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Comment by kpil | Hacker News Reader

I agree.

I actually like the hierarchical organisation, and I don't like the 10 year usability trend, particularly driven by Microsofts attempts to patch over their horrid structure with even worse workarounds.

The solution to learning my mother were to find her documents is not hiding the place 15 levels deep and having 10 symlinks to it.

Fast, unobtrusive indexing and a good structure is all that is needed. Humans organise and memorise things in hierarchies, and while categories is another helpful abstraction they tend to be confusing if they do not point to a fixed position in a hierarchy in my opinion.

You can also explore a hierarchy; Not so with a cloud of things connected to a bunch of tags.

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> Humans organise and memorise things in hierarchies,

Humans also track a lot of things based on spatial memory, which no OS since Mac Classic has even tried to make use of, which is a shame.

True, with the exemption of iOS spring board. It's a great spatial memory comeback and a testament to the easy of use of the model, even if it doesn't scale well when you get into the 100s of items.

How did Mac Classic make use of that?

In Mac Classic each folder you opened created a new window which remembered all of its settings for size, position on screen, scroll position, icon size/layout, etc. This window is an explicit and exclusive representation of that particular folder and attempting to open the same folder again does not create a new window, it simply shifts the focus to the already-open window. The change in Mac OS X towards a browser for navigating the filesystem hierarchy caused an active debate over spatial[0] vs. navigation (or browser)[1] file managers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_file_manager

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_manager#Navigational_file...

Ars did an amazing series of articles about the (IMO) missteps made in OS X, and presented a theoretical design that would satisfy both Mac Classic fans and fans of "browser-based" windowing systems.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2003/04/finder/2/

Any software developer interested in designing usable software should read and digest this. Alas, nobody working at Apple did, so I'm no longer an Apple customer.

Thank you for this! I vaguely alluded to this (active debate) in my comment but I had forgotten the source. I'm going to read through this now! :)

Very interesting, thank you.

The short answer is: stuff stayed where you put it. Every icon, every window, opened up exactly where you left it last time you saw it.

So you had the option of remembering "Excel is the icon below the Special menu" and you could be confident that the Excel icon would always be located below the Special menu, exactly where you put it.

One of the reasons I switched from OS X to Windows is that Apple threw that brilliant design in the garbage. Shame.

I wouldn't say no OS has tried, the windows 8 start screen was designed to exploit spatial memory for instance.

Project Xanadu had something like that. Of course, it is barely working.

You have to realize though that this software doesn't take away your heiracichal system, it just gives you another way to look at it. Recently I've been cleaning up my music library and I'm seeing some of the shortcomings of the current system. What do you do with a compilation album? Have a folder for each artist or put them all together, (Which would separate them from others works by the same artist)? iTunes or whatever media player you use will probably list them in both locations depending on how you sort or whatever. I find this to be a useful feature, why wouldn't you like to have the option to do that sort of thing from the command line?

That iTunes view is still a hierarchy, though. More accurately, it's still a DAG. The hierarchy is not the problem here, it's the rigidity of trying to put something in only one part of that hierarchy.

It's multiple, interwoven hierarchies, which you can look at by "seeing" a particular DAG (a subset of the actual graph).

You can see this twin representation conceptually as Artist->Album->Song and also as Compilation->Artist->Song, the latter being a small folder with symlinks to the actual song directly.

It's really just two different trees.

Spot on, for file system now it should not be a problem to have links in different places in hierarchy. You can have "favoriteSong.mp3" in catalogue with artist name and use links to put it in catalogue with "ultimate super songs". But I think people are not aware of possibilities.

Tags are still a DAG, too. I don't see what you're trying to prove here.

Tags are unordered sets that can be viewed in a DAG format if desired. Tag's themselves do not specify a DAG though.

> You have to realize though that this software doesn't take away your heiracichal system, it just gives you another way to look at it.

I think that this is extremely important. You mention iTunes, which does its best to pretend that there's no hierarchical file system underlying it. There is, of course, but—ugh, one look at it will make you long for a totally flat file structure.

I think that it's important that any hierarchical-file-system 'killer' actually not replace (or render meaningless), but only supplement, the often-useful hierarchical structure; and it looks like this tool does that.

(In case that looks like an argument, let me say explicitly that I am agreeing with you.)

>Humans organise and memorise things in hierarchies, ...

Well, sure, if things do have a hierarchical relationship, but a hierarchy is just one form of network. It fails for concurrent dependency problems, e.g.

Tags are a subset of hierarchies + symlinks. If you have a one level hierarchy, you have the equivalent of tags.

I'd argue that tags provide a more graph-like structure, of which a hierarchy (tree)[1] is just a subset. Symlinks provide an "escape-hatch" to hierarchical systems allowing objects to appear to be in more than one directory.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_(graph_theory)

How so? Unless you can tag tags, you can't represent a tree with them. If you can tag tags, you get an arbitrary graph, with all the problems that represents.

I don't think I've seen tagging systems that let me tag tags out in the wild.

You can create a DAG from Tagged objects if you use Set operations. The set of things with tag A includes things from other sets. Those sets form the next level in the hierarchy.

The tagged objects define the relationships between differing tags which allows you to define that arbitrary graph. The graph can be viewed as an effectively infinite depth tree if you wish to.

The 'path' in the tree can be represented as a tag. It's a simplistic way to go, but you can get pretty far with it to emulate a folder structure using tags.

> Humans organise and memorise things in hierarchies

Big claim. Proof?

Big proofs. Conceptual categorization is a big part of how we humans comprehend and analyze the world around us, and it relies on a hierarchy of defining attributes, from abstract model to concrete specimen:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_theory#Basic_level_c...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype#Cognitive_functions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_learning

Maybe less abstract: if you try to remember where your phone is, do you follow a pattern like "which room", "which coat/pants/desk", then "which pocket/drawer"?

I actually wnt to believe you because it accords with my own intuition but I don't trust my intuition on this!

Conceptual categorisation + language + ? is totally how we humans comprehend and analyze the world around us, granted. (The devil is in the details of course.) But I don't see how we can go from there to "it relies on a hierarchy of defining attributes"

I don't buy your example because the concepts in our heads seem to be organised in context-specific word bags, i.e. tags.

I think I would believe you if cognitive science discovered that tree-hierarchy navigation relied on built-in neuro-spatial machinery or something like that :)

I _want_ to believe you but I also want proper proof! :)

edit: thanks for the heads up on prototype theory, can't believe I'd forgotten about this. also, thanks for making me ponder more deeply about stereotypes.

Glad to be of (some) help :)

I'm not a developmental psychologist btw, just have an interest in cognitive development. The proof you're looking for would be more the field of cognitive neuroscience.

There definitely are graph-like connections between concepts all over the brain, I didn't mean to suggest that our brains work hierarchical only, to the exclusion of all other relations. As an example: if our brains were strictly hierarchical, we would be unable to see the similarity in colour between a grey table and a grey hare. I just meant to explain my thinking on how abstract thought is tied to a attribute/property hierarchy, not proclaim that I know how the brain works.

(edit: snipped on-topic content, best reserved for a separate post)

I wonder about this a lot.

File systems are arranged hierarchically. Fluke of development? Library catalogues are organised hierarchically. Lucky coincidence? Books themselves are laid out hierarchically. I see a pattern emerging, but is it a trick of the light?

Seems like we like to chunk and splay amorphous informational units into graph-like rooted structures. Maybe cuz of its flexibility?

For something we use all the time and something we do all the time language-use and conceptualisation are deeply mysterious.

We have all sorts of associations -- our brain is fundamentally an association engine. One kind of association is simplification/abstraction. This perhaps proves to be one of the most useful kinds of associations, because it helps us make decisions quickly without sifting through massive amounts of data.

I'd say it's fundamental, not any kind of mystery.

If language-use and conceptualisation are not any kind of mystery I'm sure you won't mind explaining how language acquisition works? Also, why does natural language grammar appear to be mildly context-sensitive and not context-free nor fully context-sensitive? Also, given the topic: why does the brain stereotype, and what's up with cognitive prototyping? Also, how does the brain associate the objects of conception with words? Also, how much of language's basic machinery is hard-wired? Also, how are lexicons formed? Also, is thought simply language or something else? Also, are the different languages backed by different conceptual schema?

Btw, Frege, following Hume has pointed out that abstraction is an equivalence relation: http://logic.uconn.edu/2015/01/21/reference-and-invariance-i... I wouldn't lump simplification and abstraction together, and characterising them both as associations feels wrong.

What I'm trying to say is that your time would be better spent in not correcting every instance of mild hyperbole on HN :)

And mine too. :)

Wow talk about waste of time, you jumped to a conclusion about what meant in a casual comment (you were way off, by the way, I didn't and wouldn't ever make the silly claim that language acquisition is a simple concept), and proceeded to assault us with a diarrhea of lingo meant to, what... prove how much you know about a topic? It comes off like a first year linguistics student trying to show off to his friends.

What I'm trying to say is that your time would be better spent in not correcting every instance of mild hyperbole

What was I correcting, exactly? I was giving a casual opinion. To call a casual, armchair hypothesis that differs from someone else's "correcting"... well let's just say you failed spectacularly at understanding human language patterns.

I see a pattern emerging, but is it a trick of the light?

I think it is fundamental. A hierarchy forms naturally from iterative steps of aggregation and differentiation: first, group all similar objects together; then, for each high-level group, look for differences within each group, and split the groups into smaller subgroups. Rinse and repeat until you've reached an acceptable number of items per group.

I read this as, humans with 8-24 years of western education forced on them tend to think this way.

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