While I find this fascinating, it does seem a bit curious to post this in a hacker forum. I was half way expecting to read that the farmer had been "bio-hacking" trying to come up with a healthy hybrid.
The only sins on Hacker News are being uninteresting and being rude. If PG can post about the margins of medieval manuscripts, anything interesting goes.
Given that the top comment in the thread is a relevant (and deservedly upvoted) quotation from a late-Renaissance text, I'd say we're doing pretty well here.
>On-Topic[1]: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I certainly found it interesting that this sort of thing is possible in nature. Other's mileage may vary but that's what the voting process is for, no?
Unless you go by recent popular usage, in which case every possible interaction with anything that is not specifically laid out in that thing's accompanying instruction manual is now considered "hacking." Case in point: Life has no instructions, so people happily call almost anything "life hacking."
Many discoveries were based on unintentional or natural accidents. One could calls these hacks since they broke the conventional "usage pattern." Not necessarily for this case but in situations like these.
Given that the top comment in the thread is a relevant (and deservedly upvoted) quotation from a late-Renaissance text, I'd say we're doing pretty well here.