Second the book recommendation below and can highlight one thing about having spent time on plantations myself: do NOT cut the trees. There will be folks who will tell you that by cutting the trees you will get more sunlight and hence more coffee production. I've seen first hand how hundreds of farmers (mainly in India) cut all the trees on their coffee plantation and a few years later lost most of their land due to water issues and landslides. Depending on where in the world you are, you also want to understand what companion plants (could be macadamia nut trees, banana plants, etc.) are best suited for your coffee plants.
I would not try to compete with low-quality bean production. Not sure how much land you have but you most likely don't have the resources to compete at scale. There is, however, a massive specialty coffee market and people are willing to pay good money for good coffee. So besides my recommendations above, try to find some specialty coffee producers in your region and learn from them.
Anyone wants to kick around ideas? Particularly interested in use cases for technology to improve regenerative agriculture / permaculture operations and water management in the global South (esp. India). You can find my E-mail address in my profile.
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Besides the fact that capsaicin has antibacterial effects and exerts indirect disease-alleviating effects during bacterial infections (something our ancestors had to deal with a lot), eating chili triggers an endorphin high, but regularly eating chili makes you less sensitive and hence you have to eat more chili to get your little high. Taken together, these two properties of chili most likely have been the main drivers of it being adopted as a staple food in many cultures.
I’ve gotten to a point where I prefer to drink a hot spicy soup in a cup over many things. If I drink coffee, it also always burning hot with a solid mix of cream, sugar and cinnamon. One of the things it helps me achieve is a small warmth that also helps me sleep.
I don’t even resort to hot sauce for the broths anymore, just cutting up one or two small chili peppers makes the soup hotter.
The soups are becoming a really good diet trick because they have little to no calories (but have insane amounts of sodium).
Some chicken bullion, ginger/lemon grass (paste or the real deal), chili peppers, black pepper and salt has truly started becoming my morning coffee.
Drinking regularly drinks that are too hot significantly increases the risk of throat cancer. I can't find the paper anymore that I read few years ago, but they did check various cultures where drinking very hot tea is traditional, controlled for other factors and the results were not nice. IIRC the threshold where risk became significantly higher was around 70-75 degrees celzius.
I mean think about it - around 60 degrees C proteins are getting hammered in all cells. Doing frequent small burns in cells lining your throat damages them (also teeth), make it a habit and bad things will eventually happen. There wasn't enough time to develop protection when we moved from hunters and gatherers.
That your specific brain interprets this as somehow pleasant isn't telling much, some people get off on extremely painful experiences that nobody normal considers a good idea.
Biochemist who went to med school: very hot beverages will indeed cause tissue damage, and can cause oral cancer.
Though English uses the same word to describe both (“hot”), there is no relationship between “spicy” food and high temperature stuff, apart from the fact that they both stimulate pain receptors (but in very different ways, one being harmful and the other being harmless).
Why does tissue damage increase the risk of cancer? My guess is that more damage -> more cells created to replace damaged ones -> more opportunities for mutation. Is that right? If you bite the inside of your lip a lot, is that bad? Uh, asking for a friend.
When you have damaged tissue you must replace it sooner. Tissue replacement is by division of cells, which carries the risk of a transcription error. If the wrong error occurs and is not caught you have cancer.
Basically this, but perhaps a slightly more accurate explanation is that tissue damage causes inflammation, which is angiogenic, proliferative (which you hint at) and generally increases the risk of cancer.
Yes, constantly biting your lip (I’m talking about injuring the tissue, not just nibbling) will increase your risk of oral cancer too.
It’s not something most people do super often, so I’m not sure if we’d even have a risk measurement for that. In almost all cases of accidental biting risk is basically nil / negligible… But theoretically nonzero.
It’s a well-established principle, and is one of the main reasons why smoking anything in general will cause lung cancer, why hepatitis frequently leads to liver cancer, why IBD frequently leads to bowel cancer, why alcohol consumption causes oral cancer, etc.
When you say harmful are you suggesting the pain receptors themselves are damaged by "spicy" substances? Is that why we develop increased tolerance? Though many people don't seem to, even after 40 or 50 years or eating spicy foods on an at least weekly basis.
Pain receptors that are activated by burning are indicating something harmful is occurring to your body not because the receptor is actually activated, but because of the cellular damage that triggers the receptor.
On the other hand, capsaicin doesn't activate pain receptors by cellular damage. It activates pain receptors by allowing a flood of (Na+? Ca2+?) ions through cellular walls. This triggers the pain receptors to fire without the cell damage. That is a laymen's description of reference [1].
It's interesting because the biochemistry of spicy foods differs by the 'spicy' compound. Capsaicin isn't the only one at play, wasabi and horseradish-containing foods have an entirely different molecule responsible for producing the spicy sensation, allyl isothiocyanate.[2] If you're a fan of spicy peppers and horseradish, you have definitely noticed the difference in how the 'heat' manifests: capsaicin-containing foods cause areas of damaged skin or mucus membranes to feel painful, usually localized in the mouth or around nail beds of those preparing the peppers.
Horseradish on the other hand, with it's spicy-ness provided by allyl isothiocyanate, produces a heat that - for me - is more located in the back of the head or in the upper sinus cavities. A completely different sensation than that of capsaicin.
Unfortunately, I don't know what the biochemical method of action is to produce those feelings. I'm sure it is buried deep in the literature, but it isn't on the wiki.
All my snacks now are some sort of crispy vegetable with very hot chili powder, a little bit of salt and lemon juice.
Chop up some cucumbers/radish/Lima beans/tomatoes/carrots/chickpeas etc. add a chili powder, lemon and salt and I’m good to go. Ready in seconds and way better than eating potato chips and gives me a little bit of an endorphin rush.
Oh come one, I obviously don’t chop the lima beans or chickpeas. I don’t peel carrots, wash and then chop in under 20 seconds per carrot literally. If I want to make them really fine I use a peeler to thinly slice them into discs (I’ve gotten very good at this, can probably do a carrot in a minute. I don’t have a mandolin slicer).
Actually with a mandolin and skipping peeling you literally could do a carrot in 4 or 5 seconds, but the slices tend to be so thin you'd have trouble eating them as finger food. Anyway I'm keen to try your suggestion.
Also in the same vein if you want to try things out. Take eggplant/squash/beans/spinach etc., chop them up into cubes, slice some onions and some garlic, add a half teaspoon of black mustard, a pinch of whole cumin, some asafetida, salt, whole dried red chili peppers, about a table spoon of fresh grated coconut (you get frozen packs of pre grated coconut), and some tamarind or lemon juice in a pot. Cover, let it simmer or medium high for 10 mins and there’s another health snack to go. The whole thing takes me 15 mins to make and I can snack throughout the day.
Living in Japan, it’s very hard to find properly spicy food or nice chilli sauces. I’ve resorted to just eating plain cut chilli. A while back, I experimented with not adding more spices than was already provided in my meals. No pepper, no chilli. After about a month, I started experiencing new tastes and flavours from foods I’ve always ate. It was amazing.
But I craved that endorphin high from spicy foods and have fallen back to my old ways.
One of the hottest things I've ever eaten was at a Korean-run Japanese curry house in NYC.
IIRC you chose spiciness on a 1-5 scale. The first time I tried a 2 and it was damn spicy. Next time I tried a 3 and it ruined my lunch, my pride, my afternoon, and my evening.
There are plenty of curry places in Japan that do spice levels too.
However normal Japanese curry tends to be pretty mild as well as other food in Japan, including Japanese style Chinese places which often serve dishes like mapo tofu with no spiciness whatsoever.
There are Japanese curry places in SoCal that charge extra (~25-50c per level IIRC) per spice level. Since I couldn’t handle any more than 2/10 I found that a win-win :)
> eating chili triggers an endorphin high, but regularly eating chili makes you less sensitive and hence you have to eat more chili to get your little high
I wonder what is the evolutionary reason for that. The older you are, the more defense you needed against bacteria?
But our sensitivity to temperature doesn't decrease with age, if anything the opposite... even if that's more obvious with ambient rather than tactile temperature (which I'd imagine are processed quite differently by our nervous systems).
I always thought that the endorphin high is unrelated to the beneficial effect: any strong pain is normally followed by a release of endorphins to compensate. It's why pain and pleasure are often difficult to disentangle. A strong dose of capsaicin will induce a painful sensation in the mouth (you'll feel like burning), which is compensated by a release of endorphins.
I thought only Aussies (and Kiwis) called them that... though apparently the term is used in India and Singapore too.
(Yes I know it's the correct botanical term for the plant, but we use it for the food too).
AWS Free Tier (e.g. 12 months of Amazon EC2 750 h/month, 5GB S3, Amazon RDS 750h/month, 1 million Lambda requests / month, 25GB Dynamo DB,...). This can get you pretty far in the first year of building, testing, and iterating.
It's worth noting that AWS's free tier has absolutely no safety net and you can easily end up with an unexpected bill, sometimes a very large one. The single best thing AWS could do to encourage people to learn about its services by trying them out would be to have a safe-by-default billing configuration. A user should have to flip a switch in their account to allow any usage over a given dollar amount, with services being halted in the event they would breach this limit without having flipped that switch.
You would be surprised how many users don't want that. Take e.g. a startup run by two people in Singapore that gets featured on HN unbeknownst to the founders as they are asleep. They experiences a ton of traffic, which makes them exceed the free tier limits. If you were one of these founders, what reality would you want to wake up to? That your web app was hugged to death and you lost out on a significant growth momentum or that your web app stayed up and now you have to pay a bill to AWS (but hopefully have made some revenue, too)?
I'd also say that in the year of our lord 2022 literally everyone has heard about unexpected cloud bills (yes, happens with GCP and Azure all the time as well) and hence should know that they have to set their account up properly - there is a ton of tutorials by AWS and others on how to set up your budgets and billing alerts.
> I'd also say that in the year of our lord 2022 literally everyone has heard about unexpected cloud bills (yes, happens with GCP and Azure all the time as well) and hence should know that they have to set their account up properly - there is a ton of tutorials by AWS and others on how to set up your budgets and billing alerts.
> Technical Product Management @ AWS
Thank you for your reply. However, I must respectfully disagree. Even in your hypothetical startup example, we should default to do not charge people until they flip a switch saying they are in production. I know it doesn't matter to you right now because AWS has so much demand but I think in terms of developer experience (DX), it would be really nice if we could rely on some kind of a sandbox. Even Microsoft Azure has Visual Studio subscription, which has a cap. Please consider adding this option.
Agreed! Unfortunately, quite a bit of the money that she donates to some of these organizations goes into the pockets of extremely well-paid executives. That what's always bothered me about giving to charity orgs more widely. Luckily, there are websites that allow you to check how much charity organizations are actually spending on their programs vs. their expenses...
I do think that giving directly to individuals who will make sure that all of the money is spent wisely is an interesting alternative approach.
First, HN includes more than hacking and startups. Quting from the HN guidelines, "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" can be submitted. Instead of posting a dismissive comment, you could also ask yourself - or the community - what others find interesting about this topic?
Here is my take: Mudras are an elaborate form of encoded symbolism with a long history in culture that influences a large part of the world. People trained in classical Indian dance will be able to decode a story based on these gestures, whereas someone who doesn't know much about it won't get the meaning. If you think about it like that, it's quite similar to code. At the end of the day, computer code is also just symbolism - so we as practitioners of this particular kind of symbolism can always learn about other forms of symbolism to improve our craft.
dang - are there any features for making HN more accessible? A vision-impaired colleague of mine wanted to check out HN today and made me aware that the contrasts on HN make it really hard for people with impaired vision to read on HN (webaim.org confirms this: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=919191&...). Using his screen reader (NVDA) didn't help much as the front page doesn't seem to take into account screen reading software. Has someone built a more accessible version of HN? Also, does the HN team plan to make HN more accessible in the future?
It's a problem and yes we plan to fix it. I'm sorry it hasn't been fixed yet; we're just slow at things. Hopefully HN will be around for long enough to justify how slow we are.
That's great news and thanks for the swift reply. Have you considered asking the HN community for help with this issue? I'm sure there would be lots of volunteers.
My wish list is not full Markdown support, but a little more than is currently implemented:
1. Ordered lists
- Unordered lists
Inline `code snippets`
Super^script
That's it. I totally get why HN wouldn't want tables, bold headers, etc. There's a danger of comments getting visually "noisy" with these. But for referencing code or mathematical concepts, or just listing things, the 4 things above would be really handy.
I find I can make unordered lists quite effectively
• like this
• using characters like
• U+2022 BULLET
‣ Or U+2023 TRIANGULAR BULLET
Similarly, you can do superˢᶜʳⁱᵖᵗ using Unicode as well (though I would only recommend it for numbers; Unicode doesn’t include all superscript letters, and most of the ones it does include look bad when used together). But yes, I agree that proper support for these things would be very good. (Especially code blocks!)
Yeah, I’ve done it before for superscript characters and even have used fixed width code points to force inline code. But it was cumbersome. (One time my whole comment was written in fixed width characters—I don’t remember why—and I found it a few hours later transliterated to the 0-127 range)
EDIT: Also, with native list support, you don’t get the wide line spacing. I like lists that aren’t paragraphs for each item.
Yup... Lists, `inline`, and ```code``` would be fantastic. It's so annoying for n.yc to be literally the only place on the internet where you can type into a textbox but that textbox isn't some variation of markdown. (even facebook messages [on web] supports triple-ticks for code!)
I work at Vanilla Forums (we power some of the largest communities online).
I’ve worked a lot on our editors and content formatting pipelines. We support plaintext, markdown, HTML, BBCode, and a WYSIWYG editor with markdown shortcuts.
In reality is estimate the distribution is mostly the WYSIWYG editor nowadays for newer sites and BBCode for the older ones (some users on older entrenched communities really like their BBCode I guess).
True, but it's such a mismatch in expectations where the entire tech industry has embraced markdown, but n.yc (tech mecca / water cooler) is most decidedly (and surprisingly) uses NotMarkdown(tm).
The fact that I can navigate HN does not mean that it is pleasurable. The front page makes cumbersome to navigate down the list of publications and the comments sections do not signal where a thread starts or ends and who is answering to whom. Skipping boring threads therefore becomes practically impossible unless I find the top comment and know the uncommunicated feature to collapse threads.
