Flat tax (versus the globally-preferred progressive/graduated tax) as a way to stimulate economic growth
Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
21–30 of 545 posts
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#22- 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
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#23Mental 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.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#24OpenRISC, lowrisc, RISC-V
http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/the-death-of-...
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#25[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#26Better 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.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#27Climate Change. We need to do more than reduce tomorrow's emissions to have a meaningful impact on the damage we've already done
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#28- 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
I can't imagine that approaching ecology from a perspective of re-wilding will be of much benefit. The wild is happy to take over a space that isn't kept civilized (for instance, the exclusion zone around Chernobyl), so you quickly end up with a situation where you want to be able to predict the consequences of any actions you take against the existing ecology, which is anyway how we are managing 'wild' spaces.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#29Clean 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...
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#30How 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 searc…
http://www.virginearth.com/finalists/
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.