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Comment by chalcolithic | Hacker News Reader

How much would you pay for a program that would help you do 2 way more effectively than just by querying it?

That depends on how easily I could compile it, and how much more effective it would be than querying. At the moment I can't come up with anything better than queries.

I'm willing to part with some money to have someone implement it for me if I see there's demand.

Queries kind of suck when it comes hierarchy, do they? And you sure have some folder hierarchy, even if you're not happy about it?

I identify the hierarchy as the source of my problems. I don't need hierarchy, and when I use it, it's because that's the one tool I have. There's no hierarchy between time and place, and I shouldn't be forced to establish it.

There might be some hierarchy between tags: PhD/laser experiment, PhD/dissertation, but there's rarely a need for it to be more than 1-2 levels deep, so I prefer to suffer the pains of inadequate hierarchy rather than inadequate queries. Or at least I would if I could try it out.

I was mostly referring to the fact that filesystem kind of enforces hierarchy, so you have it even if you dislike it. When I'm sorting out the mess that is my hard drive I defenitely value information about hierarchy overlap (due to (incomplete) copies), but I still have not found a tool that would help me an I can't imagine a query language that would be helpful.

I'm not sure about a file system enforcing hierarchy. Historically, they didn't even support directories at first.

Which use cases would a query language fail to help with?

Hierarchy is the only tool it gives, you can't really have one dir with all your files, unless there's very few of them.

My typical scenario is multiple copies of something in progress, like traveling with friends, copying photos to each other phones on the way and then downloading the whole mess to one computer. Query language would give me precise information for every file but it's overwhelming.

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