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Comment by eieio | Hacker News Reader

Is there a good word for "obvious" that doesn't have negative connotations?

When I see something like this it makes me think about how a spreadsheet structure is "obvious" - but I mean it positively! It's a beautiful, intuitive, almost inevitable way to lay out data, and I'm delighted that folks came up with something like this so long ago.

I feel this way about a lot of my favorite posts on HN, whether they're a bit of history, a totally new invention, or something different entirely. And I certainly feel it here.

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There's a German word "naheliegend" (pronounced nuh-her-lee-guend), whose literal translation would be "lying nearby".

I think we typically use it as a mixture of "sensible", "seemingly natural" and "obvious" without that confrontational subtone.

I think plenty of other comments have made good suggestions but that this clearly takes the cake for me!

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that German has a great word for this, although I admit when I started reading your comment I expected it to be a compound word.

I quite like the literal translation too!

We have the same compound word in Norwegian, with same kind of meaning:

Nærliggende

> 2. som naturlig faller en i tanken ; som det er naturlig å gripe til

(Aside from also having a literal meaning of being in physical proximity.)

Translated:

“Which naturally comes to mind; which it is natural to resort to.”

https://naob.no/ordbok/n%C3%A6rliggende

This Norwegian word would not have naturally come to mind for me though, if it wasn’t for GP mentioning the German equivalent of it. It is not a word I usually use myself. But I do hear others use it now and then.

It is a compound word. Nahe (close by) liegend (lying).

That word sounds like you’re saying “near the ground”.

A similar English expression might be "low-hanging fruit", but again for some reason we've attached negative connotations to it. I don't know why English keeps doing that. It feels so cynical.

Or "right in front of your face". Though that's used with and without negative connotations.

I don't think "low hanging fruit" has negative connotations attached to it.

The only negative sentiment tangentially associated with it is that when it's exhausted, further progress slows down.

It's not a fault of the language, it's the culture. "Average" and "mediocre" both have negative connotations in vernacular use as well, even though they're normal and should be expected. If we expect excellence and world-shaking performance as the standard, good enough will not be good enough.

It's more like "nearby, on the ground".

Yeah, I think saying "near lying" or "close to lying" would be less confusing. Also that is actually the order in the German word also! Because it consists of 2 words written as 1.

In Afrikaans we have the (slightly old fashioned): Voor die hand liggend.

Something like: It is right in front of your hands.

Stemming from the equivalent Dutch “voor de hand liggend”.

And I would not have a negative connotation with it in the right context. (E.g “Een tabel is een voor de hand liggende structuur om data te representeren” - a table is an ‘obvious’ manner to represent data)

I think once someone wrote a list (a 1D array), it was pretty inevitable it would turn into a 2D array within a week or a month. But it took what, another 4000 years for people to start writing arrays of 3 dimensions or more? And then within a couple centuries we got tensors, and the arrays are too big to check.

> But it took what, another 4000 years for people to start writing arrays of 3 dimensions or more?

Paper is two-dimensional.

book is 3D

Trilogy is 4Dnine nineDnine depending where you pick it up

So? You can write arrays of whatever dimensions on paper, it's a matter of notation, not of the substrate.

This is the right answer.

I was just saying that pretty much no one ever did it (that I'm aware of) before a machine came along to read and write that notation. I might be wrong. I'd love to see an example of 3+d arrays written as musical notation or something from the 16th Century.

Column headers as well, as per modern convention, as opposed to row headers.

Usually we put "properties" as column headers while rows represent entities whose those properties are assigned or recorded.

It would be interesting to understand why it's not been the other way around or whether Sumerians used both orientations.

I'd imagine it's down to our convention of writing left to right, so more-related data points (such as properties of the same item) get arranged left to right.

A quick test to that hypothesis (which I'm too lazy to try to perform but offer to anyone who might be interested in looking or who might already know) would be looking at ancient Chinese table layouts. :)

the last col is the header. I see the use of row-span too! Something we are still struggling to figure out.

You said it already! “Intuitive”.

You can both be unintuitive at first and be obvious at the same time. Double entry accounting, for example.

It's obvious nowadays in the era of a sofa and Netflix, not 4000 years ago where 9 out of 10 new born kids die and those who survived generally didn't make it until 25 years old, and where the primary issue of people was what to eat the following day and in case no tribe attacks them in the middle of the night if they would survive to the bite of that scorpion.

   Almost half of all births ended in death before the age of 5, greatly lowering the average.

  When infant mortality is removed, evidence seem to show averages of life expectancy for 3000 years ago to be around 52, give or take 15 years.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2625386/

That's a lot of assumptions about life 4000 years ago when the article provides evidence of someone doing admin work instead of worrying about food, "tribe" attacks and scorpion bites.

When you're cities of 20-40k people 4000 years ago, there's quite a bit of admin work that has to be done - it's not all small farmer villages or hunter-gatherers. Ancient Sumeria was quite advanced.

You make the dystopian world we live in sounds like a disney utopia. Which is very nice.

>and those who survived generally didn't make it until 25 years old

That's a myth.

I had the thought that the columns served different levels of literacy - that there is a hierarchy of competence in the columns themselves, or at least that each column could be assigned to a different person for action.

For example, the purpose of the columns containing sums could be the assignment to an individual (or eventual role) which is responsible exclusively for the paying-out of the sums indicated - whereas the prior columns were to be used by roles responsible for setting the amounts to be paid, and a role perhaps for assaying the land/works.

Each column could be for an individual role, and thus the table indicates not only figures and amounts, but also organizational structure.

If one flows from left to right, one can see different identities involved in filling in the cells, eventually terminating in the actual recipients of the funds being distributed.

An artist once told me some people enjoy Making Contact with Beauty. In the Simplest of things. And that can become a goal or a guiding philosophy.

It's like when you look at a facial expression in a frame of Calvin & Hobbes or Tintin or Miyazaki it is extremely SIMPLE.

The fewest of dots, dashes and squiggles basically. Change them even a little and you get total shit.

It captures Reality in such a fantastic way, exciting the exact same neurons in your head that something real does, that people have to come up with words for it like - Beauty.

My uncle, who was a top UK lawyer but not really into tech, basically reinvented a spreadsheet on paper spread over his office floor, while working on a hige planning case. Yes, I think that basic structure will pop out of a number of problem types, eg Gaussian elimination.

And yet when I got bored during the COVID lockdown and decided to analyse the published data sets against infection spreading models such as SIR, to my horror I discovered that every published data set had something Stupid about it with a capital S. Most commonly it was transposed data, published with each day's data in columns instead of rows.

I remember one official announcement from a state government health department that was investing significant money into developing a "scalable solution" because... they hit the 16K Excel maximum column count. Of course, they could have simply put their data into rows and "scaled" their existing solution to 1M data points, but they'd much rather pay Deloitte, Accenture, or whomever a couple of million dollars for a real enterprise system instead.

Next time I come across idiocy like this, I'm going refer back to this article and point to the four thousand year old tablet and say: "Those people got it! They understood how to do this! Why haven't you caught up to technology that was around before widespread adoption of the wheel!?"

The problem is mostly that some structure that looks good at start, looks bad after a while of using.

Maybe the first data was on postit notes. As the pandamic kept returning in waves, they thought they could use data in excel with new dates per row. Then new beta, delta,... variants emerged and they ran out of horizontal screen real estate.

Having worked a lot with columnar data, I often have to tell the object oriented crowd that "It's the rows and columns, stupid!".

(And that last sentence was a paraphrase. They are far from stupid, just differently wired).

I think managers should be emboldened to do that too. They often work out their solutions in Excel. And then the developers turn those fine rows and columns into an object oriented soup.

It is indeed! But it fails when you need more dimensionality.

The problem is my rows typically don't have the same columns.

A 'userCreated' row has 10 columns (for now), but a 'userDeleted' row overlaps on only two of those (let's say 'Datetime' and 'userId').

And userBanned brings in a new column 'reason' which isn't in the schema, so I have to store it in some catch-all json 'data' column which kills my db's size & performance.

I persevere with the format, but always wish we were using the right tool for the job (nosql).

As I started out in a time when you had to coin your own format for everything I passionately hate it when the data has to facilitate to the tool. I'm no db wizard so I feel terrible using the json cell unsure about the level of sin involved. I also adopted comma separated fields. Don't tell anyone

I'm not a native English speaker, but could "natural" be appropriate for this context?

How about self-evident?

Innate, instinctive, intuitive, natural, automatic. I don’t think obvious is a bad word though.

Descartes did not invent x-y coordinates until the 1600s, yet a table of columns and rows is totally natural and emergent given a two-dimensional recordkeeping medium

I'm never not going to be gobsmacked that Euclid didn't ever try using a coordinate grid as a tool. 8I

emergent? natural? a 2D surface has two orthogonal directions, so if you're using lines, so your choices are either grid, slanted grid, or godawful mess

Carcinization. All software inevitably evolves into an Excel that can read email given a long enough timeline.

Many modern people do not understand spreadsheets.

Hmm, and 2D sort-into-piles is done even in kindergarten. Including one axis being ordered. Especially 2x2 sorts.

Oddly, ordering both axes is very rare - size-vs-color yes, and color-vs-numberOfHoles, but not size-vs-numberOfHoles. Which was a puzzle when considering xkcd-ish discrete Ashby charts for K.

Sort-within-cell is also uncommon.

“Natural”

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