I wonder whether the author deliberately avoided ontology? That's what comes to mind when I read this. The age-old debate between taxonomy and ontology.
The Third Hard Problem
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Re: The Third Hard Problem
#12The problem with trees is that the are a dimensional reduction, an aggregation; taking a problem without directionality and applying a useful/functional hierarchy.
And that's a problem because Aggregability is NP-Hard: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1165555.1165556
So a tree is a way to take a high dimensionality graph and make it usefully lower dimensionality, but, given the aforementioned proof, that reduction is going to go from being a lossless compression to a heuristic. So any interesting problem (at least, any problem interesting to me) is only going to be aided (read: not solved exhaustively) by that hierarchy.
I'm okay with this. Being okay with this has been one of the most freeing things over the last 20 years of my career. Accept inaccuracy, and find usefulness in your data structures.
Re: The Third Hard Problem
#13I thought the two hard problems were naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors?
At least the title “The Third Hard Problem” is still appropriate regardless of whether you get the joke right.
Re: The Third Hard Problem
#14One nice tool for analyzing maps as a tree is as a dominator trees. I wrote a bit about it here: https://neugierig.org/software/blog/2023/07/dominator.html
Re: The Third Hard Problem
#15Putting object into trees is basically a caching problem.
Re: The Third Hard Problem
#16[deleted]
Re: The Third Hard Problem
#17Re: The Third Hard Problem
#18Putting object into trees is basically a caching problem.
I was thinking it's a naming problem haha, a file path can be seen as a global/fully-qualified name really.
Re: The Third Hard Problem
#19The first chapter of this waves away the fact that hierarchical filesystems are now useless, but it is still a fact. There is no more reason to organize your files than there is to drive around in a chariot. It is hard to map one domain to the other, but it is also not necessary. With AI indexing and recall it's less necessary than it has ever been.
Re: The Third Hard Problem
#20The first chapter of this waves away the fact that hierarchical filesystems are now useless, but it is still a fact. There is no more reason to organize your files than there is to drive around in a chariot. It is hard to map one domain to the other, but it is also not necessary. With AI indexing and recall it's less necessary than it has ever been.
This seems optimistic.