Hacker News Reader

Best of luck (not being sarcastic). Hacker News celebrates the risk-taking of startups for a reason -- great leaps often requires taking a risky jump. What you're doing is similar.

Please post about your experience! I'l love to read what happened

View on HN

Thanks! It's hard to describe, but ultimately I realized that neither academia nor industry is willing to invest in moonshot type ideas. Moreover, academics have to worry about funding and tenure (in addition to teaching and service). Funding is easiest when you propose research topics that people believe stand a chance of success. For wacky ideas it's difficult to make that case.

Anyway, I have enough money to fund myself for at least a couple years, so my goal is to make the best of that time and see if I can upend the dominant paradigm in NLP (humans don't need as much data to learn — I'm going to pursue ideas that allow computers to be as data efficient).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com