I'm a farmer in Hawaii and I'm happy to tell you the climate here (Hilo, Big Island) is fucking great. I can't speak for the rest of the islands, but here in Hilo the weather is spectacular for farming. Consistent year round rainfall, mild temperature ranges (for the tropics), trade winds keeping it breezy during the day, high soil water retention and strong immunity to hurricanes. I'm not trying to shoot down any climate change fears, I just want to tell you that right now, where I am, I see nothing to give me pause about making a long term commitment to this place. Since I am planting thousands of trees that take decades to mature, my money is firmly where my mouth is.
I would hate for articles like this to discourage people from coming here to farm. We need more farmers in Hawaii! There is so much abandoned farmland from the sugarcane era, and meanwhile everyone's eating food that arrives by plane and boat. It's a bizarre situation.
Aloha, I live on Maui and am happy to hear that. I notice some things changing here with the water and land usage but that has more to do with development than it does with climate.
I am working on a project/startup out here around regenerative agriculture. I would love to talk story if you are open. Have you ever been to Maui? I've never been to the Big Island.
I see no reason to ever leave Maui either, I'm just getting more and more established as time goes on.
I will reach out to you this weekend. I've been away from my computer last few days. I swam with some whale sharks while doing some whale research by Lan'ai!
Vast acreage was planted in sugarcane until the mid 90's when the industry completely left Hawaii. That land was sold off cheaply and many new owners bought it to hold and have not put it back into agriculture. Just sitting there growing weeds. Also many parcels are 20 acres and people build one little house on it and ignore the rest of the land. There is a tax break given to any residential land used for agriculture which in practice means people lease their land to contract farmers who grow sweet potatoes or ginger for one year then leave it fallow for years after that due to pests. All in all a huge waste.
YES. Every time I see a new language come out without first class event support it is obvious the creator never wrote a lick of front end code in their life.
Every time I type `git commit`. Every time I visualise files with ranger (terminal based file browser). Every time I typed an email, back when I was using Mutt —which I might again.
For such quick jobs, launching the editor should be instantaneous. And I don't want to use another editor for them, I like the key bindings of my main editor.
This is true with something like Vi but with a separate GUI app, wouldn't the most common case be setting EDITOR={atom,code,etc.} and it simply opening a new window in the already-running app?
(Or, for that matter, don't most people using something IDE-like use the built-in UI to make a commit?)
No doubt but e.g. VSCode’s sub-second performance shows that’s not a huge stretch while sticking with Electron and it has a subset of the challenges for startup performance
I don't think that's a good justification for slow startup time and general sluggishness. Despite having 30+ plugins and 800 color schemes installed vim starts up in just a few milliseconds on my work rig. I code all day every day.
I use vim, which launches almost immediately. I launch a new instance for every file I open, each in a new screen. It seems to work fine. Yet I wouldn't be able to do that under atom... (ignoring the issue of it doesn't work with tty).
I don't either. It's pretty fast as it is. Even if it took 10 seconds I don't think I'd mind too much as I close atom maybe once every few days, mostly by mistake (stupid cmd+q)
If you're on the insider channel, the update cycle is daily. Microsoft's Code group is really knocking it out of the park with attention and responsiveness.
I would like to be the first to welcome you to the world where your personal preferences and experiences aren't universal. I don't use my computer exclusively for editing text, and therefore my text editor is not open all the time.
> I don't use my computer exclusively for editing text, and therefore my text editor is not open all the time.
Ok, well if I was developing a programmer's text editor I'd consider you a marginal user and design for the use case of the editor staying open 24/7. Startup time seems pretty low on the priority list.
Design for whatever you want to design for. Plenty of us are programmers who program all day every day and still don't agree with you. What you choose to prioritize is different from what you understand, though. So at least now you should "get" the gripes.
Well if the Atom developers are reading this I want to encourage them not to waste energy optimizing startup time due to Hacker News complainers who are using the product for a use case better suited to Notepad.
I used to feel that social networks were a waste of time (even when I worked for Facebook) but in the last couple years that has changed. My social life has been dramatically improved by Facebook because I started using it to socialize with people who share my hobby (growing fruit). Through Facebook groups I've made a number of new friends I never would have met otherwise. We communicate and share details of our hobby on a daily basis. It's great fun. I hardly use the site to socialize with my family and old friends - it's basically a glorified message board.
responseStr = "Well, I only use it for " + singleCase + ". I rarely use it for " + otherStuff + "."
As a former employee you might have more insight than I do, but how exactly has a glorified message board which doesn't charge its users become one of the richest companies in the world?
Sure they're a bit interested in the fruit growing hobby and that network, but they're also very interested in the ways you "hardly use the site" and they're even more interested in the things your doing when you don't even know they're still watching you. Even more interesting, you're actions on and off their platform can be correlated with heavy users of the site to infer traits they'll assign to you and sell on, true or not.
At the end of the day, the way the species is evolving with the internet, giving someone permission to follow you around the web and collect that data on you is the same as giving them insights into your inner psyche, the majority of what composes your reality, and the things you value most in your life, among other things.
These are things we should have a right to offer explicitly, not implicitly surrender.
[edits to elaborate on a couple points and add helpers to the why I use FB excuse]
>...but how exactly has a glorified message board which doesn't charge its users become one of the richest companies in the world?
Because, as you just demonstrated with your programming example: For HIM it's a glorified message board. Other people may use it in completely different ways and appreciate it for them.
I'm not the greatest facebook-fan either, but I think you're really overstating the control they have over people's lives here and at the same time understating the value it can provide to people.
Unless of course all people using facebook are just damn idiots and don't know what they're getting themselves into!
EDIT: 'control over people's lives' might be better phrased as 'knowledge about their activities/preferences'
I think you're missing my point. Google and Facebook are conditioning the population to say no big deal. It's creeping normalcy. Remember when Sergei was trying to make peeps comfortable with Gmail? [para-phrasing here:] "It's not a person reading your email, it's just a robot." Well now the robot is a neural net and I'm pretty convinced (if it's not already) that neural net will start feeding data to other nets built by other powerful institutions that decide whether you get higher education, loans, whether you're likely to be guilty or innocent, &c. Didn't provide enough data, well hell, that's suspicious, throw a red flag.
And people will accept it because we're pragmatic. And those who don't just need to grow up and start pleasing the AI.
A whole new industry will pop up from the ones training nets in the first place. Hey do this and that and our calculations will read you better, you'll get the results you want. We just suggest you don't talk about these things at all, don't shop at these stores, don't have this name or be associated with that demographic ...
This is totally off topic and I apologize, but considering apparently you and I share very similar views on "social networking" and such, you would probably really love (or really hate) the show Black Mirror if you don't already. It does an excellent job of showing just how fucked up things can get when these things get out of hand.
Well yes, I must've missed your point. I was under the impression we're talking about the reasons why people use facebook and not engaging in a privacy discussion. I have nothing to add to that. Have a nice weekend!
I agree we're heading in that direction. There's actually a group of us that talk regularly about this, if you would like to join, here's our group on faceb...
I hardly use the site to socialize with my family and old friends - it's basically a glorified message board.
That's the annoying thing. We already had message boards! Except they were decentralized, you could register anonymously and the administrators often had more autonomy (e.g. not put up ads and tracking scripts). Now Facebook has eaten a bunch of that market, and so we're forced to choose between giving up those communities or submitting to the Borg. It's annoying as hell.
I still think that the information is not well organize. I prefer goes to a standard forum of the 90' to share things.
For what I see on Facebook or social network is :
- look at me
- post without arguing or even answer, discussion.
- look at me
- stalking
- quote about life
- game
- cat meme
0% construction, information is not well organize, scrolling..
Apparently for the majority of people "look at me - post without arguing or even answer, discussion. - look at me - stalking - quote about life - game - cat meme" are just the ticket!
I understand for Facebook that is better that we pay for that they don't sell our data, but I don't understand why we need to paid to post, voting. This make me feel bad. Only rich will post, vote, terrible idea. You even can't down vote. Then why don't allow down vote, or remove for 1000$? You even can have better control of the information. Welcome internet for rich only.
Facebook works ok as a message board while a group is small. But at some point as a group grows Facebook starts manipulating the feed, removes chronological ordering, stops notifying group members consistently, and does whatever other opaque actions that the engagement algorithms dream up.
French Prune and Italian Prune are the names of some European plum cultivars typically grown for the purpose of being dried, however they are also quite good eaten fresh.
In Romanian we still call plums as "prune", directly from Latin. My brother has lots of plum trees on his property (at the foot of the Carpathians) and most of the plums are used for making an excellent țuica (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C8%9Auic%C4%83), while the rest is dried up in order to be eaten during the long winter months (my grandma makes an excellent dried-plums soup).
The article tiptoes around the issue of "stealing" referenced by the headline, as if the "stolen" fruit is only taken from public property. As you will learn if you plant fruit trees in your front yard, there are quite a lot of people who think nothing of trespassing on private property and stripping your trees. In Hawaii it's become an epidemic - most of the stolen fruit is not consumed by famished thieves, it is sold at farmers' markets. Penalties are so minimal for this crime that the same thieves return over and over with no fear of being caught.
Thi issue has many of my fruit-growing friends ripping their hair out. Believe it or not, not all residential fruit trees are neglected afterthoughts - many of us put blood and sweat into these trees and live for the day we can harvest them.
Great point. I, as a farmer, do own quite a lot of wallnut trees that could be mistaken for public property. I am ok with random people picking random wallnuts, but most of the theft is done by organized groups that resell my fruit on farmers market. Each year I do think about reporting them to police (as amount of fruit stolen is higher then treshold of breaking law), but then I realise that amount of trouble I will get them into and probable damage to their life is higher than some wallnuts I just let it go. Now I just hope that the area will get rich enough that they will just don't care about picking my fruit and I will finally get something more then just few lefovers.
This is interesting because your viewpoint focuses on the law and who is technically in the right, while his viewpoint values community cohesion and well-being. This tends to be the line between conservative and liberal viewpoints regarding treatment of lawbreakers - hard line reactions which favour the capital holder versus rehabilitation, decriminalisation, consideration of the social fabric.
That said, stealing someones walnuts and reselling them is a douche move. Being a centrist, I'd recommend approaching them about it and providing a warning. If you'd prefer not to approach, leave signs near the trees indicating theft will be reported and what the punishment could be. If they don't heed the warning then report them. The correct answer is often somewhere in the middle.
Community well-being would be not reporting those who just take and eat/keep/etc his walnuts.
On the other hand, these people are deliberately stealing his walnuts and re-selling them. There's no community well-being here to preserve, they are stealing and profiting.
> There's no community well-being here to preserve, they are stealing and profiting.
I agree that they're stealing and profiting from someone else's resources but there is a community cost to someone receiving a criminal record or worse for a relatively minor crime. And was it a friend's son or someone else only a few degrees of association away?
They should be punished if they continue after being warned but when the punishment exceeds the grade of the crime, anyone concerned about community would stop to ponder the cost-benefit of reporting the thieves. What we should have is punishments that better suit the severity of the crime, like community service.
In the Everyone Wins category: the thieves apologise, return the remaining walnuts and any money made, and offer to help the owner tend to their house and garden. Alternatively they can sell the walnuts on the owners behalf, generating money without having to pay for labour. In the everybody loses category: you strip someone of their ability to get certain jobs due to a criminal record and they turn to more crime to make up for the shortfall in income. Or you send them to jail and rather than having a well-tended-to garden your tax dollars are paying to have a harmless thief in prison.
Can we perhaps instead of 'punished', maybe 'brought to justice' or 'rehabilitated'? Negative consequences should be focused on making the affected persons whole, and secondarily on getting the person to the point where they're not likely to repeat the crime. Insisting on proportionate suffering is in my opinion morally dubious, and risks devolving into "eye for an eye" mentalities, or worse.
Using the law to enforce a point is always equivalent to the use of physical force. The law simply provides such a vast weapon that the party in the wrong must back down or die.
If you wouldn't be willing to hold a gun to someone's head to make them change their actions, then you shouldn't call the police.
Are they aware that it's private property and your maintained trees? If so, and if you don't want to involve the police you might also consider a "name and shame" approach at the market itself by simply asking (loudly) "Why do you keep stealing the nuts from my trees and selling them?"
Edit: at the least they could provide you with some of the gathered /picked nuts.
> I am ok with random people picking random wallnuts
Is that typical for farmers? Like if I'm walking past a field of corn (or whatever) and I take some for myself (not to sell) - they are OK with it and don't consider it stealing?
(I've never done it, but been tempted - not because I can't afford it, but because it looks really fresh and tasty :)
I have a commercial blueberry operation. So long as you're hand-picking, and not doing it for commerce, help yourself. The amount you take will be trivial when compared with the amount taken by animals.
Besides, I can't begrudge anyone who loves blueberries.
No one cares (as long as it's within "reasonable" proportions). Any animal would happily eat 10 times the amount of corn you took.
And, man, we're loosing so much fruits, because of global warming and cold snaps nowadays... If you find a few appealing apples on the way, please, enjoy and don't waste them.
Although if there's a cash register or mailbox nearby, the farmers would of course prefer to get paid.
Typical prices in grocery stores for apples seem to be around a dollar a pound, but apparently farmers get roughly a third of that: http://www.agmrc.org/commodities-products/fruits/apples/comm... I'm sure they wouldn't mind you cutting out the middleman if it meant a little extra for them. But so far all the apple picking operations I've found are tourist attractions, and charge even higher prices than a grocery store.
Unless you're leaving the field with 5kg of apples, I doubt they'll care. But, this is coming from someone who plant fruits to eat them. We're not selling anything to grocery stores.
If the ownership of the land is a little ambiguous, you might want to try a few simple 'please don't pick the walnuts, these trees are on private property' signs. It will stop some people convincing themselves that it is probably ok to do.
But don't we put "sweat and blood" into our code as well? Don't we, in fact, put more effort into our code than into our trees, which the sun freely shines on and which (in Hawaii) the rain freely falls on, on the earth a patch of which you call your property for reasons no more clear than the reasons you would call a piece of code you wrote your "intellectual property"?
Are the birds that eat the grapes and crap out the seeds stealing? They are propagating as they consume. Are your neighbors that eat the grapes and crap out the seeds merely consuming? Why is it that for your average Westerner, nature is always something consumed? Is it not more like a "given" resource that some of us put effort into harnessing, much like the free flow of ideas is directed into computer programs?
My point is that people will come up with no end of arguments for why code should be free, yet I just knew that the top comment on this post was going to be some moralist maintaining the importance of private property in one sphere, while implicitly maintaining the necessity of its transgression in another sphere.
Yes, mulberries are worth it. They would be a very popular fruit if they could handle the rigors of transport.
If you can track on down in the UK I'd feverishly recommend Pawpaw (Asimina triloba), a custardy fruit with such tropical flavor you'd be shocked it is native to North America.
I used publicly whine quite a lot in favor of open web standards. When the specs were simpler, this made more sense, but as they grew more and more complex I felt overwhelmed with the chore of developing cross-browser apps. The investment of time required just didn't make sense anymore, and I felt like the only way to serve the web was to develop simple content-focused pages, and leave any complex functionality to native apps.
On Memorial Day I walked outside and did a double take - my quiet street, tucked away many turns from any main road, was backed up with cars from end to end. I'd never seen that before in 5 years here. Turned out it was Waze sending beachgoers (I'm still 30 minutes from the beach) on a side route to the nearest on ramp for the highway that heads to the coast. Within an hour there was a police car here diverting drivers and the town put up cones to stop it.
What's frustrating is this "shortcut" was completely ineffective. It simply moved the traffic jam from the main roads to our tiny neighborhood.
>What's frustrating is this "shortcut" was completely ineffective. It simply moved the traffic jam from the main roads to our tiny neighborhood.
This exemplifies the arrogance of 'disruptive companies' when they think they can improve on something like a traffic system or a taxi system.
They set out to make things more efficient without a deep understanding of the problem.
They see every problem as a technical optimization problem because they learned this kind of thing at school. However society has usually evolved a set of rules balancing the rights of various parties already.[1]
I would hate for articles like this to discourage people from coming here to farm. We need more farmers in Hawaii! There is so much abandoned farmland from the sugarcane era, and meanwhile everyone's eating food that arrives by plane and boat. It's a bizarre situation.