Live data from Hacker News

Your File System Is Already A Graph Database

rumproarious.com

21–30 of 85 posts

Re: Your File System Is Already A Graph Database

#21
I can see over engineering when I look at one. And premature optimization.

Anyway, why care how the data is stored? You need a catalog. You need an index. You need automation. Helps keeping order and helps with inevitable changes and flips and pivots and whims and trends and moods and backups and restoration and snapshots and history and versioning and moon travels and collaboration and compatibility and long summer evening walks and portability.

Re: Your File System Is Already A Graph Database

#23

Using the same logic, a key/value database is also a graph database? Isn’t the biggest benefit of graph databases the indexing and additional query constructs they support, like shortest path finding and whatnot?

Yes, the author is likely unaware of this. They see markdown files with links, so a graph and the set of those files, so a "database".

https://neo4j.com/docs/graph-data-science/current/algorithms...

Re: Your File System Is Already A Graph Database

#24
post #23

Using the same logic, a key/value database is also a graph database? Isn’t the biggest benefit of graph databases the indexing and additional query constructs they support, like shortest path finding and whatnot?

Yes, the author is likely unaware of this. They see markdown files with links, so a graph and the set of those files, so a "database". https://neo4j.com/docs/graph-data-science/current/algorithms...

His argument is that the LLM is the query engine. By that logic you can approximate anything since LLMs can.

Re: Your File System Is Already A Graph Database

#25
post #8

I can't remember how many file structures I've already tried... LLMs seem to be a great help here. Also used CC to organize my messy harddrive. Now just need to find a good way to maintain the order...

> Also used CC to organize my messy harddrive. Do you still have your prompt by chance, and willing to share it? I took a stab at this and it didn't want to make much change. I think I need to be more specific but am not sure how to do that in a general way

I don't have the exact prompt anymore, but it was very lean. I first asked to do an assessment: "Review the content of the whole folder structure. I want you to assess it, and suggest a better setup and structure based on its content. Don't change anything yet, just assess"

and then worked from there, giving feedback on the proposed folder structure, until I was happy

Re: Your File System Is Already A Graph Database

#26
post #20
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it has hard or soft links, its a proper graph.

On Linux at least, hard links can't be made to directories, except for the magic . and .. links. So this only allows for a DAG. Symbolic links can form a graph, and you can process them as needed using readlink etc. to traverse the graph, but they'll still be considered broken if they form a cycle.

Considered broken by what?

Re: Your File System Is Already A Graph Database

#27
post #24
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the author is likely unaware of this. They see markdown files with links, so a graph and the set of those files, so a "database". https://neo4j.com/docs/graph-data-science/current/algorithms...

His argument is that the LLM is the query engine. By that logic you can approximate anything since LLMs can.

Indeed, what is the point of links/edges when the llm can figure out the relations by itself?

Re: Your File System Is Already A Graph Database

#28
post #23

Using the same logic, a key/value database is also a graph database? Isn’t the biggest benefit of graph databases the indexing and additional query constructs they support, like shortest path finding and whatnot?

Yes, the author is likely unaware of this. They see markdown files with links, so a graph and the set of those files, so a "database". https://neo4j.com/docs/graph-data-science/current/algorithms...

Neo4j looooooves the "if you think about it, everything is graphs!" marketing maneuver. They (their marketing department) were the very first thing I thought of when I read this headline.

Re: Your File System Is Already A Graph Database

#29

Using the same logic, a key/value database is also a graph database? Isn’t the biggest benefit of graph databases the indexing and additional query constructs they support, like shortest path finding and whatnot?

I think the confusion stems from the fact that we call a database what is really a database management system.
Post reply on HN