Hacker News Reader

What I don't understand is: why use numbers?

Using your example, you could describe the insurance for your Citron as 21.2.8. Or, you could call it automobiles.citron.insurance. Which looks a lot like automobiles/citron/insurance. How is this any different from just using a folder structure?

View on HN

I guess the key difference is the amount of branches that you can make at any given level.

Calling a folder citron instead of 2, gives room to have N amount of folders at that level instead of just 10, which I think is the constrain that made this system manageable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com