Top
Best
New

Posted by cdrnsf 17 hours ago

Rack-mount hydroponics(sa.lj.am)
322 points | 87 commentspage 2
chronogram 16 hours ago|
What's the idea behind not using capital letters?
zdc1 15 hours ago||
Gen Z will often write like that, feeling that using capitalisation feels too "formal" for non-professional communication.

It's feel just the next evolution in our written messaging dialect. Gen X had c u l8r?. Millennials didn't have to pay per character, and got full qwerty keyboards so opted for normal sentences. And now Gen Z have decided that auto-capitalisation is unnecessary.

Scoundreller 1 hour ago|||
I also wondered if Jack Dorsey's shift button was broken in his firing tweet: https://xcancel.com/jack/status/2027129697092731343
benjojo12 12 hours ago|||
I can't speak for the OPs case, but it's worth keeping in mind that not all languages that people are coming from have capital letters as a concept.

I actually didn't notice the lack of caps until I read this comment

agadius 10 hours ago|||
I found it pretty hard to read without the caps. I guess the punctuation mark is too small for my elderly eyes, and my brain sees it like one gigantic sentence. Perhaps the author of the blog is a fan of Kafka?
DANmode 3 hours ago||
Ctrl + “+” in your browser :]

I also didn’t notice the lack of caps until coming to the comments.

…and I’m a pedantic SOB!

cowthulhu 16 hours ago|||
The author is trying very hard to look like they are not trying at all.
DANmode 3 hours ago||
or learned English chatting on the Internet?

At least make it sound like you’re speculating if you’re going to.

mvkel 16 hours ago|||
Presumably a shibboleth for human-generated content
Gigachad 16 hours ago|||
Gen Z illiteracy crisis.
titanomachy 14 hours ago|||
Let's not turn HN into a bunch of crotchety old men complaining about the youths.
KPGv2 14 hours ago|||
Any particular reason you didn't write a complete sentence but still used a period, kid?
fixxation92 14 hours ago||
I'd take all lowercase over all uppercase anyday
gzread 3 hours ago||
cron and ssh is the worst way to control the pump motor. If the network is interrupted the pump will be stuck on until the next cycle.
chermi 4 hours ago||
I just love the simplicity of a cron job control system. This is so fun.
tzury 15 hours ago||
Setting aside the DIY and hacking spirit of the project, let's remember that, with the commonly accepted figure of 2,500 kcal/day for an adult male, a whole iceberg lettuce (~600g) provides about ~87 kcal which is roughly 3.5% of what one's need.
TurdF3rguson 12 hours ago|
So what though? I can get all the calories I need from $0.50 of rice but I still need crunchy things and protein.
rmast 5 hours ago||
Getting all the calories you need from (plain white) rice just about meet minimum protein needs for a sedentary lifestyle (around 50g protein). For every 100 calories of rice there are about 2.1g of protein, so for a 2000 calorie diet of just rice that would be 42g protein. But eating 10 cups of rice is a lot.

Protein-wise, an all cabbage diet would give you more if you’re meeting calorie needs - 5.1g protein per 100 calories, or 102g protein for 2000 calories worth of cabbage.. but that is a heck of a lot of cabbage (17ish lbs)!

Let’s be real though, people should be eating a varied diet and not just a single food. And perhaps not a junk food only diet.

schoen 5 hours ago||
Any issues about amino acid deficiencies from that? (as opposed to protein more generally?)

When I was growing up, there was a vogue among my fellow vegetarians for the book Diet for a Small Planet which suggested that we needed to eat a diversity of amino acids in each meal, hence "complementary" proteins at the same time. This concept then seemed to fade away completely because it appears that the body can actually successfully make use of amino acids even when consumed at different times. But they have to be consumed eventually!

seu 12 hours ago||
Looks great! It could be nice to have an integrated temperature control solution that keeps your servers cool and your plants warm.
Gud 10 hours ago||
From someone who grew a lot of weed in closets, nice work!
givinguflac 8 hours ago||
Any of the billion guides to growing hydroponic cannabis can teach you how to do this in a vertical rack without issues. Neat write up though.
esafak 16 hours ago||
I found growing my own produce to be a great way to appreciate farmers and my local supermarket.
jeffrallen 12 hours ago||
I am here for exactly this kind of surprise. Nice work, HN!
colordrops 15 hours ago|
Always lettuce. If someone can figure out how to grow something with a dense and full nutrient profile then there might be something to vertical farms.
defrost 14 hours ago||
Dyson is doing strawberries

* https://dysonfarming.com/strawberries/

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA6BCIWPJ30

The rationale there is a combo of profit (from off season strawberries) and mark-up possible from unique branding (Dyson) and social fuzzies (eco-friendly, etc (regardless of cold economics)).

jpalomaki 6 hours ago||
Home scale example with strawberries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LIhx0yoM7s
jillesvangurp 13 hours ago|||
The challenge is finding something that is energy dense, that grows quickly, and has a high value to justify the length of trouble you have to go through. Things like potatoes, grains, rice, etc. Are relatively low value and they don't grow that quick.

Potatoes especially don't like to be submerged. But otherwise they are not that hard to grow. A simple grow bag will do. That's true for a lot of root vegetables and tubers. For vegetables like that, greenhouses are more common.

With rice and grains, they grow well enough in hydroponics but you just need an enormous amount of area to get to interesting amounts. Also the growing season for that is quite long. Hydroponics favor things that you can harvest in weeks rather than say 2-3 times per year.

odie5533 14 hours ago|||
I grow kale, mustard greens, herbs, and sprouts. I'm not looking to erase my need for produce. I just want to always have some fresh staples. Easier to pull off a few sprigs of parsley or some basil than it is to buy those little packs all the time.
regularfry 12 hours ago|||
I remember seeing people suggest vertical algae farms that could (in the marketing theory) be a very high nutrient source. The problem then is that you're eating algae. Spirulina is an acquired taste.

I'm more intrigued by duckweed, which grows very fast and is a common food in some countries.

driverdan 7 hours ago|||
Fruiting plants require more space. You're not going to grow tomatoes or peppers in a server rack. Density works well for leafy greens and microgreens.
boomskats 10 hours ago|||
Isn't the idea that you get to do that with all the fertile land you liberate from the lettuce?
zokier 8 hours ago|||
afaik soybeans can grow perfectly well in hydroponic setups, and I'm sure you can do many other beans too.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jf203275m

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S194439862...

roughly 12 hours ago|||
there's no free lunch - the plants are just rearranging what you give them.
gus_massa 9 hours ago|||
I agree. Potatoes transform light into starch. With traditional farming you get a huge "free" solar collector. In vertical farming you have to pay for the light.

So the alternative is to grow lettuce that has a greater price to energy ratio.

roughly 4 hours ago||
More than just light - the chemical profile of the soil is the feedstock for all of the interesting chemistry the plant does. The air can provide oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon, which are the backbone of a lot of the chemistry, but anything more exotic than that is coming from the soil. They're factories, not alchemists.
gus_massa 1 hour ago||
Hydrogen comes from water. They have surplus of Oxygen from CO2 and water, so much that they give it away. Carbon comes from the CO2 in the air.

Other nutrients like phosphorus or potassium come disolved in water, but in intensive farming they must be added to the soil, so it's the same that dissolving in the hydroponic solution. Perhaps it's more efficient in hydroponic than in soil.

Nitrogen is more tricky. There is plenty of Nitrogen in the air but not in a useful form, so in most cases it must be added as fertilizer. In some cases like soy the plants have helper bacteria that transform the nitrogen from the air into useful forms. This conversion takes a lot of energy, so I don't expect the lack of wind to be a problem, you still need some air movement to keep the CO2 high and the O2 low. (Anyway, farming soy under artificial light is probably not profitable for the same reason farming potatoes under artificial light is not profitable.)

The most important thing you lack inside a vertical farm that you get almost for free in a big faring field is sunlight (i.e. energy).

zokier 8 hours ago|||
co2 is mostly free and plentiful, and also the main ingredient for plant biomass.
roughly 4 hours ago||
which is why lettuce grows just fine.
DANmode 3 hours ago|||
Turns out you’re meant to eat multiple plants.

Bioflavonoids are important.

chermi 4 hours ago||
Mushrooms!
More comments...