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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

I have a phrase "topless computing" which for me is allowing the data to be accessible in an onwardly usable fashion. Not assuming the use case you have in mind is the final one - someone will always have a better more specific use case

It does mean we all need to become proficient at using those data flows - to become coders as we are all readers and writers today.

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> It does mean we all need to become proficient at using those data flows ...

Pretty sure that's extremely unlikely to (ever) happen for even a majority of the population.

a) People have their own interests and goals. They generally aren't going to put time into anything like this unless it seems like it'll help them achieve one of their interests/goals

b) Not everyone is "switched on" technologically. Kids, elderly, even just some people with non-technical personality types. :/

I think Excel proves this is a lot more possible than often thought.

b) is education. Literacy is terrible without school too. But now nearly everyone spends years learning that skill and can use it throughout life. Not to say coding is necessarily as useful as reading and writing though.

Absolutely- I am about 30,000 words into a book on Software Literacy and it's good to hear I am not the only fool thinking along these lines :-)

Edit ... not that you are a fool :-)

Education definitely won't work for many elderly people who are 1. Not Interested, and 2. May no longer be capable of picking up (or retaining) the skill. :(

I'm not talking about re-educating adults. Just that we could teach nearly everyone to program if it were important, in the same way we teach nearly everyone to read and write. Kids already learn long division at school, which is an algorithm. Programming is kind of easier in a way because if you have a goal, you can fumble you way towards it until it works, but you can't really fumble your way through long division if you don't know how to do it.

Hmmm. Not sure you really understand what elderly people are like. :/

For example, my father - who used to be able to do at least basic programming in C and Python - is no longer able to grasp the concepts for any length of time.

eg teach him, verify he's gotten it... and the next day it's a blank. Repeatedly. :/

I like the concept of individuals being proficient at understanding data the same way they understand language today. Am less sure that this is possible, because each brain has specialized areas (Broca's and Wernicke's) for processing language; we all have pattern recognition built in too; but abstracting the meaning and impact of data is a lot less intuitive.

That said, I don't think "topless computing" is an ideal phrase, because the image many people will get is a woman typing while topless.

I think the answer is finding a way to transform data into a format that takes advantage of those brain centers. Visualization is a great example of this, but has a long way to go.

How would you suggest visualizing it?

Depends on the data

I’m really interested though. Obviously location data on a map. What about interests?

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