January 5, 2026
Fungi get receipts
Show HN: WOLS – Open standard for mushroom cultivation tracking
HN swoons over QR‑coded mushrooms as farm dreams sprout
TLDR: An open standard called WOLS puts a mushroom’s full growing history into a QR code, promising easier tracking for farms, labs, and hobbyists. Early reactions are cheerfully optimistic—one would‑be farmer is thrilled—while bigger debates about privacy and overengineering loom, with encryption and no lock‑in as answers.
Hacker News just met its new wholesome obsession: WOLS, an open labeling standard that puts a mushroom’s whole life story into a scannable QR code. Scan it and you get the species, strain, growth stage, temperature, humidity—basically a farm journal in your pocket. It’s free, open, privacy‑friendly, and already ships with JavaScript and Python tools, plus a Docker CLI, with more languages planned. The goal? Drag a $50B, spreadsheet‑ridden industry into the shareable, research‑grade future—no lock‑in, no nonsense. Platform support is starting with WeMush.
The early comment vibe is pure cottage‑core hype: one user dreams of finally starting a mushroom farm, calling it “so cool” and promising to watch this closely. That sets the tone—aspirational growers are in. While the thread hasn’t erupted into debate yet, the fault lines are obvious: skeptics will grumble about “QR codes for dirt,” privacy hawks will ask who sees the data, and minimalists will say “spreadsheets were fine.” The spec counters with encryption, signatures, and vendor‑agnostic design. Meanwhile, the jokes practically write themselves—“from spore to store” and “farm to QRm”—because, yes, mushrooms now have receipts. The real drama: will this standard finally let farms, labs, and hobbyists compare results apples‑to‑apples, or is it tech creeping into the tool shed? Early signal says: green light, grow on.
Key Points
- •WOLS is an open, vendor-agnostic QR code-based standard for encoding mushroom cultivation specimen data.
- •The specification supports comprehensive histories including species, strain, stages, environment, substrate, yields, and lineage/genetics.
- •Official libraries are released for JavaScript/TypeScript and Python, with a Docker-based CLI; Go and Rust implementations are planned.
- •Privacy features include public or encrypted data options and cryptographic signatures for authenticity.
- •The core data model and multiple encoding formats (compact URI and embedded JSON) enable interoperability, extensibility, and integration with IoT and equipment.