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Comment by cityzen | Hacker News Reader

Kind of off topic but when the word "hydration" become a technology term? I see it all over and it's never really made sense to me. The definition is specific to fluid:

1 : to cause to take up or combine with water or the elements of water 2 : to supply with ample fluid or moisture

Maybe I'm old school but the word "populate" makes a lot more sense than hydrate when talking about data.

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think powdered milk. You hydrate it by adding water.

Same idea, only for objects. You hydrate them by adding data.

The term has been used for probably 20+ years.

There's an interesting correspondence with water and data going even further back than that in the English language, think about how often you hear variations on "learning through osmosis" or "hopefully I will pick that up through osmosis". Osmosis is specifically diffusion of water. It's fascinating that so many speakers of English refer to it as "learning through osmosis" rather than the more accurate and less water-centric "diffusive learning".

I've no idea of the etymology for this or why this conflation is surprisingly so deep in contemporary English culture, I've just been fascinated by it for a long time.

Not sure diffusion is really more accurate than osmosis. It does need to diffuse across the brain membrane, after all ;)

Well, one can assume the eyeballs are akin to an aqueous membrane, but the human ears generally should be non-aqueous for best results. ;)

This threw me straight back to secondary school, we had a teacher with a fearsome reputation who was berating a class of mine for not revising efficiently, he said "you can't just open your book and learn by osmosis" and some very brave kid piped up with "it's not osmosis sir, that's the movement of water across a membrane. We'd be learning by diffusion, not osmosis". At the very least, this proved we'd been paying attention in biology!

Over 10 years ago with various ORMs.

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