joehewitt

No, I've never been to Maui. You can reach me at [email protected]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Have you considered that Atom is not an editor meant for "quick jobs"? It's a workhorse for programmers who are coding all day every day.

> 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.

Don't get all the gripes about slow startup time. How often do you launch your editor? We're programmers - the editor stays open all the time!

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.

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.

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.

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.