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Comment by TechSquidTV | Hacker News Reader

Ha! I very recently started something for peppers (Capsicum) https://pepperrank.com/

I love these niche sites! my friend recently started this for Tinned Fish (absolutely and solely for the love of the fish and with no plans to monetize.) He loves that a few random people will rank hundreds of tins. http://tinventory.co/

I've seen some similar sites

https://pepperscale.com/hot-pepper-list/

https://scovillescale.org/

https://pepperdatabase.org/

I feel like I remember using another one much more similar to your site a while back but I can't seem to find it. But pepperscale is really cool and has individual profiles for cultivars

all objectively better names

Data quality on Scoville is unfortunately garbage; Testing is expensive and both individual plants and individual growers/fields are highly variable, so nearly everyone is playing 'telephone' making subjective claims in relation to "known" standard varieties which are also usually subjective claims.

"Slightly hotter than a Jalapeno" means very little when a Jalapeno is anywhere from 3,000 scoville to 60,000 scoville.

How expensive is testing now? It looks like the standard method is HPLC analysis of capsaicinoids. I found old forum posts from about 10 years ago indicating $50-$65 per test from providers including SBL, which doesn't sound bad, but I don't know if prices have gone up recently.

Part of the issue is that there's a massive variety between peppers, and genetic diversity is incredibly wide, making it nearly impossible to determine the exact type of pepper you have. There are a few different universities and governments that "certify" peppers, but they aren't connected in any way.

That makes a lot of sense. I was thinking about testing a particular pepper you have for chemical content, but genetic testing and mapping results to pepper type names does sound more complicated/expensive.

I've learned in the course of making this site, that pretty much all information about peppers is garbage. That's half the reason I wanted to start this.

Why are you making my screen look dirty? lol

lol I kind of thought it made it look like a hot sauce label. but maybe not.

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