Hacker News Reader

Comment by Brajeshwar | Hacker News Reader

This is something I realized long back when I tried to move away from Physical Books to the Amazon Kindle. My daughter, “But you are not reading a book, you are playing or watching on your new Gadget.” I decided against that and my physical to kindle ratio is about 1:5. Same goes for phone, device, usage, etc. It is hard but I try.

I'm also trying to teach my kids the idea of files and how everything on the computer are pretty much all files.

View on HN

> I'm also trying to teach my kids the idea of files and how everything on the computer are pretty much all files.

Interesting. As a generation that grew up on Windows, that's probably my mental model as well. Keeping specific files like music, videos, photos organized and sharing them on pen-drives was a big thing even 10 years ago - and to an extent, this is completely gone. Can you expand why you want to teach that?

For me, it's the concept of how computers actually work under the hood that I want my kids to have a grasp on. It's all files in a file system, and they all do different things. And that's different than what might be going on when you load a website, though it's all (sorta) files on the other end of that as well.

Files have metadata that describes to the operating system what they are for, and how they are to be used.

Etc, etc.

This is information that I think will be very enlightening for them, even though not strictly required to operate a computer these days.

Steph, CEO of Obsidian, does it better at https://stephango.com/file-over-app

Reply on news.ycombinator.com