joehewitt

No, I've never been to Maui. You can reach me at joe@joehewitt.com

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.

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.

There was a book written on Engelbart's work and his philosophies which I enjoyed reading many years ago:

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrapping-Engelbart-Coevolution-Pe...

My guess is that most people who hit a performance wall with canvas are using overly complex vector graphics and not caching bitmaps as often as they could. While things like OpenVG are on the horizon, vector drawing is still a CPU-bound activity most of the time, while bitmap blitting is all GPU. This is the case whether you're using canvas or a native graphics library.

See also, another look at David's work:

The Making of John Mayer's 'Born & Raised' Artwork http://vimeo.com/60647216

Sorry, I'm doing some experimental stuff here. I do UA sniffing to decide whether to render the page on the server (with Node.js) or on the client with Ajax. Crawlers and old browsers get static content, new browsers get JavaScript.

Here's an example of the problem it solves. I never log into Facebook in Safari because the Facebook app is a much better experience on iOS. Often I tap on links in native apps which go to facebook.com, and then I'm looking at the Facebook login page instead of the content I want to see.

This solution would allow apps (if they choose to use this service) to turn facebook.com URLs into fb:// URLs, and take me where I really want to go when I click those links.

Ideally iOS would provide this URL mapping, as Android does, so that this happened everywhere, not just apps that use this service. I wish Apple would do this. In the mean time, this is one approach we could take.

I'm just now learning about how Android solves this problem. That's great, but the problem remains on iOS. Protocol handlers in browsers don't help here because the problem has to do with http urls.

If iOS allowed me to launch native apps with http URLs, I would never have written this post. They don't, they only suport custom protocol schemes. I'm trying to lessen the importance of custom protocol schemes here by providing a service to silently map http URLs to the custom URLs so users never see them.

I'm using a fairly experimental JavaScript-driven system right now. It's totally overkill for a blog, but it's my blog and I can do stuff like this for fun. No offense, but if you disable JavaScript, you get what you deserve.

Touch scrolling has become a fundamental interaction on mobile devices and I'd like to see it be leveraged more on the web. That has nothing to do with how the web looks.

yep.

I don't want my personal account on the server in case it was compromised. Besides, even if you use that "dropbox exclude" command, the client will start downloading all of your files when you first link it and there's no way to tell it not to do that before you have the chance to do all of your excludes.

What security problems do you foresee? As I outlined in my post, I created a dedicated Dropbox account for the blog and it only synchronizes files meant for the blog. If those became public it wouldn't be a problem.

The server was down initially until I upgraded my EC2 instance from micro to small. Now it's running, but yeah, I didn't test in Opera so I'm not surprised.

Perhaps I didn't stress enough in the blog that this system was designed with non-technical users in mind. My girlfriend uses it on her blog and she is savvy enough to understand Markdown, but if I asked her to run a command-line script every time she wanted to publish something it would be a non-starter.

I could never have gotten my non-technical girlfriend to use this system if she had to go to a command line and type "git commit" and "git push" for ever new post. She's become quite prolific with it since there are no tools she has to use to publish, other than a text editor.

Some, but not all, table views were replaced with web views a few months ago. News Feed is one example that is now HTML.

The existence of the HTTP Accept header shows that HTTP was designed with a variety of incompatible user-agents in mind. If you write new user-agent, use Accept to specify what content types you can render. Intelligent web servers can serve the same content in different formats for the same URLs. Your browser that only handles HTML will browse on unimpeded, my browser that also handles NewLanguage3000 will get the newfangled version. Everybody wins.