Hacker News Reader

Comment by n0us | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought the culture and heritage surrounding bonsai is amazing. I was in a local bonsai club when I was younger and the patience required to produce a really great tree is something to be respected. Sometimes the trees will just die for no discernible reason and you just have to start over after months or years of work. Some of the oldest trees are estimated to be over 1000 years old and have been passed through generations of care takers.

View on HN

I always compare software engineering to bonsai. To be happy doing either for a long time, you need to enjoy the work of becoming a craftsman for its own sake -- the things you build or cultivate can die quickly and for no good reason, and all that remains is the appreciation for the work you put in. Whenever someone asks for a fifth round of changes for a button's color, I think about a Japanese monk raking gravel. When the Tibetan monks blow away their mandala after weeks of painstaking work, I see startup pivots and acquihires.

That's a really interesting analogy. I struggle with the idea of working so hard on things that feel pointless and ephemeral, and that's a nice way to think about it.

I'm not sure that's the point of a mandala, but it's definitely an interesting idea to ponder.

The 'point' of mandala is everything is temporary.

Something might last thousand years or a billion, but it's still going to end.

Thanks for this. Recently I've been getting frustrated by some code. Your message helped me sort it out :-)

Interestingly, when I was a child I saw some artists making chalk drawings on the side walk outside of a church. It started raining, slowly ruining the drawings. The artists didn't budge, but kept on drawing until they were finished. They didn't care about the drawing (the thing), only the drawing (the action). Since then I've tried to live my life that way, but sometimes it is hard to remember.

I know the feeling, one of my favourite tree just died in spring; it was all fine during the winter, and just died like that. 5 years of work, and p00f!

Needs more torture. You were too easy on it.

I too am fascinated with bonsai. It's not only aesthetically pleasing, but also really interesting from a purely biological perspective.

I had a mentor of sorts who was this retired engineer who went to MIT and he gave me the advice that bonsai is one half art, one half biology, one half philosophy. This adds up to over 100% obviously but the point was that to be good at bonsai you needed to have at least two of those things down pat. The biology is interesting, (just kind of stream of thought here) although I was pretty young at the time I remember there being a great deal of interest in soil mixes, and special types of fertilizer which allow the tree to be healthy while also staying small. I was also taught to think of the root structure as a mirror of the visible part of the tree, and in some ways more important than the parts that you typically see. You can recover a tree from pruning its branches but if you over prune the roots it will likely die, similarly you can't let the roots overgrow because they will get over crowded in the small pots. Also certain species of tree with different root structures required differently shaped pots. Grafts were common, sometimes you might desire a tree that does not grow well in pots but you could achieve the same thing by grafting a branch of one species onto the root stock of another but this was difficult to do because you can end up with ugly scars or a contrast between the two types of bark. Another thing I remember being interesting is that some fruiting trees will produce miniature fruits, or miniature flowers.

I've seen the miniature fruit trees. They gave their all to crank out a single mini fruit which wasn't so mini compared to the bonsai.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com