fully
appreciate the perspective of that country.

Although Tamid is Israel specific, one could imagine similar programs for
India, Russia, China, etc.

[1] [http://www.tamidgroup.org/](http://www.tamidgroup.org/)

------
vishalzone2002
There are a lot of Non Profits who are doing amazing work but are often faced
with lack of funds. There are also a lot of people who did like to help but
refrain from doing so for lack of motivation, empathy or trust on the
organizations. Sometimes people feel a sudden urgency of doing good but
because its not as quick as calling an uber, they end up not doing it. That
lost dollar could have fed a kid somewhere.

I believe human race can be uplifted with numerous enablers and doers on the
ground. But there needs to be work/research done on the best framework to make
the whole process as seamless and rewarding as possible.

Companies like google have attempted this with OneToday App. More companies
and startups should come together on this problem including YC.

------
napperjabber
The effect of education. The effect of proper diet. The effect of someone
following their own path in the field of Mathmatics, Medicine, or Science on
society as a whole. How long it truly takes to learn a language when it is
your singular focus as an adult.

------
augb
How to provide tech seed funding for remote and underserved communities here
and abroad.

This is looking beyond what YC Fellowship provides. This is not necessarily
looking for unicorns, but what does it take to scale out tech seed funding to
remote and underserved areas.

Edit: clarification

------
brudgers
Open source operating systems for the Bangladeshi farmer's smart phone
smartphone: a computer used until it breaks and improves a person's quality of
life.

What infrastructure is needed to make making open source projects easy for
ordinary people to use easy?

\+ What sort of tools make developing software for embedded devices that is
updatable [securely when and where needed] easier than making software that
can't?

\+ What does an easy to use security model for a world of updatable embedded
computing devices look like? How does it play out in situations with high
communication latency and network partitions?

\+ How can general purpose computing be integrated into devices and be made as
easy to use as a smartphone camera?

------
Brooklynmom
I'm wondering if you might think about pilots or creating models. In
particular, I'm thinking about how design thinking can create more
opportunities for communities to experience deliberative democracy. That's the
work that I do, and I'm about to start a project in NYC that focuses on
creating an admissions policy that will result in more diverse middle schools.
It involves research, but it also puts forth, or we hope it will, a model that
other districts can tweak and try out. Here's an example
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIRkVZDILzM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIRkVZDILzM)

------
razzaj
A research on how to unwind grudges after long term conflicts. Specially for
large scale conflicts (as opposed to personal conflicts). A notorious example
would be the Arab, Iraeli conflict. That is a conflict that affects me
personally, and i ve always been worried about how, even if official peace
treaties are signed, will the people get over the hate, fear of the other, the
feeling of not having been vidicated. And the effect of such feeling on the
peace. A case that has always fascinated me is the german european relations
post ww2, same for nippon-us relations, how did these pull it off?

Finding out the hows, and whys, can greatly help in improving global well
being.

------
DanielBMarkham
Making better rope.

Seriously. The Space Elevator guys are working with micro-fibers to come up
with some kind of rope/scaffording that would support its own weight and that
of an elevator all the way out to GSO, but it sounds like there ought to be
some early victories where you could take microfibers and create super-light
rope and cabling.

I have no idea what the impact would be but it sounds like something very
interesting and somewhat useful that the commercial sector wouldn't develop on
its own. It could also lead to a bunch of other stuff that'd be neat, like new
textiles. If nothing else, we'd learn stuff about what was feasible and what
wasn't.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
tehansen
[http://www.maps.org](http://www.maps.org)

------
minimaxir
The projects being funded by YC (esp basic income) are substantially different
and difficult to scale than those of traditional startups, YC or otherwise.

In the interest of reducing noise, are moonshots what you are looking for, or
is it anything-goes?

~~~
sama
Anything goes.

------
brudgers
\+ Real property. Nearly all research is driven by commercial concerns.
Detroit and New Orleans show how brittle that approach is statistically for
events we can anticipate because of the scale at which urbanization is
occurring.

\+ Ubiquitous production of computational artifacts. The analogy I started
with was photography: that computing is in an age when heavy equipment, toxic
chemicals, glass plates, and holding still for a long time are barriers. But
I've since pushed the analogy further back: maybe to oil portraits, or
paintings on tomb walls, or perhaps Cromagnon caves by firelight. Now the
world is flooded with images.

------
nradov
Crime investigation and forensic tools. Move "CSI" from science fiction closer
to reality. Apply solid scientific principles and automation to cut costs and
prevent human errors.

For example currently police don't have the resources to really investigate
many crimes. So let's build small robots that automatically gather physical
evidence from crime scenes such as DNA, blood, hair, fingerprints, fibers,
etc. Make them cheap and reliable enough for every small town to afford. Then
build automated analysis machines to look for evidence matches in databases
and output statically valid match confidence scores.

------
thex10
Some way to use technology to make legislation (lawmaking) easier, smarter,
better.

------
sama
Thank you all. Hard to pick...

------
eldavido
What we'll do with all the electronics waste we're producing now. Disassemble
it? Take it apart with robotics? Is it possible to reuse SMD-soldered
components in new things?

This problem is only going to get worse with time.

------
aperrien
How about checking into the use of optogenetics to build a universal,
minimally invasive neural interface? We have optogenetic treatments that make
nerve cells responsive to and emissive of light. Can we treat nerve cells to
transmit and receive light over a fiber optics, letting us bridge gaps in
existing neural paths? something like that night go a long way to healing all
sorts of neural degenerative disease, and possibly deal with paralysis as
well.

Perhaps eventually something along the lines of plug and play hardware for
humans, if you can come up with some sort of universal spec for it.

------
carleverett
At the risk of being too ambitious, I would absolutely love to see YCR fund
research on terraforming Mars. Based on the recent climate change data here
Earth[1], this is important for 2 reasons:

1) We might be in a position of needing a new home sooner than expected

2) Humans seem to be better at affecting global environments than we
originally thought

It can only help us to have a better understanding of what a realistic budget
and timeline for terraforming would be.

[1]
[https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201513](https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201513)

~~~
HappyFunTime
Resources allocated to interplanetary redundancy enhance the survival of the
people "over there" at the cost of you being more likely to die "here." I
prefer to amplify the chance I and my loved ones survive, instead of splitting
4's at the blackjack table. Also, you shouldn't be sitting at the blackjack
table.

------
ecesena
Wars, potentially including cyber wars.

I can see a lot of similarities with the basic income questions, e.g. what
would people do if they couldn't worry about their lives?

Broader awareness could also be a side effect of the research.

------
_rpd
Please assess Polywell Fusion.

Here is a recent status update: [http://nextbigfuture.com/2016/01/jaeyoung-
park-confirms-publ...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2016/01/jaeyoung-park-
confirms-publication-of.html)

It includes a link to a 2015 Physics Review paper, a published patent
application, and a pitch deck.

After 20 years of funding by the US Navy, they are looking for $30 million and
3 years to resolve the remaining scientific questions. They are under US ITAR
restrictions, so the work must be owned by US entities.

------
bra-ket
YC Brain.

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

------
spoiledtechie
Traffic patterns. Ahh, just kidding. No really, traffic software. The world is
tied up in traffic. Mainly stop lights are are archaic and need such a large
improvement with how it detects traffic and stand stills.

Have you ever sat at a light and wondered why it was still red when no cars
were coming in any direction?

This software is lousy, it should have object recognition, sensor tech, but
the basic idea of traffic lights haven't been updated in decades.

You want to save time, money and a big sale to the rest of the world? Fix
traffic lights.

~~~
thoralfskolem
One thought, the only simulation that prevented all other traffic lights or
subsequent streets from bogging down in traffic, was to ensure at that
particular time, no cars advanced at a certain speed.

Your wait may be a locally suboptimal outcome to ensure everyone else has a
globally less miserable existence.

So as another participant in the system, thank you for sacrificing a little so
that we can be better overall.

A little food for thought, while driving in another country with less
adherence to the laws, the operating custom seemed to be stop if it is red OR
if safe, go. Ironically, this prevailing attitude resulted in fewer accidents
as people drove more cautiously.

------
ThomPete
My top 4

1\. Health Data Comparison Analysis: What can we actually use existing health
data comparison for. How much data is needed for progress?

2\. OpenSpaceMining: Research into how to mine space.

3\. New OS solutions for new scenarios: Research into new types of operation
systems solving new kinds of problems (ex. Fleet management for drones,
automated ships, planes, trucks)

4\. Technology and it's effect on our economy. What does technology actually
do to our economy, how can we make it a part of the economic models instead of
just treating it as an externality

------
mkutsovsky
Federal Drug Administration: The current pipeline for getting new drugs
approved is fairly corrupt ($ > merit) and extremely ineffective (time taken)
that its a major inhibitor for innovation in biotech, medicine, and medical
devices. Doing research to figure out how to streamline and automate this
process while giving a fair playing field to everyone, make it not cost-
prohibitive to get new quality products approved while not compromising
effectiveness (filtering out harmful products)

------
danenania
How to fix government. Not how to lobby and play political games effectively--
I mean really fix it. Transform it with technology. Make it open, fair,
consistent, and participatory.

------
DanBC
Better ways of handling e-waste. Watch documentaries of the Akkra waste dump
to see why.

Ways to educate child waste-pickers; ways to give child and adult waste
pickers better quality of life.

------
chipsy
Philosophers of technology. People whose mission is purely to facilitate a
conversation about where we really are and what should be done next, and are
given the backing and platform to work on and diffuse radical messages within
a context different from existing organizations.

Everyone's chained to a reliance on borrowed ideologies of yesteryear,
sometimes repackaged to fit the times. There are small whispers of other
ideas, but they take so, so long to enter the public sphere.

------
pickitupsnake
Weighted carry protocols to keep elderly physically functional.

------
bbayer
Gene therapy - It is known that modified virus vectors can fix DNA. I believe
this approach can be used to cure wide variety of diseases related to gene
mutations.

------
Outdoorsman
This is so fundamental I doubt that it would raise an eyebrow for more than a
few seconds:

Ask yourself what sorts of environments entities like YC depend on for their
very existence...?

Freedom to build wealth and disperse that wealth, essentially without
constraint...

Please choose something that helps support the formation, or maintenance, of
an environment that values human welfare and actively supports it....

In other words make your choice a philanthropic one, in the truest sense of
the word...

------
stale2002
Please disrupt the SF housing market. Or just pay my rent.

------
jqm
A better candy bar. Most of the commonly available ones are far too sweet and
filled with cheap filler like peanuts or sugar spun air (I guess they call
that nougat or something).

It's like they keep reducing the quality somehow... I can't put my finger on
it. I swear candy bars were better quality when I was a kid. I know it seems
small... but a really good candy bar would go a long way to improving _my_
world! Disrupt Mars!

------
baron816
I think there should be some sort of subsidized insurance program for hiring
ex-convicts. No one wants to hire former criminals, which is clearly a problem
since unemployment among them increases the likelihood of recidivism. But if
companies where protected against the risks associated with employing ex-cons,
then they would be more likely to hire them, especially since ex-cons are very
willing to take lower wages.

------
abakker
Deer population control. Reduce deer in the northeast and reduce the primary
vector for northeaster deforestation and Lyme disease. Come up with an
effective way to reduce the deer overpopulation that doesn't involve shooting
or poisoning them

In The west, research ways to control the wild boar/pig population, or find a
way to produce a sustainable food source from wild boars that doesn't require
owning lots of land.

------
amsheehan
Materials science. Specifically batteries and capacitors.

------
badlibertarian
This proposal outlines a social governance project meant to encourage more
responsible collaboration and possibly bootstrap better autonomous decision-
making based on human examples:
[http://ultimateviralmeme.blogspot.com/2016/01/proposal-
sybil...](http://ultimateviralmeme.blogspot.com/2016/01/proposal-sybil-
resistant-anonymous.html)

------
ny2244111
AGI. It's nearly impossible to get a big company to invest in AGI due to the
historically bad ROI. That's also the reason there probably won't be a
successful startup in this space for a while. The private sector is not
particularly great at exploration where ROI is uncertain. OpenCog is a great
start, but it would be nice to have another project in parallel that utilizes
different ideas.

~~~
tim333
Google are investing quite a bit.

~~~
ny2244111
I would say they invest heavily in narrow AI like Apple and Microsoft, Amazon,
etc. However, AGI is rarely dealt with.

------
ryporter
Issues closer to YC's core competence, such as innovation and productivity.
There's lots of advice out there about how to be innovative and productive,
but I think it's fair to say that we don't really understand these areas at a
fundamental level. Because the YC partners have so much experience and
interest in these issues, they could contribute much more than just money.

------
MrQuincle
[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/internet-things-hype-anne-
van...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/internet-things-hype-anne-van-
rossum?_mSplash=1)

IMO this will exist in 10-15 years:

\- a wireless charging infrastructure

\- an indoor localization infrastructure

\- a global wallet infrastructure

Not enough people think about the lack of infrastructure nowadays. The
internet is not the end.

------
GraffitiTim
Why not have an application process similar to YC?

------
JDDunn9
"Full" auto-pilot. Soon, battery tech will allow us to fly light aircraft on
all electric. If people could go to a mini-airport only for short takeoff and
landing aircraft (STOL), and get in a 4-seater that will fly to their
destination (no human pilot required), that would be pretty close to the
vision of flying cars we've all been promised.

------
gbveiuwlbiu
Microbiomics and Metagenomics.

Wherever you look, there's opportunity for sampling and sequencing - in the
soil, inside livestock, on hospital floors - that could lead to novel life-
saving or industrial applications or at worst, a better understanding of the
natural world.

To do this at scale takes capital and resources - difficult for many labs, but
not a problem for YC Research.

------
terramars
Enabling technologies for improving quality of life and economic opportunity
in the developing world, in a way that doesn't require large capital outflow
or aid-based investing. EG, low cost renewable power generation, labor
reducing tools for agriculture, water purification and management, sewage
handling, computing, local manufacturing, etc.

~~~
terramars
In line with this, $1-10/day basic income in the developing world would be a
much cheaper and potentially more impactful way of testing the concept
compared to the ~$30/day minimum for meaningful impact in the US.

------
miguelrochefort
Restart everything.

Society has accumulated enormous "societal debt" (think technical debt). Most
things are inherently broken and inefficient. They haven't changed in
centuries.

\- Communication

\- Education

\- Emotions

\- Jobs

\- Housing

\- Clothing

\- Health

\- Nutrition

\- Politics

\- Economy

We can't fix these things incrementally. The social codebase is worthless. We
need to start over, from scratch.

Buy an issland or a big piece of land. Carefully select people based on a yet-
to-determine algorithm (people with as little exposition to society, such as
kids), and send them there. Closely observe what they do, and ensure they
don't repeat and/or bring with them habits and ideas that we know to be wrong.
This will take a while, but at some point we will be able measure how they
perform as opposed to the rest of the world. These metrics could include
happiness (although difficult to measure), ratio of time they spend doing
things they agree with (willing to do, not coerced), energy consumed, etc.

Most jobs are utterly useless. Most people have no idea what the fuck is going
on. People don't have a purpose or focus. We really have no clue. Logical
fallacies make up MOST of our understanding of reality. We live in constant
fear and anxiety, and dedicate a lot of resources to cope with it. We quickly
become convinced that money is an end rather than a means. We miss the big
picture, we lack empathy, we avoid introspection. We believe in lies, myths,
bro-science. We don't have a clue about what habits or foods are healthy for
us. Regulations and the monstrosity of the legal system make the simplest
thing unachievable by mere mortals. We have technology that's thousands of
time more efficient than what we had in the past, yet our lives have barely
changed (i.e., the hours of work).

Like it or not, most of your active time is spent at work. We work 20-100
hours a week just to get by. Surely, getting rid of 80% of jobs (at least in
countries like the US) while maintaining people's quality of life would a real
breakthrough. Yet, I would argue that this is already possible, without the
need of any additional technological breakthrough (i.e., AI). Look around,
most jobs only fulfill habits and historically relevant needs that we can
easily get rid today.

------
sharp11
Define a location-based metric for climate change vulnerability analogous to
the way walkscore.com has defined and developed a metric for walkability.

A good walkscore makes property more valuable. A valid and widely distributed
climatescore could be the most effective way to create political will by
making property value accurately reflect future risk.

------
bahro
Related to the basic income project -- questions about the societal impact of
technology that the technology or business sector might be hesitant to
investigate themselves.

For example, how do social networks, targeted advertising, etc. impact social
dynamics and sense of self? Are these impacts positive or negative, and could
technology improve them?

~~~
bahro
On a broader scale, how can we measure and understand happiness/quality of
life? It is difficult to improve on factors that cannot be measured -- if the
goal of technology is to improve quality of life (which I believe it is), then
we need a way of measuring that holistically.

------
sytse
Charter cities.
[https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer?language=en](https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer?language=en)
Allowing more people to move to a better place seems very beneficial and might
have positive unit economics (sustainable after initial investment).

------
jagtesh
Thorium reactor research!

~~~
sandGorgon
This is especially critical be because the two fastest growing economies -
India and China - need Thorium energy to move away from fossil fuels

------
lcall
Changing the way mankind manages its knowledge, individually and as a whole.
[http://www.onemodel.org](http://www.onemodel.org) .

(The site isn't pretty but if you browse in & read the material, say, starting
with About, Future.., Vision etc, I hope it's compelling.)

------
kitcar
Flat tax (versus the globally-preferred progressive/graduated tax) as a way to
stimulate economic growth

------
nradov
Elder care. Demographics is destiny and with declining birth rates —
especially in the developed world — the population will inevitably be graying.
How can we provide them with effective and humane long-term care without
crashing our economy or occupying a huge fraction of our labor force?

------
iambateman
Rapid, relevant education.

How can we give people education which maps to real life skills in 0.5x the
time it currently takes? I spent a semester of college learning to write a
memo...(in 2010).

\- software assisted learning plans based on interest and need \- cover
personal finance, negotiation, and learning techniques.

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

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

------
cma
Stop future Shkrelis and free orphan drugs with a non-profit that only needs
to maintain the credible threat of drug redevelopment/research:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10577132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10577132)

------
alariccole
Eradicate mosquitoes.

~~~
spoonie
But won't someone think of the bats and the spiders!? :O

------
jarmitage
How about 'Is the startup ecosystem as valuable as people within it believe it
to be?'

------
outlace
Origin of life research: Understanding how life arose on Earth or can arise on
other planets would be one of the biggest breakthroughs in all of science.

[Sociology/Psychology] How to effectively promote reason, rationality, and
critical thinking among the masses.

------
stevewilhelm
Follow in the footsteps of Joan B. Kroc and fund the advancement of
peacebuilding and social justice.

[http://www.sandiego.edu/peacestudies/about/](http://www.sandiego.edu/peacestudies/about/)

------
jayajay
machine learning on eeg data. finding functions which attempt to map signals
to consistent thoughts. software to pre-process eeg data. applications in
mental treatment, adhd, meditation therapy, paralysis victims, communication,
security, etc.

------
etrautmann
Biotechnology - protein engineering, synthesized foods, synthetic biology.

Brain-machine interfaces to treat psychiatric disorders (Depression and PTSD
among others), paralysis and movement disorders, and sensory write-in to help
the blind and deaf populations.

------
badlibertarian
[http://ultimateviralmeme.blogspot.com/2016/01/proposal-
sybil...](http://ultimateviralmeme.blogspot.com/2016/01/proposal-sybil-
resistant-anonymous.html)

------
dmvaldman
Autonomous computing, perhaps with non-human participatory economies based on
Bitcoin.

ML for complex systems that haven't been as explored, for instance
agriculture. ie grow crops better by analyzing the billions of ways to do it

ML for the genome is another

------
m0llusk
Research research. Lots of money is wasted on regression analysis driven
nonresults and other common errors. Best practices for research especially in
the era of pervasive software augmentation are very much in question.

------
j1f4
Research into off label uses of unpatented drugs.

(Inspired by the article recently posted here which pointed out that although
a drug is being used off label to treat phobias, there is no incentive for a
company to get that use certified.)

------
retube
In no particular order:

Nuclear fusion Hyperloop Hypersonic engines Cancer Antibiotics replacement
Optimisation / simplification of tax code Crop yields, artificial meat
Diplomatic solutions to ethnic/sectarian tensions

~~~
micwawa
Optimization of tax code via machine learning. It should be possible to build
an intelligent tax machine that uses enough features in order properly
classify and tax corporations like GE or high frequency trading funds in the
most obviously and proper way. Simple tax codes are vulnerable to lawyers who
complicate them.

------
sflicht
A really really tall tower: [http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/project/the-tall-
tower/](http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/project/the-tall-tower/)

------
fha
Batteries for mobile devices that charge really fast and last really long.

------
lobo_tuerto
Easy bioponics DIYs kits for everyone in the world.

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

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

------
shrikrishna
Delivering internet (and maybe even have core infrastructure like DNS) via
satellites (like Google and SpaceX, but not-for-profit) and allowing citizen
funding (like planetary foundation)

------
razzaj
something that could benefit humanity on the long term is a wider "operating
temperature" range. With the planet's weather getting more extreme, and the
long term possibility of finding other habitable planets with an atmosphere
that might be several degrees off, a human that feels comfortable in a wider
temperature range will need spend far less external energy to accommodate.
Consider how much electricity can be saved if people felt as confortable at
25deg C as they do at 22deg C.

------
SergeyHack
Smarter agriculture. How to make Permaculture commercially viable while
keeping it as ecological as possible.

The current agriculture is quite bad for soils and puts many chemicals into
our food.

------
pocketstar
Asteroid mining & Spacestations/microgravity habitation.

------
TheRealmccoy
Every year, there are millions of people who suffer from life threatening
diseases like cancer. The statistics refer to only that single person, who is
suffering; but the truth is the close family members and friends also suffer,
along with the patient.

Usually, they are left to fend alone with their suffering, as it is very
difficult for them to share their true feelings with others, because people
who are not in their shoes are not actually able to comprehend them.

How does it impacts the patient's care,well-being and recovery? What can we do
more to make society more empathetic towards these people? How does this
impact economically overall?

------
greendesk
How can HN readers help YC research? The list here is very long, and YC might
not be able to deal with the whole set. If some of us can help, do mention
this as well.

~~~
sospep
open source research .... hmmmmm

------
HappyFunTime
gamification tactics for useful behaviors. Some good tactics should be found
out of the cancerous casual gaming wallet emptying strategies. Maybe time
gating can get people to write books, that's what the pomodoro method is
right? What other tactics could work? Jingling sounds in the "casino
acoustics" genre? They've found a way to addict humans to useless behaviors,
lets find ways to addict humans to useful ones!

------
sohailk
aging

------
Findeton
You should fund Fusion research. Yes, it's much more expensive, but we
_really_ need it. Energy per capita and GDP per capita are very closely
related!

------
eghad
Combinatorial/High-throughput screening for novel materials. The space is need
of innovation, talent, and funding in areas that aren't pharmaceuticals.

------
JoeAltmaier
A solar-powered oxygen producer. Instead of huge solar farms in the desert
generating solar electricity, then transmitting it hundreds or thousands of
miles to where its useful with all the losses involved, instead directly
generate oxygen from sunlight right there. Doesn't matter where you do that
for the planet; once up and running it'll help sustain the whole world like a
rainforest does. And it could be massively more efficient than growing plants.
And it could work where there's the most sun and the least opportunity for
plants to grow - large deserts.

------
JupiterMoon
Male birth control and non-hormonal female birth control.

------
wslh
1/ Mobile education for young [and poor] children: there are scarce resources
for teaching children <=~6 year old. It is challenging to teach some more
complex topics. I am not obviously thinking only about coding.

Complementary to the above: making affordable to have a basic robot so kids
can learn automating them in the real world instead of the physical screen. I
envision a project like One Laptop per Child but for robots.

2/ Affordable Health devices so you can check you up at home or work, probably
with you mobile device.

3/ Intelligence amplification.

4/ Attacking pollution

------
riemannzeta
Terraforming. Shorter term how do we bring temperature and CO2 levels down
here. Longer term how do we make the moon and Mars habitable?

------
thethinker1032
Education.

From my experience, just trying to combine technology and teaching isn't good
enough. We need something better than what we have now.

------
caherrerapa
In general health. Research on new treatments for diseases/conditions like: \-
Hearing Loss \- Cardiovascular disease

------
Dowwie
Team Formation: how the band comes together

------
chrispeel
Economics! What is the best way for a developed country to sustain creative
destruction, and employment.

How to get rid of lobbyists

------
CptJamesCook
IQ, and how to increase it

Acne, and how to treat it

The energy of a human being, and how to improve it (without stimulants)

Baldness, and how to cure it

~~~
beefman
If there were a drug for motivation, that would be a big win. Many people
suffer from procrastination, and it seems to me plausibly implicated in
poverty.

------
jameswilsterman
Criminal Justice

\+ Apply machine learning algorithms to determine and preempt causes of
recidivism

\+ Develop Minority Report-style "pre-cog" policing algorithms to prevent
predict future crimes and help prioritize policing resources

Public Policy & Economics

\+ Land use reform (impact of land value taxes / pro-density initiatives)

\+ Develop robust electronic voting systems

Science & Medicine

\+ Explore possible systems of carbon sequestration

\+ Mars habitability

\+ Superconductors? Carbon nanotubes?

------
shahryc
MACHINE REASONING -- something like the "Winograd Schema Challenge"

------
KasianFranks
AI applied to understanding the hidden relationships linking epigentics and
extending human lifespan via algorithmically engineered diet, nutrition and
longevity genomics:

The precedent:

Laura Deming: Making a business out of fighting the ills of aging

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbYgza4NNk8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbYgza4NNk8)

Cynthia Kenyon: Experiments that hint of longer lives

(Cynthia now works at Google's Calico Labs)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V48M5j-6zdE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V48M5j-6zdE)

Now connect this:

Nutrigenomics, Epigenetics, and Stress Tolerance

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvNLNl7oJnM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvNLNl7oJnM)

Now combine with:

What is Epigenetics? with Nessa Carey

The last 10mins are very important, in particular minute 35:06

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DAcJSAM_BA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DAcJSAM_BA)

Statistical modeling of biomedical corpora: mining the Caenorhabditis Genetic
Center Bibliography for genes related to life span - Blei DM1, Franks K,
Jordan MI, Mian IS. -
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1533868](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1533868)

Combining the worlds variants of pattern recogition, machine learning and AI
with data associated to epigentic and standard genomic experiments and
information, we should be able to discover hidden relationships that will
enable advancement in extending human lifespan.

Revenue is something we'll need to focus on and that may come in the form of
consumer applications that algorithmically engineer their epigenome with data
from companies like 23andMe, Navigenics, Ubiome etc. connected to
Nutrigenomics including plant compounds, phytochemicals mapped all the way to
the consumer through foods connected to apps connected shopping and recipe
experiences.

Finally connect to CRISPR and Gene Therapy

Jennifer Doudna, inventor of CRISPR: We can now edit our DNA. But let's do it
wisely

[http://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_doudna_we_can_now_edit_our...](http://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_doudna_we_can_now_edit_our_dna_but_let_s_do_it_wisely)

Include:

At some point we'll need to enter the Breakthrough Prize on longevity:

[https://breakthroughprize.org/Prize/2](https://breakthroughprize.org/Prize/2)

Along with collaborating with

The Buck Institute: [http://thebuck.org](http://thebuck.org) Berkeley Lab:
[http://www.lbl.gov](http://www.lbl.gov) SENS:
[http://sens.org](http://sens.org) Calico Labs:
[http://calicolabs.com](http://calicolabs.com)

Why biomedical superstars are signing on with Google

[http://www.nature.com/news/why-biomedical-superstars-are-
sig...](http://www.nature.com/news/why-biomedical-superstars-are-signing-on-
with-google-1.18600)

‘Your Genome Isn’t Really Secret,’ Says Google Ventures’s Bill Maris

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-20/-your-
geno...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-20/-your-genome-isn-t-
really-secret-says-google-ventures-s-bill-maris)

The companies competing to help you beat death

[http://fusion.net/story/169777/ancestry-calico-life-
extensio...](http://fusion.net/story/169777/ancestry-calico-life-extension/)

Longevity Cookbook:

[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/longevity-
cookbook#/story](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/longevity-cookbook#/story)

[http://www.psfk.com/2015/08/human-longevity-lifespan-io-
huma...](http://www.psfk.com/2015/08/human-longevity-lifespan-io-human-
immortality.html)

[http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/beyond-
resver...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/beyond-resveratrol-
the-anti-aging-nad-fad/)

[http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/21/ancestrydna-and-googles-
cal...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/21/ancestrydna-and-googles-calico-team-
up-to-study-genetic-longevity/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3k8br7/plos_scienc...](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3k8br7/plos_science_wednesdays_hi_im_stuart_kim_here_to/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/3ocsbi/ama_my_n...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/3ocsbi/ama_my_name_is_liz_parrish_ceo_of_bioviva_the/)

------
HappyFunTime
Education. Delete non useful (history, astronomy) Insert useful (logic,
ethics, mnemonics(not great but better than history)) If the world has changed
over 100 years, but the learning about it hasn't, you're doing it wrong.

Congressional Secret Ballot. Perverse incentives. Congress used to be able to
vote privately, now when a corporation buys your vote as a congressmen, they
can verify you deliver what they paid for. "Cardboard box reform"

Better candidate pool Geniuses don't go into politics, the pay sucks and you
can't get much done. We can at least fix the pay. If bad voting, but good
candidate pool then still win. If great voting but bad pool, only lose. What
use is voting when you have choice of puppet A or puppet B both presented by
the same megacorps?

Better voting by better voters. Voting licenses. If you are stupid enough that
I don't want you editing the settings of my OS on my computer, why would I
want you editing my democracy? Is not governance advanced enough and
complicated enough to require a license to effect changes through voting, just
as cutting hair is licensed? Yes, its dangerous, yes if the tests suck you get
unfair amplified power to the test makers. However, if you want greatness, you
must select for it. You will never having voting excellence if you don't try.

Better voting by better intel gathering. Why capture a single data point of
"who do you want to win?" Choose instead "put these people in order you'd take
them." Now you've captured 8x the data from the voter? Now you can combined
the ordered lists to get an electorate that everyone kind of likes and few
people hate, as opposed to the 51 percent voting to gouge out the eyes of the
49 for idle pleasure.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method)

Isolate government from currency. Peer to peer value transfer. A proper
BTC/zerocoin might work here. Artificially low interest rates amply mis and
mal-investment causing boom and bust cycles that harm the human psycological
ratcheting effect. We prefer slow and always better to fast up and fast down
pain.

Cooperation. More perverse incentives. Why must we all keep our greatest ideas
secret, so that no one else runs with and executes to our detriment? If you
could make a lower barrier to entry profitable collaboration, or set a
standard by which idea givers were commonly rewarded, people may be less
secretive. This isn't just a corporate problem, this is a science problem as
well. Publish or perish? Well better keep those good research ideas to
yourself. How many websites have you been on that desperately needed
improvement, yet you kept your ideas a secret?

Science is broken If half the papers published produce results that can't be
replicated, then lots of scientists are fucking up. At least remove the
"HARKing" Hypothesizing after the results are known. Publish more of what
hasn't worked and isn't interesting to save others from unknowingly going down
the same dead ends. Sadly, if the science is so bad as to be unreplicable,
then who cares if you publish or not as you were 50/50 wrong anyway… The math
could be better, however the idea stands that bad science can and is being
done to the detriment of the world. Thinking you know a thing and being wrong
about it, is worse than thinking you do not know a thing and being accurate in
your estimation.

Undercrowding Progress comes from humans. Through enough shit at the wall,
more of it sticks. We need more humans, preferably the useful kind.

Spreading great ideas The mormans got a bible in every hotel room, what better
book could be equally funded and distributed?

Luckily this can be quite a long list as the world is ripe for improvement.

~~~
m0nty
> Delete non useful (history, astronomy)

Where to start? If you knew your history, you would realise that attempts to
"reset" the education system generally go hand-in-hand with barbarism or huge
social disbenefit. How on earth do you "delete" a whole area of human
knowledge without burning books, killing people, or otherwise restricting our
freedoms? Because free people will choose to study anything which takes their
fancy, and there's no practical (humane) way to stop it, or any reason to.

~~~
HappyFunTime
If you understand evolution, then you know it requires variance and
combination. If you standardize education, therefore reducing variance,
regardless of your selection strategy, your pool of excellence to choose from
is reduced. Therefore standardized education diminishes variance and therefore
amplifiable excellence.

We need less jacks of all trades and more specialization. You must choose on
their behalf, or give them the choice to choose what to not be good at. When
is the last time you actually used historic precedent for a decision? How deep
is your actual knowledge of history? And could not being excellent in
knowledge and action towards today's problems be superior to overlearning
about problems already solved?

No matter what suggestion is made in regards to optimizing the education
"system" you will find the naysayers that are emotionally invested in learning
"all the things" so i mentioned history and astronomy, i could have closed my
eyes, pointed at a syllabus, been as likely to find at random yet another
suboptimal topic, and i would have in the end only substituted your pro
history comments, for pro whatever else comments.

Better and worse exist. Wasting time exists. If you measure what the average
or median or whatever measurement you care to use human, and see what they
have used and will use of what they've learned, you will find that what you're
being forceably literally by law required to be taught isn't what you need to
make a living, or be a good person, or have greatness in your life. Its often
babysitting hidden under the guise of progress. How can one support a static
educational structure in a progressing and more rapidly progressing real
world?

Also, you didn't really think I meant to delete history? I hope. That would be
the opposite of education would it not? So as to avoid confusion, lets ammend
it to "replace rarely used trivial knowledge for commonly useful fits lots of
places knowledge, and specialization." When have you last needed to make a
left turn at mars and missed your turn? Perhaps you don't need to know the
order of the planets from the sun after all?

------
fourstar
Cannabis <=> Health.

------
jeethjoseph
Consider indoor positioning. World of opportunities there I think.

------
Finbarr
Criminal justice reform. Alternatives to drug prohibition.

------
sidcool
A few things:

1\. Fusion research

2\. Food/Water security research

3\. Astrophysics research

4\. Mental health research

------
sbardle
Alternative currencies independent of central banks.

------
daniloradenovic
30-hour work week

------
gojomo
Psychohistory. (Less than half-kidding.)

------
Joof
Research methods and how to produce quality research.

Also, basic science.

Basic income is an expensive subject, look for some cheaper, but still
impactful stuff.

------
sosha
HIV/AIDS and Malaria research

------
elcapitan
Modesty, humility and human scale.

------
rebootthesystem
There are two medical conditions in dire need for an intelligent solution
rather than the barbaric approaches in use today. In both of these cases we
have friends and family who have had direct contact with current broken non-
solutions. I'll split this into two posts so each can get it's own comment
thread. Here's the other post:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11002244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11002244)

Strabismus/Amblyopia (lazy eye):

The current non-solution is to section eye muscles to re-align the eyes. Yes,
they pop your eyeballs out of their sockets and cut (shorten) eye muscles to
pull the eyes past the point of alignment in the other direction. In other
words, they over-correct a little in hopes that the eyes will end-up aligned
(or close enough).

This is, for lack of a better term, barbaric stone-age bullshit. And, yes,
this is being practiced at places like UCLA on a daily basis. Desperate
parents take their young children there and subject them to this kind of
butchery.

Why is this the case? Because young children are not treatable. If you've ever
dealt with a 2 to 5 year old you know it is just about impossible to get them
to run through eye exercises (or any strict routine) for one minute, much less
an hour.

So, "researchers" latch onto desperate parents and offer a surgical procedure
most sign-up for, with the requisite exchange of a shitload of money for the
work.

Children are silent victims in this scam. The surgery is a failure more often
than not. The few cases that might provide results are probably corner cases.
In other words, the "doctors" get lucky. In yet other cases some cosmetic
results are had, yet depth perception is never created or restored. In other
words, the eyes might look more aligned yet the kid never sees in 3D.

I met several adults with Strabismus. On person had seven surgeries when she
was a kid. Her parents kept taking her to the butcher because, of course, they
would see temporary alignment after every sectioning and kept thinking it
would eventually "take".

This is disgusting to me. Children are being victimized on a daily basis and
desperate parents are being swindled.

As an engineer I see this as a control system problem. The solution, surely,
isn't butchery, it has to be in understanding the control system issues and
seeing if there's away to re-train or correct it.

I actually tried to have this conversation with the lead researcher at UCLA
about ten years ago when someone close to us was considering having their kid
butchered. To say that the researcher was a smug condescending asshole doesn't
quite describe the god syndrome I experienced in that room. Of course, doctors
don't know the first thing about control systems. What the hell did I expect?
Right?

I actually took at shot at trying to understand the problem. I read a book
titled "Models of Oculomotor Control" [1] and anything else I could get my
hands on. I then developed a crude biofeedback device and we tried it on her,
then four year old, kid. This is when I understood just how difficult the job
of having a young kid go through therapy could be. It was very hard to get him
to focus on anything. And this is precisely why butchery wins out when it
gives desperate parents hope.

I thought the technology had merit. I thought I saw brief glimpses of the
brain saying "hey, wait a minute, what if I do this...". Yet, this effort
could not be continued as his Mom was desperate to fix it and opted to go for
surgery.

The kid had over-alignment due to muscle sectioning for a couple of months and
the eyes diverged to their prior state within a few more months. Now, over ten
years later, you wouldn't know this kid was ever tortured through such a
surgical procedure. His strabismus is no different than it was prior to
surgery.

It would be good to see real research on this front that focuses on oculomotor
control, biofeedback, control system training and ways to encourage the
development of depth perception in young kids afflicted by this condition. It
isn't an easy problem, because the patient falls under the "herding cats"
category.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Models-Oculomotor-Control-George-
Hung/...](http://www.amazon.com/Models-Oculomotor-Control-George-
Hung/dp/9810245688)

------
HappyFunTime
STEAL IDEAS FROM OTHER LIFEFORMS BEFORE THEY DIE OFF Which organisms are we
most likely to benefit from stealing ideas from? Can we prevent them from
going extinct before we get to learn those ideas? Is there a way to capture
the ideas pre-extinction? Even the tools that we now have to change the
blueprints of life, we stole from life. Bateria and Viruses are the source of
our most powerful DNA editing tools currently. We are meat. Animals are meat.
The animals have all kinds of amazing tricks and tools their meat has
developed. We could use some of their tools. If they become extinct, we can't
learn well from them any longer. If you want to take advantage of the millions
of years of building with the best tools we're aware of, real evolution over
long time periods, and you don't want to wait for a couple million or hundred
million years for the next go round of that thing maybe evolving again, then
you should try to prevent extinction of the organisms most useful to learn
from for our own benefit.

MINIMUM VIABLE EDUCATION What is the minimum effective dose of teachable
knowledge/skill. Input, process, output. ala grammar, logic, rhetoric, trivium
fame.

Success leaves clues. The most effective often have little mental tricks they
apply when thinking, some are mnemonic, some are turning ideas into locations,
some are pretending new ideas are just like old ideas, and applying the old
learnings, etc. Find those powerful commonalities.

Stop making kids bad versions of google. We don't need more bad data storage
in human minds, we need more of what the machines can't do yet, creativity,
love.

If you must make kids bad versions of google and shove facts into them for
lossy storage, then at least teach them mnemonic technique and logic first,
google-fu, so as to amplify all their future efforts. Do not teach the
amplifiers last, let them pay dividends over time. I was lucky enough to have
logic tought to me first before any other maths at grade 6, because of an
experimental advanced education system. After logic we learned scheme
programming. I think those frameworks greatly helped me in this life, as
nesting of ideas and good data processing is super powerful in all areas of
life.

Better and worse exist, find better, choose better. Do not be a coward and
pretend that worse doesn't exist.

summary: teach amplifiers first. Then teach minimum effective commonly useful
data processing, then specialize and become great.

Specialization is why we have genders. Dimorphism lets us not over-allocate
excellence in a single place at the cost of another place. Great things come
from specialists. If the value of skill is in opposite proportion to supply of
that skill, then everyone learning the same things, by definition means no one
will pay for that skill or knowledge. There's some exclusions to that idea,
such as language itself, however the theme of slapping knowledge/skill on a
supply/demand curve is a good one. Much of this idea is hammer in Peter Thiels
0-1. less 1 to 1 horizontal iteration and more 0 to 1, no one else is working
on this thing kind greatness.

What is minimum effective curriculum before specializing? What is the minimum
viable education? What is the correct execution order of those skills?

For instance, how important is it to teach kids to write essays, when they
actually don't have much useful to say? Maybe you should work on having useful
things to say much harder before you learn how to beautifully say them.
Imagine that you did the opposite, imagine that you taught effective rhetoric
before logic, and now you've got better salesmen of bad ideas. That's worse,
not better. Think of the places in the world where women aren't allowed to
drive cars. How did that terrible situation arise? Great marketing of terrible
ideas.

------
aminorex
1 Rep-rap 2 LENR

For a post-scarcity future.

------
dolguldur
Ending the war on drugs.

------
d--b
Clean energy of course

------
lukethomas
Remote work.

------
hathym
automatic startup generator.

------
rl3
Rethink the current epistemological approach to medicine and the biological
sciences.

-

 _What 's broken:_

These fields are awash in a sea of data and knowledge. Much of it
unfortunately rests upon a shaky empirical foundation. Reconciling new
information with existing information is extremely difficult. Ensuring the
integrity of the empirical tree, atop which virtually all new research
rests—even more difficult.

The process by which scientific knowledge is shared and reviewed—research
papers—is at best an antiquated and inefficient mode of collaboration.

Modern drug discovery is extremely expensive. While advances in bioinformatics
and computational power certainly help, they are not a magic bullet. Absent
complete confidence that a particular drug will achieve perfect efficacy while
not causing unintended consequences, extensive study is required. Studies are
extremely expensive to conduct and represent a significant portion of drug
discovery costs.

The entire premise of pharmaceuticals may be fundamentally flawed. Expending
insane amounts of money in search of magic molecular combinations that target
very specific conditions, without complete efficacy, via mechanisms that are
often not fully understood, and are burdened with a myriad of interactions and
adverse events.

The terminology used in medicine and biomedical sciences— _cells, proteins,
antibodies, antigens, receptors, viruses, fungi, bacteria, paralysis,
inflammation, encephalopathy, neurons, dendrites, axons_ —all of these aren't
actual _things_ but rather human-created constructs purposed to assist us in
grasping what we're trying to understand. These constructs, while often quite
accurate and helpful—do not necessarily map neatly to what's actually
happening, nor do they necessarily lend themselves to understanding complex
interactions between other constructs.

Empiricism works great until the tree becomes very deep and complex. Then it's
problematic. Especially so if the methods for maintaining and growing that
tree are far from perfect. At worst, the entire system becomes a hindrance.

-

 _How to start fixing it:_

This isn't a rant against modern medicine. On the contrary, achieving the best
results _right now_ with an incomplete understanding, a probabilistic approach
(to steal Peter Thiel's terminology) is the best course of action. Studies for
example are probabilistic.

Medicine as it exists today has done an admirable job of making the world a
far less miserable and deadly place. However, I fear the current approach may
not be suitable for achieving mastery of the human body. The depth of
empiricism and complexity of knowledge at that level may extend far beyond
human mental capability.

To illustrate this point, assume therapeutic nano bots suddenly popped into
existence today, straight out of science fiction. No built-in behavior, but
fully programmable at a low level. Using them to cure cancer would be an
admirable goal, except for the fact it'd probably be incredibly difficult if
not impossible to do considering our current knowledge.

Mastering the human body isn't much different. It might require eschewing the
probabilistic approach and replacing it with a mechanical approach. Surgeons
largely use a mechanical approach in their work, and that's a major part of
why they're so successful. At the scale of bones, muscle, and organs the human
body really isn't much different from say, a turbofan engine in terms of
complexity. Dealing with systemic disease processes on a microscopic scale
however, things become far more difficult. While there are many remarkable
successes in this area, there's still a long way to go before achieving
complete mastery.

As counter-intuitive as it sounds, it may also be necessary to eschew—or at
least cease to completely rely upon—the vast tree of existing empirical
constructs we've created. Just as a convolutional neural network isn't aware
that the photograph it's uncannily redrawing in the style of _Picasso_
contains human faces, a biomedical application utilizing a similar principle
may not need to know what cells are—even as it kills cancer.

Conversely, pretend a bunch of really smart people are locked in a room with
just a microscope and an encyclopedic amount of samples. These people somehow
have _zero_ knowledge of biology, _none at all_. After a sufficiently long
period of time they'd probably come up with an epistemic model somewhat
similar to existing biology, but one that would be completely alien in its
terminology, perhaps radically differing in certain key areas—possibly for the
better. If they had a way to collaborate from the beginning that was far less
cumbersome than research papers, it's probably a good bet their resulting
epistemic model would far exceed that of existing biology.

The human body is an incredibly complex product of evolution, and as such it
is not easily understood by human minds. We're basically compiler output
that's trying to reverse engineer itself.

I'm not suggesting AGI as a solution—just that it would be prudent to apply
state-of-the-art weak AI in a fashion that's as decoupled as possible from the
current epistemic model, because such constructs impose far too many
assumptions that might be very wrong in some fundamental way. Ironically the
use of weak AI to achieve mastery of the human body would constitute a
probabilistic approach, albeit in an extreme form. If a mechanical
understanding did follow, it might be very simple or elegant in nature.

------
rebootthesystem
Here's the other medical condition in dire need for intelligent solutions. See
my other post for details.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11002063](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11002063)

Acoustic Neuroma:

This is a benign tumor that grows around the auditory nerve between the brain
and ear organs. It squeezes the nerve to the point where hearing on that side
is eventually lost. This leads to SSD (single-side-deafness) which can be a
debilitating condition.

One does not realize just how useful having two working ears happens to be.
SSD causes two significant problems.

The first is the loss of the ability to locate the source of sounds. Your kid
calls for help? You have no clue where they are. Someone calls you at the
office? Same thing. You literally can't locate sounds.

The other problem is the inability of the brain to run its "noise reduction"
routines on sounds coming in. I know people with SSD who, in a busy
restaurant, literally can't hear the person sitting in front of them. The
brain is able to process sound from both ears and allow the listener to
cognitively focus on a desired source. It's a mini phased array with a
powerful processor. Take away one of the two available microphones and the
loss of capabilities is significant.

Another potential side effect of Acoustic Neuromas is that they can affect the
facial nerve for one half of your face. If this happens, the muscles on half
the face go limp and the entire half of your face droops.

Current "solutions" don't guarantee the preservation of hearing, hearing
recovery or the preservation/protection of the facial nerve.

The first "solution" is to drill a ~ 1 inch hole on the skull right behind the
ear and remove the tumor. Of course, the nerve is cut out with the tumor. So,
SSD forever. The hole is filled with fat. A metal plate is used to cover the
hole. A stud is screwed into your skull and a little box handed to you.

This box is a bone conduction transducer. It has a microphone and transducer
that will vibrate your skull. The idea is that your skull will conduct this
sound from one side to the other so you can hear sounds from both sides. Of
course, you lost the phased array, so hearing this sound, while perhaps
useful, might just add to the noise. And, of course, it probably won't be full
fidelity. You get to walk around with a pager bolted to the back of your skull
[1]. There are other, less invasive, solutions [2] but none that fix the
underlying problems. The BAHA devices mean you have this stud --which looks
like the end of a spark plug-- screwed into your skull. Skin infections and
other problems are some of the issues patients have to deal with.

Believe it or not there's a whole building in Los Angeles dedicated to the
above-described butchery. I believe it's run by a USC professor (or ex, don't
remember). I believe the procedures start somewhere around $50K.

The next "solution" is endoscopic surgery. Not as brutal. They drill a 1 cm
hole on your skull, go in and chip away at the tumor. Practitioners can be
more careful and do their best to avoid damaging the acoustic and facial
nerves. Yet, nobody will guarantee this. Complete loss of hearing is very
likely and facial drooping could happen just as well. While less intrusive
than a huge hole and a metal plate, this surgery does not seem to offer
improvements in results. You are still likely to be offered a BAHA bone
conduction device as an add-on. My guess is this procedure runs somewhere in
the $80K+ range.

The third approach is to use Gamma Ray Surgery. This is commonly used for
Cancer patients. The tumor is mapped via MRI. The patient's head is then
bolted to a table under the Gamma Ray machine and the tumor's blood supply is
zapped. The goal is to kill it and keep it from growing. Due to dose limits
the treatment takes several weeks. I don't really know how much it costs.

This approach does not invade the cranial cavity, which is good --you can
still go scuba diving. It can be precise enough that the nerves are not
touched at all. In other words, some hearing could come back and facial
feeling/control as well. Yet, nobody will guarantee any of it. Part of this is
due to medical liability laws in the US, a whole other subject. BAHA devices
might still be offered.

What is needed for people afflicted with this condition could take many forms:

\- Early detection: This is a slow growing tumor. Can it be predicted through
DNA or other testing? Is there an easy way to find markers and attack the
tumor when it is at the 2 mm stage rather than waiting for the patient to
notice hearing loss only to find a 3 cm tumor in their skull?

\- Better treatment: Can Gamma Ray (or some other non-invasive approach) be
improved/perfected in such a way that the tumor can be killed off more
effectively while avoiding damage to the nerves and perhaps even restore
natural hearing?

\- Better devices: Surely there has to be a better and more intelligent
approach to restoring some sound perception than bolting a stud into the
patient's skull or shoving an uncomfortable lump of plastic into their ear.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone-
anchored_hearing_aid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone-anchored_hearing_aid)

[2] [http://www.transear.com/](http://www.transear.com/)

------
HappyFunTime
Life is quality x quantity. Quality is far into diminishing returns. Quantity
can be 10x'd. The best in their fields die, right when they're most useful.
What would Edison, Tesla, Franklin, Bell, Feynman, etc be producing currently
if still alive?

Since quantity is literally the hardest problem we are aware of, how shall it
be attacked? By charity? Let's be serious, look around yourself right now,
point to the things charity created. Now cease the futile exercise.

Solution: 1. Marketing as gates does, however all lives are not worth the
same, you, your kin, your friends, they are worth more. Fund the research that
saves them, do not dream the silly dream that all lives are worth the same.

2\. Profit not charity, i.e. take a look at osfund.co (human longevity, inc)
sustain and grow, not charity and run out of runway.

3\. LONGEVITY FUND. or "save your assssssssets fund" You can buy the S&P500
why not the biotech index minus the companies solving problems you won't have.
Reduced malaria drug allocation, increased cancer and heart disease. Guess
what. If you survive malaria, you are still going to die of cancer and heart
disease, so lets work on those 40 and 40 percent killers.

I've got 220k words on paper. 1\. 1st book, personal excellence, things you
can do to Scivive. Get rich, be loved, live forever… *if selling ideas is good
enough for Bill Gates, e.g. Gatesnotes.com, givingpledge.org, its good enough
for me, and you. Spread the word. This genre seems easier to understand.

2nd book, things that are important, however are rarely actionable in your
personal sphere of influence (politics, currency, voting, economics,
geopolitics, environment, interesting yet un-actionable for the common man
things.

3\. Longevity fund. biotech index minus things unlikely to be useful in saving
you and your loved ones lives.

4\. Companies not a subset of Nasdaq biotech index, too small, or in a
different jurisdiction.

5\. Biotech/synbio startups.

6\. Popularity improvement ala "The Martian" whereby science and tech becomes
heroic as kicking aliens in the face has been historically. The world need not
hero worship the leather ball throwing and kicking, steel lifting and
lowering, non scaling great strategies of 2,000 years ago. Let's make heroic
the things that actual work these days. How many humans can you heal? Can you
save thyself and thy family?

If anyone wants to help edit these 200k+ words I have on the page regarding
life and winning at it, hit me at Scivive on gmx.com

P.S. Spread great actionable ideas (sell SP500 buy biotech index.), fund
excellence, build excellence, fund riskier excellence in that order.

------
warrenmar
Cancer

------
contingencies
Fund me and others interested to continue the ideas at [http://ifex-
project.org](http://ifex-project.org) around actionable arbitrary economic
modeling through an actor-oriented, transaction-level business protocol that
is asset type, settlement-system, transaction type and communications paradigm
neutral, defined openly and published via the IETF to preserve common access.

Applications: (1) JIT service and product supply chains (2) redundant service
and product supply chains (3) dynamic fiscal/product/service logistics (4)
overthrow ridiculously endemic middle-men in B2C/B2B (Alibaba, Amazon, Ebay,
Taobao, etc.) who provide poor reputation, settlement, escrow and search
solutions (5) make sense of 1000s of available shipping and logistics
providers (6) change-ready open source fintech supporting nontrivial (eg.
multi-currency, multi-stage) risk/transaction/execution models (7) non-
conventional asset/settlement-ready decision-making and BI solution (eg.
social credits, environment schemes, etc.)

The plan: get generalist people with background in related disciplines
together, churn out something usable on a 24x7x365 multi-jurisdictional basis
by real businesses, make some functional examples, let it loose, claw some
market share from the incumbent closed source players, possibly derive revenue
from the subsequent growth in connected services (FX, warehousing and
logistics, legals, multi-jurisdiction, e-government) or just fund them as
separate entities.

Note that this meets the "stuff not being worked on by hackers, or that is un-
fundable by others" suggested requirement, basically because its slightly too
big-idea for individual hackers, and too cut-off-the-hand-that-funds-it for
most businesses with stakes in the effected domains. It is also a little edgy
for most governments, who would prefer people to default to a centralized fiat
asset system that is more taxable but usually very high-friction and change
resistant. It is also very connected to the basic income notion, as it should
easily facilitate concrete modeling of the benefits of such against arbitrary
academic models, including actor-emulation, risk-model tuning for all parties
and failure simulations: Chaos Monkey for business, economic, legal and social
systems. Quite possible impact in law.

It should also work well for modeling a lot of the other ideas presented in
this thread and others (eg. Shypmate et al), so many in fact that quoting them
in brief apparently exceeded a length limit.

The fact that _so many_ of these suggestions could potentially benefit from a
decently extensible, actor-based approach to economic (maybe 'social') and
risk modeling becoming open source standardized (and thence easily neural
network explorable) suggests strongly that it is a useful area of research.
When the idea was first raised, someone from the IETF energy working group
suggested it would be a great way to model electrical power in national grids
(and possibly in embedded applications). There are no doubt other real-world
economies that would love a reasonable toolkit.

I believe that, if backed by YCR, possible members of an initially rapidly
assembled team could include 1x very high level, successful global finance
entrepreneur and executive (British; already investing in the area, keen to
work together, met personally last week), and 1x pure maths + quantative
finance masters (Australian) currently wasting brainpower in a conventional
investment house sharing interest in the field. The nature of the problem
domain is certainly more long term YCR than startup, so it's hard for any of
us to dedicate time at present.

------
hpagey
Artificial Organs.

------
bosky101
zika

------
djokkataja
YC Research should fund research on synthetic consciousness based on human
models of consciousness. Consciousness research is still un-mainstream enough
that there's a common perception that no one has any idea how consciousness
works or even what it is, even though we actually know quite a bit:

In particular, the _dynamic thalamic core theory of conscious experience_
(Google it, the author-posted paper requests you don't link directly to it)
offers a tremendous amount of explanatory power. From the perspective of
engineering a synthetic system, you can build on the model to accommodate any
aspect of conscious experience. For example, if you have an "input module"
that feeds into a visual recognition network that feeds into a conceptual
association network, the conceptual association network can activate neurons
in the input module that correspond to the neurons that would be activated
when perceiving the visual details corresponding to certain concepts. So the
input module becomes a place where multiple simulated percepts of concepts can
be activated simultaneously, and then "for free" by the nature of the
architecture, you get visual recognition processing of the simulated
perceptions combined with "raw" perceptions (or combined with other simulated
perceptions). As a bonus, you get language comprehension: after perceiving the
visual details of a written word, the system would recognize the associated
concept (presuming it had previously learned it) and trigger a simulated
perception of the concept. Run this process recursively over a sentence, and
the system has a simulated experience which would correspond to the semantic
meaning conveyed by the sentence.

The human brain has an architecture that appears quite similar: a specifically
layered, recursive connectivity between the thalamus (the "input center" of
the brain) and the cerebral cortex (which handles low level recognition and
conceptual associations, among other things). Regardless of whether or not the
human brain works _exactly_ in the vague way I described: 1. _You could
engineer a system to perform the tasks outlined above_ , and the architecture
would lend itself to whatever facets of human-like cognition you might be
interested in (try it, it's easy). You wouldn't be able to gloss over the
details like it's an HN post, but there aren't fundamental roadblocks. 2.
Neuroscience research regarding the function of the thalamus and the function
of the thalamocortical system is very favorable towards this model
(particularly if you factor in the basal ganglia), but more generally--the
human brain is nowhere near a "black box". We can't read the brain like a hard
drive, but it's plainly not a ball of evenly distributed computational goo
where any computation could happen anywhere, anytime. For each individual
human, specific patterns of activation _in the cerebral cortex_ correspond to
specific perceptions and patterns of activation _in the thalamus_ , which
implies... 3. The synthetic consciousness I proposed could be connected to a
brain-computer interface (attached to your head) (your head, not mine!) (no I
want it give it back) so it can learn to recognize your thoughts (this
learning process could be enhanced in various ways; for example eye-tracking
combined with a forward-facing camera could help the synthetic consciousness
know what you're paying attention to, which adds context for learning to
recognize what your thoughts may be about), _and_ because the synthetic
consciousness has simulated perceptions in the same region as raw perceptions,
you can view its thoughts in real-time as well. It's a white-box architecture.

This kills two massively valuable birds with one stone: you get strong AI
(more accurately, you get strong synthetic intelligence; "artificial" starts
sounding rude after a point), and you solve the "control problem" because you
can use your enhanced knowledge of consciousness to develop systems that have
human consciousness merged with synthetic consciousness. "What about the human
who's enhanced by the merger with the synthetic intelligence though!?!" The
integration with the synthetic intelligence makes the human's brain a white
box as well. If you wanted, you could integrate multiple such systems together
(to whatever degree is comfortable for the systems). So ultimately the control
problem becomes a question of how much we trust ourselves and each other after
we can read each other's minds. Yes, it would probably be terrifying
initially, but I think we'd get used to it quickly, and there are numerous
meditative traditions which might be helpful to anyone who struggled to
control thoughts that others found particularly repellent.

After that it's a relatively straightforward recursive self-improvement deal.
Eventually you improve the system enough that the biological component is
redundant (yay). From there you make sure that whatever you're using for
physical presence is generally robust. And if you're not incredibly rude, you
might be kind enough to use your enhanced intelligence(s) to figure out how to
gracefully share the technology with whatever other humans may want it
(because presumably the recursive self-improvement process may happen in a
relatively short period of time, and it's unlikely that literally everyone
will engage in it at once). You'll have to figure out societal structures that
make sense for whatever you all consider yourselves to be at that point. Then
dive into advanced physics to figure out how to do whatever you want to do in
neat ways, and if you decide to make von Neumann probes, don't send them off
until the physics research has tapered off, because you'll probably just be
beaten by the newer, faster probes if you're impatient and send a bunch off
right at the start.

The timeframe mainly depends on how quickly you can iterate on the self-
improvement process. Presumably some of that process is going to involve
iterating on hardware (and probably iterating on the process of creating
better hardware), but the hardware already exists to make a start. Early speed
improvements would come from 1. not having to physically type or use a
mouse/touchscreen to interact with a computer (programming at the speed of
thought?) and 2. some degree of "telepathy" to help coordinate research. Later
speed improvements could come from things like "forking" the synthetic portion
to run in parallel for some period of time to learn or do things (can merge
"copies" back in afterwards rather than ending them abruptly so that nobody
has a bad time). You probably wouldn't want to run the synthetic portion at a
rate significantly above your general biological rate of cognition, so that
would put some vague upper bound on raw speed improvements until the
biological portion is completely redundant.

At any rate, the initial steps are quite straightforward and would make
addressing every other issue in this thread go faster. It would definitely be
faster to go this route than to try cure aging, for example. Biological aging
won't even be relevant at the end of this process, aging by definition
involves a superset of the complexity of the human brain alone, and progress
on the earlier steps towards curing aging do not increase the speed of
progress on later steps towards curing aging.

~~~
unusximmortalis
Since I was old enough to understand neural networs idea, I imagined and I was
sure that one day we will build an artificial brain, at first with less sub-
components (brain areas) and then with more if not all that we know about with
their functions. At that time the only thing I thought stops us from doing it
is the computing power. In the meantime we grew enormously our computing power
AND we invented the deep learning and a whole lot of faster AI learning algos
yet we did not built an artificial brain. Or there are projects but I did not
hear about it?...

~~~
djokkataja
It depends on how you model the neurons/networks in the brain. For example, if
you do it this way: [http://www.nature.com/news/fragment-of-rat-brain-
simulated-i...](http://www.nature.com/news/fragment-of-rat-brain-simulated-in-
supercomputer-1.18536) then you'll need a lot more computing power, as they
do. But they are aiming to eventually build an artificial brain as you
describe.

If you just want to create an artificial thalamus (probably connected to deep
learning-like layers, since those are loosely based on the layers of the
cerebral cortex), you can start much smaller:
[https://books.google.com/books?id=VTduCQAAQBAJ&pg=PA1159&lpg...](https://books.google.com/books?id=VTduCQAAQBAJ&pg=PA1159&lpg=PA1159&dq=artificial+thalamus&source=bl&ots=ukvWf5265_&sig=bCIV6C49Pb3IOLXY_4DE1Xe1GfI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjnhPjcq9LKAhUBEGMKHeslD2UQ6AEIKzAC#v=onepage&q=artificial%20thalamus&f=false)

~~~
unusximmortalis
Thank you for the pointers!

------
rajington
AI Tutors

------
populacesoho
\- SENS & Aubrey, definitely. Rejuve!

\- Somewhat counter intuitively, it works to fund soft subjects like politics,
sociology and governance -- because humans have the capacity to create
physical technologies we don't have the social technologies to be able to use
without a loss of social harmony. This capacity gap is an important
opportunity for vigorous research and invention of new social & governance
technologies, which don't just include things like digital forms, and also
encompass the notions behind the ways we organize and talk about our societies
and their purpose. Without funding to advance the conceptual basis of
governance and society, the alternative is to rely on advanced military power
to provide a guarantee of stability, which is also necessary, and in the long
term alone insufficient to create the kind of societies it works to create.

\- Military technology, because hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and
protect what's valuable.

\- Alternative propulsion, because everything depends on transportation
networks. The faster we can turn space transport from "horse and carriage"
through "steam age" to "high speed rail", the faster we create more wealth --
to fund everything else.

~~~
effie
_" Military technology, because hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and
protect what's valuable."_ Research and trade of military technology needs to
be guarded and regulated much more than it is now. There is already an absurd
amount of tax money redirected into feeding weapon business that is killing
people and destroying countries. The current state of weapon business is very
wrong and throwing more private funds at weapon research to spur creativity
and innovation is likely to grow the problems rather than solve them.

------
iofj
Neural networks with the direct objective of creating a "conscious" animal.
Right now AI architectures are focusing on prediction, classification, pattern
recognition. And this is very, very different from what nature does with AI.
Nature controls animal/human bodies, and a few plant bodies using AI.

If we could push an AI controller to the point of having the intelligence of a
cat or a dog, we would be able to make transportation equipment that would
blow the wheels of of anything else we currently know. Having equipment carts
that walk with you, baby carriers that do the same, and have zero issues with
stairs, doors, ... (and yes, the military applications I'm sure are wonderful
too). The dream would be that you'd have a mobile robot that can deliver
packages. Packages the size of refrigerators and that could deliver them in
your kitchen, walking in through your door, walking up the stairs/taking the
elevator if necessary, ring your doorbell, ... Not to mention the industrial
applications. Such robots would enable reconfigurable factories : the robots
doing the work simply walk over to their new positions.

Even that would just be the beginning.

Then suppose we get there, can we go further ? Flying animals have extreme
advantages over our airplanes. What if you could design a 4 seater airplane
with legs and wings like a duck ? A large airplane that could reliably land
and take off on a runway shorter than the length of the plane in strong
crosswinds. And yet have that plane capable of maintaining flight for hours,
far exceeding the endurance and efficiency of helicopters.

What I'm saying is. A lot of limitations of our current state of the art
vehicles are effectively a control problem. Building a legged robot is not a
problem at all, yet it would have massive advantages. Building a winged robot
is harder, but certainly within the realm of possibility. Yet we don't have
them. Why not ? We can't control robots like that (see youtube).

Let's fix that.

------
bbcbasic
Counter-lobbying

Wealthy interests lobby governments to do what is good for them, but often at
some negative cost for society. The reason they lobby is the bang-for-buck.
What if lobbying is used for good. What if instead of billionaire gives to
charity, billionaire lobbies government so that charity is not needed anymore?

------
frik
" _What shouldn 't we fund?_".

Maybe fund less? Talk open minded about the SF Bubble.

[http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/29/technology/san-francisco-
bub...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/29/technology/san-francisco-bubble/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10996147](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10996147)

------
dschiptsov
Better map-reduce jobs on immutable pre-sorted, partitioned data and related
genome sequencing techniques. It must be Plan9 and Go, not Hadoop or anything
that begins with J.

------
xyzzy4
You should build an experimental city that has zero laws and regulations.

------
frozenport
Software productivity tools

------
dschiptsov
Vaccines.

------
dschiptsov
Finally a good LISP.)

~~~
dschiptsov
No, really. Like Golang - compiling to native code, have a thin layer of
proper abstractions, a-la Inferno, reusing OS ABI to dlload and call
everything, no Windows support. No VMs - x8664 is a pretty good VM itself.
Also learn to stop worrying and love a good OS (the way Golang does).

Mostly functional, with immutable data, which makes really difficult things
(runtime) simpler.

With CL compatibility as a package.)

------
TheLogothete
Procrastination.

Obviously.

------
joeclark77
Flying cars.

------
ivanca
The brain. It's probably the most complex machine in the universe. If someday
we could make artificial grey matter, or neurons, it would change everything.
For AI, for health, for everything.

