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Comment by loughnane | Hacker News Reader

My nephew, a sharp kid who started his freshman year at college in September, saw me working on my computer a year ago.

He asked what I was doing and I said, “making a website”. He asked, reasonably, how do you do that?

Not wanting to get into details I said “it’s just writing some files that chrome can then read”. He asked, “what’s a file”?

I told him, but I was floored. He’s not every kid, but it’s had me thinking about how younger folks (I’m 38) will see computers.

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I’m not sure kids, especially recently born ones will ‘see’ computers. In the same way that most people don’t ‘see’ the abundant ressources around us. Air, water taps, power, cars, internet etc. These things will always have been there. Most children’s have a rectangle with multiple circles on it pointing at them from their first hour on earth.

Has he never copied a file to a usb stick? Or emailed an attachment? I don’t understand how this is possible.

If your whole computer life is using Safari or clicking apps, then yes, you might not ever see a "file".

Phone and Chromebook. Kids through highschool might never see anything else. Assignments are in google drive, etc.

Gdrive still has a concept of files and directories. It is kind of primitive in that way.

It does, but using it is really optional. It works equally well if you leave everything in the default Drive directory and use search to find whatever you need.

If you're not used to thinking in terms of files, it just looks like a list of your most recent documents, with a search bar to find anything else.

I just read through the circa 2010 retrospective on how the Drive team tried to come up with their brand. 99% of the concepts were very based on the traditional physical idioms of files, mechanical hard disks, etc. iCloud was released midway through the project and so then they started making “cloud file” and “cloud disk” concepts. It was nearly an accident they ended up with an abstract shape like Chrome. But ultimately Google Drive icon has stood the test of time while files and disks have faded in to history.

Kids (almost) never use Drive. They access everything though apps like Doc, Sheets, etc.

Source: was until recently a classroom teacher for 7-10 year olds.

I can't speak for iPhones, but Android has a file system and the ability to create directories. I think it would be weird if Apple products didn't have that as well, even if it's a bit hidden. I don't have any form of evidence to back this up, but I think that this has more to do with apps, not the device that kids use. Having everything be an app makes it seem like you have multiple independent things on your device, and the device itself is nothing more than a way to connect to those apps.

I gather most of his use was on his phone and a school-issued chromebook

Course they have. But to them they see it as sharing the state of the app rather than saving and loading data.

Kids don't really use email these days, or usb sticks. They share more than we ever did, but directly via apps or mobile which doesn't work with "files". It seems reasonable in this case the thing missing is the abstraction of a "file". Think of how your phone works, you share pictures, video, text, posts, etc. but never files. Sharing to email is my phone's 5th or 6th priority option. It comes after a boatload of social media options, messaging, online storage, even some sort of AWS application I've never even launched.

I can answer for my kids. Everything they do is in the cloud and accessible on any device. I'm not sure they'd understand why anyone would want a thumb drive.

As for attachments on emails, they don't (even for a 100% online highschool). To turn in a paper they can just hit "share" and select their teacher.

Files and filesystems are almost dead to them. There is a little hope... My son googled to learn why a game was going slow and answers indicated he should delete the temp files. That was his first experience needing the file explorer.

As someone who grew up with DOS and turned in CS homework on a floppy disk, it is almost hard to watch.

The death of the floppy disk has been nice to watch though.

We'd better rectify that. The future we're headed to where everyone is a slave to several massive IT corps is not one we should wish on anyone.

(Cue Doctorow links to enshittification and war on general purpose computering.)

I haven't used a USB stick in years as a tech person and virtually all my day to day document processing is in the cloud. It wouldn't surprise me if the person in question does know what a file is, but doesn't work with them enough as files to really get it.

It’s probably my paranoia but I assume something will go wrong with the network at the conference where I’m presenting. I usually have multiple types of backups.

K12 CS Framework only mentions "file" 4 times: https://k12cs.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/K%E2%80%9312-CS...

Computer file: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_file

File system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system

Plenty of bright people don't understand the first thing about computers, even in the generations that came before Gen Z. It just means their calling is potentially in something else. It is possible that the majority of techie youngsters are so used to the abstractions around dealing with filesystems on modern technology that files and filesystems elude them. It's also possibly your nephew is just sharp in another area that only requires understanding how to open and use a web browser, and that plenty of other youths exist with similar cultures around computers as we had growing up.

Then again, a Gen Z software developer at the company I work at was confused on how to download a torrent (not that it matters but the contents of the torrent were legal.) That was at least a bit of a shock for me, as it's difficult for me to imagine someone getting into tech without having gone through the usual piracy phase (that phase lasting shorter or longer depending on the person.)

The concept of a file itself is pretty interesting in itself though, as this buffer that lives on disk and is referenced to indirectly. In Linux, everything is a file. In Emacs, everything is a buffer, and then maybe a file.

Sure, the concept of file itself is an abstraction.

It's a whole different thing to use an abstraction in order to make something understandable and to just handwave everything technical about it. It's not just a different thing.

What is he studying? I feel like a lot of older people in non technical fields, even if they work with files, could not reason through exactly how to define a file.

Went to a trade high school, the usual classes but a focus on carpentry.

Everything is a file!

You're a file.

I’m a file. You’re a file. Everything is a file!

What is your definition of a file?

Does it include bundles of files?

What metadata does it include?

Can it exist in more than one place? When a file is opened, is the file what is in processor and cache/RAM or what gets serialized to some persistent media?

Metaphorically, is a file a sheet of paper or folded tan cardstock that holds many sheets of paper?

Is a file unitary or can it contain other files? Is a directory a file? Is a link? Is a device a file?

I mean, a file is an abstraction of several of the choices you are asking about in these questions, and different people will answer different things. ps. I've worked on filesystem drivers...

Ok, can you "reason through exactly how to define a file?"

Is defining something as an "abstraction" the same as saying you can't provide a definition?

Since you are a driver worker, do you consider something a file before it is written to a filesystem?

I read you as needlessly combative here, getting far from the points made. Commenter said they told a kid that websites are just a collection of files, kid replied "what's a file?", and I chimed in that that's not so strange, because even people who work with them might have a hard time nailing down a definition. None of this is incompatible with your soap box, but you're writing as if we disagree.

This reminds me of when I took an Intro to Programming with C++ course at a community college almost 10 years ago. There weren’t any basic computer usage prerequisites for this course. So I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised that at least one classmate did not know how to locate the source code file they created for their Hello World task in the first lecture.

I keep hearing about how the #1 profession every kid wants to be is YouTuber or influencer or something like that. But don't these professionals rely on high-end graphics/audio/video editing software to produce polished videos? Doesn't all of that require a high degree of computer skills, including using files?

Plenty of tools are popping up in this space. This seems like a growing market.

Sure, but if they reach that level or have some business acumen, they may just pay other people to deal with the video production and files.

Non-IT parents think their kids "are good with computers" because they can tap the next video on YT.

IT parents show their kids what an OS is, what a File Explorer is, etc. Perhaps it's useless, but it sheds a light on that's behind those curtains, and kids start understanding the mechanics of 'stuff'.

I totally relate to this, but from the exact opposite perspective. I'm old-school, everything is a "file" to me. It's still weird to me that modern tools have abstracted away from "files" to just data. I'm not saying it's bad, it's just so different than how I came up.

A workmate (I do labouring and was doing traffic control that day) brought her teenage son a PS5. I don't know why parents would purchase consoles for their children as you don't learn any transferable skills (I guess you could be a streamer).

I'm not saying being a sadist and give the kid a second hand laptop with *BSD because then the kid will want nothing to do with computers, especially if the laptop is cheap and doesn't have a working driver support (This is where Linux is better from my personal experience).

This is also why I like HTML, I got a free internet CD with Netscape Navigator in 1996 when I was 12 and the three working examples (two with Netscape Navigator and one was a html email with Netscape Mail and News client) I had, I was able to play around with and create and learn basic HTML until I got a modem in 1998.

> I don't know why parents would purchase consoles for their children as you don't learn any transferable skills

It's plausible that parents may just want their children to enjoy some leisure? To not feel like every experience in childhood should be preparation for labour?

As a child, I was disappointed when I got a BBC B instead of a Megadrive. But I definitely learned more, and some of my leisure time was programming in BBC Basic.

Weren’t there like 10 years between the BBC and the Megadrive?

Yup. It was a very old computer for the time. You should've seen our cars.

Parent comment has big “alpha grindset” energy. Like they hadn’t considered the concept of “toys”.

In my own anecdotal experience, if you are a computer gamer, you miss out on all the "console exclusive" stuff. Stuff like Gran Tourismo or the latest Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy or whatever. I can't really remember. Then when it is a game everyone plays, it tends to be something where the console gamers can't play with the PC gamers so it's like

"Hey I just got the new counterstrike!"

"Oh that's awesome! I have that too! We should play sometime!"

"Yea what's your PS5 handle?"

"My what?"

"You don't have a PS5?"

"Nah I have a PC"

and yea.....

That is my anecdotal experience though, and it was always bolstered by the benefits of PC gaming - cheaper games, ample mods, lots of sales, and the biggest game library of any platform. Plus better performance. And I could text chat on my keyboard while playing Quake 3 back then haha. Sadly text chat in games has died off as an art, in favor of voice chat and all the problems voice chat comes with. lol.

Edit: And of course, the PC is a tool, the game console is just a dumb appliance.

Well it plays all ways. PC misses out on the console exclusives, consoles miss out on the PC exclusives, consoles themselves have different exclusives and don't interop. For people getting into gaming when they're young, a big influence is probably what their friend group is playing on, which in turn is probably inspired by whatever their parents decide to let them on. That or whatever games is latest hotness.

When I was young Minecraft forcefully evangelized my friend group, which had previously been more nintendo/xbox, into PC gamers. The origins of a lot of my current interests and career go back to the initial questions of: Why is minecraft running at low FPS? How do I set up a minecraft server? It's a little different nowadays, when some of the biggest multiplayer titles are cross-platform.

Moral of the story: make friends with PC nerds.

I never had much time for consoles and I don’t feel like I missed out on much. Popular games come and go. The joy of doing whatever I can imagine with my PC is more than enough consolation.

There are many people in tech industry who began to learn about coding precisely because of video games. Age of Empires II was essentially the first gateway to my career.

It was my gateway to a lifelong love of history and cultures.

> you don't learn any transferable skills

Actually, playing video games is an activity that let you practice real-time thinking. Other activities with real-time thinking include music instruments, sports and social interactions. By real-time thinking, I mean an activity that requires you to think and act within short timelapses. It appears also that activities involving real-time thinking can be quite fun, and few course in schools involve real-time thinking.

Now, learning new languages like html or how to fine-tune LLM can be quite fun. Learning how to draw nice pictures, or how to write nice books can be quite fun too. It's nice to let children explore different activities (or free internet CD if we speak about 1996) so that they can find the ones that resonate with their inner motivations.

I also learned HTML in 1996 (when I was also 12), in part from a cover story in I wanna say PC Magazine. I had a modem and had access to an unlimited AOL account thanks to my school’s computer lab teacher not doing a great job of hiding the password for the account (she also trusted me and my best friend quite a bit…trust we only abused insofar as we stole AOL from the county, back when it was still hourly and not unlimited for everyone), but it’s a similar story.

But you know what got me interested in computers to begin with? My Super Nintendo (and I guess my NES before that). So I rebuke the idea that video game consoles don’t teach transferable skills (what the fuck that is supposed to mean) and that they don’t unlock wonder and excitement about technology in lots and lots of people, especially kids.

Has he never filed paper in a filing cabinet?

Our abstractions are out of date.

I managed my own file system by writing down tape counter numbers on the cardboard cover of the cassette tape.

It’s ok, lots of “normal” folks today don’t really know what a file is either. They just know it’s an icon you can drag around.

The kid at least asks questions!

perhaps writing the -apps, and -data, for the site, might have more signifigant meaning [despite not being entirely correct] relating to a mobile context.

I think your nephew is the exception, not the rule.

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