Computer Files Are Going Extinct • Hacker News Board

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#331

Post by jkp56 » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 12:52 AM UTC

the_pwner224 wrote: post #153

jkp56 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'd call this karma, I think. On the one hand these big corps create siloed software environments that not only take all control away from users, but also remove the necessity to think. From their pov, users are as dumb as rocks and should stay at that level. At the same time the same corps cry about the lack of supply of new engineers and pretend to promote CS in college (by giving out ipads and watching a colorful…

> pretend to promote CS in college Potentially because that means in 5-20 years they'll have a much bigger pool of labor available? They've already done illegal market-manipulating collusion which resulted in billions of dollars of salaries not being paid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666545 ; in the end they got hit with fines for a few million bucks and some developers got a paycheck for a few thousand bu…

What I meant is these corps really want to increase the workforce and then cut the salaries, but at the same time they want to profit from dumb users who are easy to rip off. But the corps can't get both.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#332

Post by Zanni » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 12:54 AM UTC

jimktrains2 wrote: post #283

Zanni wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little of both, maybe. In defense of your position, though, I agree that zip files are an odd choice. Why not bundle everything into a single document, a Word file or a PDF?

How do you bundle a spreadsheet into a PDF? Even embedded into word is a lot less usable and runs the risk of linking to the document and not embedding.

Depends on what you're planning to do with the spreadsheet. If it's display only, it's easy to bundle into a PDF or Word doc. If you need to interact with it, sure, standalone is better. But this the first case is something I deal with all the time. If I'm looking at financial statements for a board meeting, I really don't need a live spreadsheet, and it's massively more convenient to have it bundled in with the agenda, minutes, reports, etc.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#333

Post by ghaff » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 12:55 AM UTC

pvaldes wrote: post #324

fl0under wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in my early twenties and I would expect none of my peers during high school would have difficulty zipping up some files. Perhaps I am just in that brief period of time where more people than just the nerds knew the basics of the filesystem.

There are several layers in this problem. To be able to zip files like a pro is great, but maybe those people shouldn't be doing it when they can use bzip2, gzip or xz instead that perform better.

99% of the time who cares about the performance or the program. If I need to create a compressed archive of a bunch of files for some one off purpose I’ll use whatever is most obvious and easiest on whatever system I’m using.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#334

Post by ghaff » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 1:03 AM UTC

jacobolus wrote: post #229

unqueued wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but what if you are grading papers, do you want to mark up bitmaps? People need to learn that there is more than one way to do something.

> if you are grading papers do you want to mark up bitmaps? Why not? Get a tablet with a stylus and draw your commentary directly on the image. That is the way teachers have always marked up student work, just now without a paper copy or a physical red pen. Trying to mark up documents using MS Word or Google Docs or whatever is a horrible experience in comparison.

Making hand annotation with a digital pencil more seamlessly integrated with typed and otherwise native digital docs actually seems like a great direction to be moving in. Things are moving there to a degree but it’s still hard to shift back and forth between modes.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#335

Post by detaro » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 1:04 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #304

jacobolus wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Have you ever graded written papers? Have you ever seen a paper graded by a good teacher? We’re not talking about pages of written commentary here. The most “effective and efficient” approach involves circling words or phrases, underlining sentences, writing arrows from one part to another, scribbling some wavy lines in the margin, writing a few words here or there, ... There is a very limited amount of time av…

"Effective and efficient"? Or just lazy but fast?

the former. Even some professional editors prefer pen/stylus for some review stages.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#336

Post by rootsudo » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 1:14 AM UTC

unqueued wrote: post #80

cproctor wrote: post #74

To a computer science teacher, this feels like trying to walk up a down escalator. First-year CS students (middle school or high school) with experience using Apple products don't have a concept of a filesystem. The shift to auto-saving documents also corrodes the intuition that files get stored on disk in some non-magical way. In the same way that it's now easier to teach networking and graph theory because youth ex…

I have a very similar anecdote. I had a long conversation with a friend who is a high school science teacher. She told me that computer literacy has plummeted in the last ten years. She has her students go into the field and collect data in the form of photos, spreadsheets, and typed reports. She wants students to bundle these files in zip files, and email them to her. Students have no idea how to do this. Some of th…

These are both interesting insights and I, am, somehow more, selfishly surprised and amused that my career isn't going away because of increasing literacy but because user experience on few devices made it so.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#337

Post by Const-me » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 1:28 AM UTC

TuringTest wrote: post #288

Felz wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real answer is actually the same in both cases: the bits (atoms) get used for something else. Although bones can linger for quite a while, not sure if there's a file parallel for that.

Sure there's a parallel. The bits are still there, in the same place and same order, just there's no longer an index to find and use them, so they're not "alive". And they remain in the same place until the file space they occupy is reclaimed by the OS and rewritten with new content.

The most funny thing happens with SSDs. Even when same block is reclaimed and overwritten by OS, it very rarely overwrites the bits in NAND flash, due to the wear leveling implemented in SSD controller chip. When the actual bits are destroyed is unpredictable, probably that's why some vendors have hardware encryption there.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#338

Post by seabird » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 1:37 AM UTC

anderspitman wrote: post #296

seabird wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMB shares or the like are pretty much universal in such a situation. I generally tend toward making something available on a file share and emailing a link, but because of permissions and access controls, email is generally easier, especially for transient files that really don't need to be permanently saved. Never once have I used Dropbox or Google Drive in such a situation, even with very small companies.

What hiccups do you run into in terms of permissions with sending an "anyone with link can view" link over email? Asking because I'm working on a competing technology and want to get the UX right.

What I'm doing is not "anyone with link can view", it's uploading the file in question to an SMB (or equivalent) share and sending the location of that. If the user in question doesn't have permissions for my department's share, they can't access it.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#339

Post by goatlover » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 1:50 AM UTC

eecc wrote: post #108

cproctor wrote: post #74

To a computer science teacher, this feels like trying to walk up a down escalator. First-year CS students (middle school or high school) with experience using Apple products don't have a concept of a filesystem. The shift to auto-saving documents also corrodes the intuition that files get stored on disk in some non-magical way. In the same way that it's now easier to teach networking and graph theory because youth ex…

Frankly, we’ve been fantasizing of moving away from the file-system-as-tree abstraction since forever, wanting to embrace a metadata rich database approach. Can’t happen soon enough imho

Wasn't that the way Google Docs was originally implemented, but everyone preferred having it organized more like a file system, so Google Drive has a folder structure.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#340

Post by jimktrains2 » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 2:03 AM UTC

Zanni wrote: post #332

jimktrains2 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you bundle a spreadsheet into a PDF? Even embedded into word is a lot less usable and runs the risk of linking to the document and not embedding.

Depends on what you're planning to do with the spreadsheet. If it's display only, it's easy to bundle into a PDF or Word doc. If you need to interact with it, sure, standalone is better. But this the first case is something I deal with all the time. If I'm looking at financial statements for a board meeting, I really don't need a live spreadsheet, and it's massively more convenient to have it bundled in with the agen…

On the flip side, I do public transit advocacy, and having spreadsheets of the monthly data reported to the board, it would be so much better than ocr/text extraction and manual editing.