5 ms·

Kind of funny that this is like some strange new concept... Having a web server and putting your stuff on it.

by jdjdjdjdjd 3mo ago

bayindirh 3mo ago
Considering many people doesn't know what a file is, keeping the spirit alive is important, I think.
- al_borland 3mo ago
  The lack of basic computer knowledge I’ve seen from developers is terrifying.
  - cogman10 3mo ago
    It's almost inspiring how far someone can get without understanding really basic stuff about how an operating system operates.
    - assimpleaspossi 3mo ago
      > inspiring You spelled "frightening" wrong.
      - Levitz 3mo ago
        It's a complex feeling, really. I've got a friend, I'll call him Bob, mostly because Bob is nowhere near his real name and I'm about to say some not very flattering things about him. He is my friend and not my job colleague or anything, so there's certain objectivity to this, in fact I appreciate Bob and I wish nothing but the best for him. Bob has been programming for a bit more than a decade. He is, barring the people I know from other countries, the best paid programmer I know, and I know well over a dozen. Bob has no interest whatsoever in any programming language that is not what he has been using his whole career, nor does he have any interest or curiosity in dipping his toes in other related fields, web development, tinkering with arduinos, home servers... Nothing. Bob has not built a computer, ever, doesn't know how to do it, nor what each part in that object does, beyond the hard drive because he did plug an extra one once or twice. More anecdotally I played some Factorio and Satisfactory with Bob, now I know these are not excellent representations, but I expected a degree of order, planning and foresight, I was very much surprised when facing the reality of none of that being present, and I very much did not expect to see the same thing the few times I've looked at his code, but I did see that same thing. I promise you Bob doesn't make up for all of this in social skills. Now, is Bob a good engineer? I really, really don't think so. Is he a curious person? A bit, not much, I get the feel he just ended in CS with no particular interest for it, but I'll say it again: He is the best paid programmer I know. Is that frightening? Well yeah, in a way. It's also endearing in a "Well damn if this guy can do it then surely I can too" sort of way. Money is not everything of course, but it's as good of a proxy as any.
- shermantanktop 3mo ago
  I encountered juniors straight out of school who don’t know what tar is, or rsync, or what a symlink is. It’s all learnable and everyone starts somewhere. But you’d think natural curiosity would kick in and they’d have picked up some of this on their own by the time they have a job.
  - christophilus 3mo ago
    If they were Windows game developers, they wouldn’t have to touch any of that. I guess it depends on where their interests lie and what platform they developed on.
  - wildzzz 3mo ago
    If all you do is write code for Windows, why would you need to know what any of that is?
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    - zikduruqe 3mo ago
      Because Steam... /s
  - Telaneo 3mo ago
    I didn't even know about tar or rsync until I started to use Linux, and I don't really see how else one get to the point where you need to know about them. And even symlinks are still in my mind as 'shortcuts but [...]' (even though the other way around is probably more accurate). Even as a dev, it's very possible to go through life without touching Linux.
    - t-3 3mo ago
      If you've built any open source software ever, it's pretty hard not to know of tar, even if you don't know exactly what it is. I think it's reasonable to expect anyone interested in computers would be familiar with common compression tools, let alone a CS major.
- tadasv 3mo ago
  This will get worse with new generations. They grow up on tables and phones where file system is a completely foreign concept. You need an app for everything.
  - nebalee 3mo ago
    It's not like the preceding generations were any different, until they had to do work on a PC.
- mr_toad 3mo ago
  > Considering many people doesn't know what a file is, keeping the spirit alive is important, I think. Files aren’t sacred. It’s actually troubling that many technical people never consider alternatives. Most of the worlds data today is probably not stored in filesystems, rather in databases and object stores that use custom storage backends.
  - 59percentmore 3mo ago
    After the nth time of my Android Chrome app silently corrupting and auto-deleting my browsing history (all of it; it's not a bug, it's the intended behavior!), would love to hear about a file alternative that's modular enough to resist that kind of catastrophic failure and interoperable enough to inspect/repair if anything ever happens.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      how would any alternative design prevent intended behavior? But the most obvious alternative to a filesystem would be formatting a whole hard drive as an sqlite database. Obviously it would be a radical rethink in OS design. There are also "single-level stores" from the last millennium - designs where there is no separation between volatile and nonvolatile storage. All memory in these systems is treated as nonvolatile. A Word document, for example, would be something like a suspended Word process. A directory is a process that only manages pointers to other files and directories. Obviously processes must be extremely lightweight in such a system. KeyKOS is an example of this and you can read papers about it and its Unix emulation layer. This is one of the many things humanity explored before settling on the hierarchical filesystem as the base layer of storage.
      - bayindirh 3mo ago
        > But the most obvious alternative to a filesystem would be formatting a whole hard drive as an sqlite database. At the end of the day, you'll be chasing pointers inside that SQLite database, where you store tables, indexes and such. Interestingly, this is how a filesystem works. Tables, indexes, redirections and fields. Very much like a database. EXT4 is a table of redirections, nothing fancy [0]. [0]: https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/understanding-ext4-disk-layout-part-1 https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/understanding-ext4-disk-layou...
bigbuppo 3mo ago
Oh, wait until the kids learn about hardware.
bblb 3mo ago
The article was a lot of words just to say that. It's sad that we need this new concept of "IndieWeb", as the whole Internet evolved into a monstrosity hosted and guardrailed by a handful of megacorporations. Hosting files became a privilege, when it should've been a (human) right all along. edit: The tech to host yourself is obviously still there, but the _mindset_ changed to cloud only.
- kay_o 3mo ago
  > edit: The tech to host yourself is obviously still there, but the _mindset_ changed to cloud only. Sadly with CGNAT, port blocks, hosting any server being a terms of service violation...
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    Non-cloud shared hosting costs $2 per month
dizhn 3mo ago
We are a long removed from when putting something in your public_html folder would instantly give you a personal web site. Not that I am saying people should still hand write html or anything but it was a very quick and natural way to participate back in the day. (A unix account usually gave you automatic p2p chat too using finger to see if your buddy was online and talk/ytalk to talk to them.) This was little less than magic at the time even when your friend was sitting on the terminal right next to you.

Kind of funny that this is like some strange new concept... Having a web server and putting your stuff on it.

bayindirh 3mo ago

Considering many people doesn't know what a file is, keeping the spirit alive is important, I think.

al_borland 3mo ago
The lack of basic computer knowledge I’ve seen from developers is terrifying.
- cogman10 3mo ago
  It's almost inspiring how far someone can get without understanding really basic stuff about how an operating system operates.
  - assimpleaspossi 3mo ago
    > inspiring You spelled "frightening" wrong.
    - Levitz 3mo ago
      It's a complex feeling, really. I've got a friend, I'll call him Bob, mostly because Bob is nowhere near his real name and I'm about to say some not very flattering things about him. He is my friend and not my job colleague or anything, so there's certain objectivity to this, in fact I appreciate Bob and I wish nothing but the best for him. Bob has been programming for a bit more than a decade. He is, barring the people I know from other countries, the best paid programmer I know, and I know well over a dozen. Bob has no interest whatsoever in any programming language that is not what he has been using his whole career, nor does he have any interest or curiosity in dipping his toes in other related fields, web development, tinkering with arduinos, home servers... Nothing. Bob has not built a computer, ever, doesn't know how to do it, nor what each part in that object does, beyond the hard drive because he did plug an extra one once or twice. More anecdotally I played some Factorio and Satisfactory with Bob, now I know these are not excellent representations, but I expected a degree of order, planning and foresight, I was very much surprised when facing the reality of none of that being present, and I very much did not expect to see the same thing the few times I've looked at his code, but I did see that same thing. I promise you Bob doesn't make up for all of this in social skills. Now, is Bob a good engineer? I really, really don't think so. Is he a curious person? A bit, not much, I get the feel he just ended in CS with no particular interest for it, but I'll say it again: He is the best paid programmer I know. Is that frightening? Well yeah, in a way. It's also endearing in a "Well damn if this guy can do it then surely I can too" sort of way. Money is not everything of course, but it's as good of a proxy as any.
shermantanktop 3mo ago
I encountered juniors straight out of school who don’t know what tar is, or rsync, or what a symlink is. It’s all learnable and everyone starts somewhere. But you’d think natural curiosity would kick in and they’d have picked up some of this on their own by the time they have a job.
- christophilus 3mo ago
  If they were Windows game developers, they wouldn’t have to touch any of that. I guess it depends on where their interests lie and what platform they developed on.
- wildzzz 3mo ago
  If all you do is write code for Windows, why would you need to know what any of that is?
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - zikduruqe 3mo ago
    Because Steam... /s
- Telaneo 3mo ago
  I didn't even know about tar or rsync until I started to use Linux, and I don't really see how else one get to the point where you need to know about them. And even symlinks are still in my mind as 'shortcuts but [...]' (even though the other way around is probably more accurate). Even as a dev, it's very possible to go through life without touching Linux.
  - t-3 3mo ago
    If you've built any open source software ever, it's pretty hard not to know of tar, even if you don't know exactly what it is. I think it's reasonable to expect anyone interested in computers would be familiar with common compression tools, let alone a CS major.
tadasv 3mo ago
This will get worse with new generations. They grow up on tables and phones where file system is a completely foreign concept. You need an app for everything.
- nebalee 3mo ago
  It's not like the preceding generations were any different, until they had to do work on a PC.
mr_toad 3mo ago
> Considering many people doesn't know what a file is, keeping the spirit alive is important, I think. Files aren’t sacred. It’s actually troubling that many technical people never consider alternatives. Most of the worlds data today is probably not stored in filesystems, rather in databases and object stores that use custom storage backends.
- 59percentmore 3mo ago
  After the nth time of my Android Chrome app silently corrupting and auto-deleting my browsing history (all of it; it's not a bug, it's the intended behavior!), would love to hear about a file alternative that's modular enough to resist that kind of catastrophic failure and interoperable enough to inspect/repair if anything ever happens.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    how would any alternative design prevent intended behavior? But the most obvious alternative to a filesystem would be formatting a whole hard drive as an sqlite database. Obviously it would be a radical rethink in OS design. There are also "single-level stores" from the last millennium - designs where there is no separation between volatile and nonvolatile storage. All memory in these systems is treated as nonvolatile. A Word document, for example, would be something like a suspended Word process. A directory is a process that only manages pointers to other files and directories. Obviously processes must be extremely lightweight in such a system. KeyKOS is an example of this and you can read papers about it and its Unix emulation layer. This is one of the many things humanity explored before settling on the hierarchical filesystem as the base layer of storage.
    - bayindirh 3mo ago
      > But the most obvious alternative to a filesystem would be formatting a whole hard drive as an sqlite database. At the end of the day, you'll be chasing pointers inside that SQLite database, where you store tables, indexes and such. Interestingly, this is how a filesystem works. Tables, indexes, redirections and fields. Very much like a database. EXT4 is a table of redirections, nothing fancy [0]. [0]: https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/understanding-ext4-disk-layout-part-1 https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/understanding-ext4-disk-layou...

bigbuppo 3mo ago

Oh, wait until the kids learn about hardware.

bblb 3mo ago

The article was a lot of words just to say that. It's sad that we need this new concept of "IndieWeb", as the whole Internet evolved into a monstrosity hosted and guardrailed by a handful of megacorporations. Hosting files became a privilege, when it should've been a (human) right all along. edit: The tech to host yourself is obviously still there, but the _mindset_ changed to cloud only.

kay_o 3mo ago
> edit: The tech to host yourself is obviously still there, but the _mindset_ changed to cloud only. Sadly with CGNAT, port blocks, hosting any server being a terms of service violation...
- inigyou 3mo ago
  Non-cloud shared hosting costs $2 per month

dizhn 3mo ago

We are a long removed from when putting something in your public_html folder would instantly give you a personal web site. Not that I am saying people should still hand write html or anything but it was a very quick and natural way to participate back in the day. (A unix account usually gave you automatic p2p chat too using finger to see if your buddy was online and talk/ytalk to talk to them.) This was little less than magic at the time even when your friend was sitting on the terminal right next to you.