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On this topic, is there a good place to ask "does this exist?" where you'll get good answers. Like, when I'm about to start hacking on something, I'll Google ar
by jackowayed 17y ago
On this topic, is there a good place to ask "does this exist?" where you'll get good answers. Like, when I'm about to start hacking on something, I'll Google around a little, but sometimes I find out after I start/finish that it already exists in a reasonably-good form. An Ask HN thread every once in awhile I guess would be ok, but it seems like overkill in many cases, especially if not many people would really be interested in the answer.
I guess ideal would be a piece of HN just for that that doesn't end up on the homepage, but some people would look over them once a day or so and see if they do know of something that exists.
- apphacker 17y agoIf not many people are interested in an answer then it wont make the front page.
- jackowayed 17y agoBut that also means I won't have much likelihood of an answer. I want a place where some people who want to be helpful will see it even if not too many people care about the answer. Perhaps Twitter and/or Quora are my answers
- reconbot 17y agoStack Overflow and Server Fault are full of questions like this.
- giantfuzzypanda 17y agoI don't think you can really do much better than Google. If the competitor/originator isn't on the first few pages, then you have an advantage even if you weren't the first one to make it.
- jackowayed 17y agoIf you're talking startups, I agree. But sometimes it's just some little library/tool that I need, and I'll spend an afternoon writing it and put it on GitHub if it doesn't exist, but if it does, I'd rather just use that than waste my time.