Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

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

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.

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://FearlessVR.com