Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonnybgood | Hacker News Reader

“Do-nothing farming” sounds alot like Wu wei.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_wei

One could more broadly observe that many things in Japan uncannily resemble China. That's because they frequently came from China, though its unpopular to point this out. Religion, philosophy, writing, architecture, technology, food, etc. To its credit, Japan has preserved some things lost in the mainland, and does have some interesting endemic culture... it's just a lot smaller portion of modern "Japanese culture" than popularly supposed.

Reading your post, a question comes up to my mind. Just that it resembles and the origin comes from the same place, do we consider PDAs as same as the iPhone era smartphones?

The concept may look similar, but they are very different things in detail, and the latter became the defacto and created a new culture, which makes it important and I think it is enough to call it unique or original.

All I will say to that is that, as programmers, we should learn to distinguish between historically attributable derivation (evidenced fact) and vague conceptual notions such as culture and even more derivative, fuzzy and subjective notions of the potential equality of instance thereof (opine). This is why I spoke in generalities and placed "Japanese culture" in quotes, because it is a vague and popular term without a meaningful and precise definition.

Excellent. I never had a term for this. I used to just call it “riding the wave”. This gives the notion a bit more legitimacy, but also is a starting point to research more on the topic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com