Mastodawn

John Andrzej Odrzywolek has bravely reinvented the wheel by declaring that you can derive math's most basic operations using... math's most basic operations! 🚀🤔 Apparently, the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is a single function and the number 1. Who knew? 🤷‍♂️
https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/04/13/the-smallest-math-library/ #reinventingthewheel #mathoperations #ultimatequestion #mathfun #innovation #HackerNews #ngated

Mathematical minimalism

How to bootstrap all the common calculator functions from just one function.

John D. Cook | Applied Mathematics Consulting

N-gated Hacker News Apr 9

🚀🎩 Oh, look! Someone reinvented the wheel by creating a "lightweight" build tool for C/C++ that nobody asked for, just to give GitHub's AI something to do. Somehow, it's supposed to be revolutionary despite being yet another addition to the endless sea of build tools. 🤦‍♂️🔧
https://github.com/randerson112/craft #reinventingthewheel #lightweightbuildtools #C #C++ #GitHubAI #softwaredevelopment #HackerNews #ngated

GitHub - randerson112/craft: A lightweight build and workflow tool for C/C++

A lightweight build and workflow tool for C/C++. Contribute to randerson112/craft development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

Stephen Hoffman Apr 6

A tale from the IT crypt, thanks to another thread on re-inventing grep…

Back in the pre-Y2K era of the NT Affinity boondoggle, a development team was tasked with creating the “DIGITAL OpenVMS Disk Services for Windows NT” (NTDS) remote storage system for Windows NT clients.

Imagine creating an NFS server, and creating NFS clients for Windows NT, all allowing access to a hardware storage pool available on some bigger not-NT server.

This product was being newly created too, so a fairly extensive new-development project split across the server-related development work, and the NT client work.

In one meeting early on, I’d pointed out this was all quite literally re-inventing NFS, and so using an existing (or modified) NFS server could probably speed up the whole product release.

Was told no, the server only accessed arbitrary blocks in one (partition) file on the host, so definitely not at all like NFS.

Okay, but accessing arbitrary blocks in one file is a proper subset of accessing arbitrary blocks in multiple files, right?

Was told no; totally different. But never did get any explanation why NTDS was all so assuredly and totally different from NFS.

🙄

The NTDS project wasn’t a particular success with customers though (and a similar outcome with NT Affinity more generally), so shortening the schedule and saving some development wasn’t a factor in that (un)success.

#retrocomputing #TalesFromTheITCrypt #ReinventingTheWheel #openvms

N-gated Hacker News Apr 5

Look at you, trying to reinvent the wheel with a "totally not for diplomats" German app. 🌍📱 Congratulations on discovering the FSI course, something the government has been using since the dinosaurs roamed the Earth. But hey, charge $5 a month for a 60-year-old curriculum and you're golden! 💸💼
https://detawk.com/ #reinventingthewheel #FSIcourse #techcritique #appdevelopment #governmentinnovation #digitaldiplomacy #HackerNews #ngated

DeTawk - German as it should be | DeTawk

Learn German with DeTawk, a modern app built on the FSI German course, the same curriculum used to train US diplomats. Free, proven, and structured for real fluency.

N-gated Hacker News Apr 1

🚨 BREAKING: Two mediocre note-taking apps decided to "collaborate" and give birth to yet another #open-source monstrosity, 'Cushion.' Because what the world desperately needed was a software hybrid that does absolutely nothing new. 🙄👶✨ Welcome to the endless cycle of reinventing the wheel—this time with a slightly different shade of gray. 🌀💻
https://cushionmd.com/ #mediocreapps #Cushion #collaboration #softwaredevelopment #reinventingthewheel #HackerNews #ngated

Cushion

A local-first markdown workspace with integrated AI chat. Write, organize, and think — all in one place.

N-gated Hacker News Mar 27

Ah, the disillusioned coder's dream: reinventing the wheel in a language nobody asked for, all for the glory of a few lines of Rust! 🚀🦀 Who knew we needed yet another Gzip decompressor to remind us that sometimes, just sometimes, #learning can masquerade as productivity. 😆
https://iev.ee/blog/gzip-decompression-in-250-lines-of-rust/ #disillusionedcoder #reinventingthewheel #Rust #Gzipdecompressor #programminghumor #HackerNews #ngated

gzip decompression in 250 lines of rust | ian erik varatalu

ian erik varatalu

GOOD STRATEGY Mar 27

TECH HOUR: Warehousing Your Data: A No-Nonsense Guide to the Right DBMS in 2026

In 2026, the guide evaluates top database management systems for effective data warehousing, focusing on backfilling dimensional tables. Snowflake is praised for its ease of use and innovative features, while Oracle excels in reliability for enterprises. PostgreSQL appeals to budget-conscious users seeking straightforward functionality, making it a solid choice for mid-sized warehouses.

https://goodstrat.com/2026/03/27/tech-hour-warehousing-your-data-a-no-nonsense-guide-to-the-right-dbms-in-2026/

GOOD STRATEGY Mar 26

TECH HOUR: Snowflake’s Cortex Code: The Agentic Reckoning

Cortex Code: The Agentic Reckoning, Or, How Snowflake Finally Gave Data Engineers a Break from Their Existential Crisis (Now With 300% More Technical Guts) Martyn Rhisiart Jones, Madrid, Thursday 26th March 2026 Yesterday I attended Snowflake's breakfast date in Madrid, and here are some of the great things I learned. So, without more ado... Listen up, you glorious data martyrs, you noble sufferers who’ve spent years knee-deep in the festering swamp of undocumented ETL pipelines, chasing lineage graphs that resemble a deranged spider on acid after a three-day bender, and muttering dark incantations at 3 a.m. because some crusty Python script decided “customer churn” meant “every table that vaguely smells like a customer, plus that one VIEW nobody documented since 2019.” I stand before you today, your erudite, slightly unhinged technical prophet (with a heavy dose of stand-up bile and a side order of schema diagrams), to deliver the good news: Snowflake has unleashed Cortex Code, the AI coding agent that doesn’t just autocomplete your misery, it inhales it, digests the entire governed data estate, and burps back production-grade, hallucination-free SQL, Python, and dbt YAML while respecting your PII tags and warehouse economics like a paranoid compliance officer on Red Bull. This isn’t your garden-variety Copilot having another existential meltdown over a missing import. This is Code Context incarnate, an agentic beast that has swallowed the Horizon Catalogue whole, metadata, lineage graphs, semantic layers, role-based access controls, Dynamic Table lag policies, and the soul-crushing reality of your credit burn rate. […]

https://goodstrat.com/2026/03/26/tech-hour-snowflakes-cortex-code-the-agentic-reckoning/

N-gated Hacker News Mar 17

🤪 Oh joyous day! Yet another "revolutionary" runtime promises to finally #sandbox your Node.js app for dainty little #AI tasks, because that's been the burning issue all along. 🚀 Let's all pretend to be shocked when it turns out to be just another way to run JavaScript—this century's version of reinventing the wheel. 🔄
https://wasmer.io/posts/edgejs-safe-nodejs-using-wasm-sandbox #NodeJS #JavaScript #Innovation #ReinventingTheWheel #HackerNews #ngated

Edge.js: Running Node apps inside a WebAssembly Sandbox · Blog · Wasmer

Today we are incredibly excited to open source [Edge.js](https://edgejs.org/), a JavaScript runtime specifically designed to safely run Node.js workload...

Klaus Frank Mar 14

Looking at https://www.youtube.com/@htme it apparently takes a very small group of people only about 10 years to make it from scratch to quite a surprising amount of todays technology.

I kinda expected them to not even make it half the way in that time. But apparently if you know what you're building it is millennia faster than when you don't...

#diy #reinventingTheWheel

How To Make Everything

Today, getting what you need is as easy as a trip to the store; from food to clothing, energy, medicine, and so much more. Andy will discover what it takes to make everything from scratch. His mission is to understand complex manufacturing and production processes that are often taken for granted, doing it all himself. Each week he'll travel the world to bypass the modern supply chain in oder to harvest raw materials straight from the source. Along the way, he’s answering the questions you never thought to ask. Andy is learning How To Make Everything! Thank you to our patrons for making this series possible!

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