How to grow almost anything | Hacker News Reader

How to grow almost anything

howtogrowalmostanything.notion.site

201 pointscar61 comments

Thought this was for plants, womp womp.

We should have already made super-seeds that you can plant in concrete and grow all the tomatoes you'll need in a month with a single LED. Why be dependent on Big Ag or imports from Chile for tasteless nutritionless environment-poisoned overpriced veg if you could grow it in a closet? Saves water, saves power, saves the environment, tastes better, better for you, cheaper. We just need a lot of bio nerds (and a few billion $) to develop it.

I mean there are considerations. Something like that would be insanely invasive and overrun most ecosystems in years.

Why not have the food grow in your stomach. Direct consumption. Put the LED there too.

And a state-of-the-art AI-powered app for this!

...with a monthly subscription price (and a non-zero chance of them bricking you -- probably intentionally so that they can sell you another you).

Gotta get VC funded after all, right!

Why not have the food grow in your skin. Use the fusion reactor in the sky.

I've always wanted to be a mixotroph.

the wiring harness required would be a bit uncomfortable.

How are you going to get more than an LED’s worth of chemical energy out of a plant that was fed only an LED’s worth of energy?

Also, I find this goal equally as dystopian as big ag is currently. Just plant a garden and tend it

i would love to have an app, that reminds me of when to water or fertilize my plants, depending on the plant species, weather and light conditions. maybe even automatically turning off and on the growlights. just to maximize plant health.

Ha, working on exactly that at eg https://www.meso.cloud/plants/magnoliophyta/malvales/magnoli...

If you're into home automation, you could probably get pretty far with some light & moisture sensors (I recommend Xiaomi Flora bluetooth sensors for the latter purpose) and smart plugs connected to Home Assistant. I did something like that on a small scale, it worked fairly well.

Definitely doable, aquarium controllers are also quite flexible.

We're working on a free Home Assistant plugin that let's you define your sensors and outputs, then choose a plant (see link below, or climate of a specific location) and hopefully take most of the heavy lifting from there.

Add a pre-check, that based on location,light conditions, local soil inof, etc tells you want is safe to plant.

You find growing tomatoes in a closet to cause great suffering and injustice? (that's what dystopian means)

I have gardened, but personally I'm tired of it. And a garden is often impractical; takes a bunch of land, water, nutrients, requires enough sun, etc, besides the expenses, and the time and effort. I live on an acre of land and I still don't get enough sun because of where I live, and my soil is shit. I can grow things but it's quite hard and yields are pitiful.

I'm not a botanist but my understanding is that a combination of bio-engineering and growth hacks (ex. pumping co2 into grow tents, optimizing light, nutrients, hydroponics, etc) can have substantial yield improvement. It's not that cheap or scalable, though. My theory is that, for about the same money as heirloom tomatoes, you could get good yields, better flavor, have a smaller environmental impact, and avoid all the gardening limitations I mentioned. But I think bioengineering could maximize the yield more than current methods (especially if pests weren't a concern, ex. a climate-controlled grow closet)

LEDs help to supplement in regions that don't have that much light (Netherlands etc) or when you try to achieve something very specific (scientific, flavor profile etc) but bypassing the reactor in the sky is just not a very good idea.

The other issue you mentioned also killed 50%+ of vertical farming startups: you need a diverse living ecosystem. You need a living soil crawling with organisms of all sizes (check Arbico Organics, Jim's Worms and others), the whole thing needs to be balanced, otherwise it's hard to grow in the first place and/or a single unpredicted "intruder" will wipe out your entire operation (Bowery Farms and plenty of others from what I understand).

>You find growing tomatoes in a closet to cause great suffering and injustice? (that's what dystopian means)

As a gardener, I would for sure suffer if all I could do is grow plants in a closet.

Gardens are a truly valuable treasure. Grow wherever you possibly can, but please don't ever take away the sunshine.

Off topic, but Notion is a perfect example of how badly you can abuse web standards. This webpage, which is a document with some markup and links (the very thing the web was made for) takes ~600MB RAM, about 10 seconds load, and lags terribly. Just unusable.

What if you used the app?

Also, my screen is 20 inches wide, yet the website uses only 25% of that width.

On 24" it looks ok at 150% with vertical tabs to the side.

hate Notion but also it took 2s to load on iOS safari

Notion has really great ideas though, it's just so poorly implemented that it really hurts my desire to use it for anything unless forced to.

It was such a breath of fresh air in the beginning, when it was simple, elegant, and focused. Shame they had to cram it to the gills with half-considered cruft.

Wow it is horrible. I clicked on the link to load it, tabbed back to this comment page and read this comment, went back to the page to see how it was doing and got 99% blank page, scrolled for a solid 10 seconds and just as I was about to come back and say the page is broken for me it popped up a proper scroll bar for a window about 1/3 of my browser size. Scrolled through about 5-6 pages worth of that which still looked broken, then the window finally resized and images started popping in, but it still took another 7 seconds or so for those to load an actual image instead of just a placeholder icon while everything shifted around like mad.

It would appear it waits until it's in focus to load/do certain things

Notion sites aren’t my favorite and this website has some annoying quirks (like scrolling to the top after fully loading)

But if this is what it takes for someone to generously share so much information with us for free then I really don’t care if I have to wait a couple extra seconds for a page load or if a tab takes up 600MB of RAM. I know this thinking makes the web purists angry, but the majority of people who visit these sites to learn aren’t going to be impeded or even bothered. Even on my older iPhone on non-5G cellular it loads in a couple of seconds.

If MIT were responsible, sure! But Notion is a $10b company that shouldn't be shitting up my device's free memory just to show a basic webpage. Very much the same deal with FB marketplace which is probably the worst offender.

Not everyone has a fast device also.

It's more than a few seconds. On a desktop with a stable fast connection, it takes up to 1GB of RAM and ~17 seconds to finish loading, including around 2.5 seconds of processing time.

On the network side it makes ~650 requests.

That's an exceptionally resource hungry way to load the content.

This varies more than I'd guess by machine. On my Comcast Wifi, it takes 37 seconds to load on my tablet but only 4 seconds to load on my work M3 Macbook Pro with 64 GB of RAM. Maybe Notion developers are issued the latter.

Site doesn't even work on Pale Moon, and judging from your comment that's probably a good thing.

Whenever I use Notion I can feel the PM working there being pushed to ship a new feature this quarter; you can almost hear the engineers asking “why are we building this?”

A few years back Notion was excellent modulo a few small UX things that could be improved.

Now those small things still haven’t been improved but there’s way more clutter worsening the UX notably over time.

How many years back? I worked for a company that used Notion for its docs in 2019 and it was already slow and bloated then.

Wait till you see my React Native <TextInput> chew through 2 - 3.8 GB RAM for a 1 MB string..

That’s Notion in a nutshell really. Nice UX when it works, but no attention to quality. I’ve lost count of the number of big, obvious bugs I’ve tripped over that they seemingly have no interest in fixing.

i have slighlty old iphone and boy the notion app is crazy laggy. You are right, i saw a video where the guys spent everything literally on UI design, even that video had comments saying, should have invested in an efficient backend.

Even the app itself is getting slower. I loved it, and I've been using it for about three years, mostly for taking D&D notes - and it's getting slower and slower on my laptop (though it's still quite good on the phone.)

Turn off JS.

Hit the back button whenever a page says JS is required, unless you want to read it badly enough to wait for it.

The web is much better that way.

Oh, I thought there’d be some tips for my rhubarb.

A spiritual successor to: https://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/MAS.863/

Warning to anyone who goes down this rabbit hole: If you set up a home lab, don't tell people who you're not close with. There's a very good chance they'll assume you're (if they're a normie) making coronavirus or meth, and (If they're a biologist or chemist) assume you're not disposing of reagents and cultures properly. I wish this wasn't the case, but as a society, we're not ready to talk about bio outside of institutions and universities.

Also, the costs are deceptive, even with used or Chinese parts: I estimate $10k USD for a usable molecular bio lab, including equipment and reagents.

> There's a very good chance they'll assume you're (if they're a normie) making coronavirus or meth, and (If they're a biologist or chemist) assume you're not disposing of reagents and cultures properly.

I don’t have a full bio lab but I do have a lot of various lab equipment and do things at home that aren’t typical hobbyist projects. I haven’t found this to be a problem at all.

I also don’t mentally segregate the world into “normies”, which honestly helps a lot. In my experience people who develop a chip on their shoulder about their geek hobbies and start describing other people as “normies” bring a lot of these problems upon themselves. It helps a lot to just talk to people like peers and also know when people just aren’t interested in talking about your certain hobbies.

Great points. I've heard the term used in different context, and don't consider it a pejorative.

I don't think GP does either, other than 'self-perjorative'. At least that's how I see it - a sort of semi-self-deprecating acknowledgement that the speaker is not 'a normie' (whatever that means, really).

The root problem is segregating the world into buckets like that.

Whether its being used in the condescending version or the self-deprecating version is beside the point. When you go into social situations sizing people up as “normie” or not the preconceived ideas about the other people become an obstacle for communication.

That's a noble perspective for sure, but it won't help much when that nosy busybody from down the street Mrs. Smith notices you're bringing some sciencey looking stuff into your garage late one evening and she starts telling the neighbours that you're making meth.

Not everyone is in an environment where they can rationally explain their non-standard hobbies to their neighbours without judgment and no amount of treating a person like Mrs. Smith as a peer is going to stop her from spreading the kinds of rumours that result in a police investigation into them.

Unfortunately some people live in environments where others are just itching to recreate the Salem witch trials.

Is this a hypothetical or is it based on real events? My dad has pieces of retired distillation apparatus from a plant that does chemical research and also manufactures codeine. Definitely the condenser, and maybe also the round-bottom flask. He's left them sitting above his TV for years, in plain view. My mum has a binocular microscope and a box of precision scales sitting near the kitchen table. Nobody has ever commented on any of this except to say how neat the glassblowing is, etc.

I'm sure some people do live in modern-day Salem equivalents, but I bet a lot more people think they do.

It depends where you are. If you're in the upper middle class neighborhood you can probably get away with it. People will think you're brewing your own alcohol or some other eccentric hobby.

If you do this in a poor neighborhood that's had a problem with meth houses, you'll, either get the police kicking down your door, or you'll get the methheads breaking in and stealing your equipment.

Trying to compare what happens in the AU vs US might not work out well.

The parent comment was explicitly about telling other people.

Not some imagined scenario with a nosey neighbor seeing you shuffle lab equipment into the garage under cover of darkness. That’s a scenario hatched out of watching TV shows.

Regardless, it doesn’t matter that much if the one nosey neighbor starts spreading rumors. Unlike the movies and TV, the rest of your neighbors already know that the nosey neighbor is prone to fits of imagination, speculation, and prejudice. Nothing comes of it. Go on with your life.

Like you, I find the more I talk to people about what I’m doing (without going beyond their level of interest), the less they’re spooked. Especially when I’m prepared to talk about how I’ve thought seriously about safety.

Whereas the more people just happen to see stuff that’s unfamiliar to them, the more they imagine movie tropes to explain it. Sneakiness and a “you wouldn’t get it” attitude just code you as obnoxious, and color their assumptions accordingly…

You know, after pondering this, I think we're making progress. For example, I haven't heard the bare PCB and/or wires = bomb trope in years! Know your audience, as you imply. If asked what you like to do for fun or hobbies, selectivity in the response and assessing the situation helps!

Yeah, trying to create one right now to try to do some E Coli + Desnoyer’s style flower experiments.

I really underestimated the cost

The reagent shipping costs are a big one I underestimated! Or making sure the fuge you get does 10k g etc

Here is where everything started: https://cba.mit.edu/classes/index.html

I like seeing courses created like this. I also wish there were more good tools to create rich/custom experiences yet are simple to host and durable.

Damn, I thought this was going to be about tissue culture or horticulture in general.

my mind broke just being on the first page.

omg notion is horrendous

dangerous knowledge in the wrong hands

All knowledge is dangerous in the wrong hands.

Want to know how to secure your computer? In the wrong hands, that gives somebody information on how to break into insecure computers.

Want to know how to slice an onion properly and safely? Oh, so now you want to teach people how to efficiently use knives, the most ancient of offensive weapons?

I guess you want to teach your children how to play nice with other kids and have a healthy school environment? Well, some people are going to use that knowledge to understand how to emotionally abuse children. You're a monster.

Focus on motivations and safeguards of the attack vectors, not limiting the spread of knowledge.

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