5 ms·

Reinvent the Wheel

70 points by nz 4y ago

smitty1e 4y ago
"We can make it rounder."--Me
- indymike 4y ago
  The eternal quest for a rounder wheel is a great way to describe the tech industry.
  - mikro2nd 4y ago
    Well, YES! since so much of the tech industry has a triangular thing that they insist is a wheel and obstinately refuse to engage with those round things, despite the round things having been around for quite a long time. (I'm talking about programming languages, of course. See the Stop Writing Dead Programmes talk.)
    - nz 4y ago
      Link to talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ab3ArE8W3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ab3ArE8W3s
- th70w4w4y 4y ago
  Stole my joke :)
TuringTest 4y ago
> Diversity, then, means voluntarily accepting that not everything be optimal. I think a better mental model is to accept that optimal is contextual, i.e. it depends on the environment on which you build your gadget. Diversity happens because the environment is not homogeneous, so each region produces local forms optimally adapted to its niche conditions - and some generalist forms that work well in a large range of conditions without beint optimal at any of them.
- Ygg2 4y ago
  To optimize you first need to know what you want to optimize for. That's why optimal is a misnomer. Optimal for what?
  - TuringTest 4y ago
    That depends on the function of what you are building.
epolanski 4y ago
That was a very well written piece.
openfuture 4y ago
For me this is how I learned mathematics up until university. By just going unprepared to exams or doing extracurricular competitions and then "inventing the math" in the exam. In the case of competitions it was a bit more fun than exams which would still just be testing one or two ideas with a few examples but still it is in my opinion the more fun way to go about it. All these kids who were memorizing things, or studying the thing to death, a lot of them had trouble understanding what it was that they were doing.
- onemoresoop 4y ago
  I remember doing the same thing in my exams but the problem was that I'd always run out of time and wasn't getting the best grade. I was doing pretty good otherwise and my understanding was deeper. I wouldn't recommend doing that in exams if you care about grades. I didn't and still don't but not to the point of having bad grades or failing at anything.
  - openfuture 4y ago
    Yeah my grades were terrible but there was this one time that the teacher had to regrade everyone because I spotted something he hadn't seen himself and so my solution was better than the one everyone was repeating by rote memorization. I always took the elite classes so that stung a lot for all those perfect students. I don't give a fuck about grades, that system of assessments is cruel and inaccurate. It makes people stupid.
Theodores 4y ago
I have reinvented the wheel. My 'reinvention' could be considered as swapping the 'bearing bits' around a bit if you wished to mock my efforts. I was only interested in one particular application, the goal to reduce the parts count, to make servicing easier and to have a lighter/stronger product. As a thought exercise I highly recommend reinventing the wheel, not for the sake of it but to solve a real world problem. For instance, if people struggle to use your widget and assemble it incorrectly. Or if regulatory and safety requirements have made the original design somewhat cumbersome. We live in a great time for reinventing the wheel with open source CAD tools and 3D printing making it possible to create a functioning prototype. You can also check your homework to see how far others have got. Patents relating to wheels are what you might call numerous, however, with first principles thinking and an in depth understanding of how it works there is the possibility to devise something that is actually novel, even if it is just swapping a few 'bearing bits around'.
vsareto 4y ago
I don't like how this article wants you to waste time getting tripped up and frustrated with basic problems just for the sake of figuring it out on your own. There are major companies doing research on wheels in a variety of contexts and constraints (trains/planes/automobiles). The folks involved all likely have engineering degrees which taught and challenged them in more effective ways than just having them sit down and reinvent wheels on their own for 4-8 years. >You should reinvent the wheel because it’s fun. Passion is great, but it can wax and wane because we're humans, and that's where discipline keeps you moving forward so you don't drop out of reinventing wheels and waste all of that time you invested because it stopped being fun one day. Discipline means you block out some time, do a wheel iteration knowing it'll suck to do and it isn't fun, then forget about it. Only the luckiest people constantly have fun with a subject and then actually contribute to the state-of-the-art.
- throwaway71271 4y ago
  > folks involved all likely have engineering degrees which taught and challenged them This is part of the wheel :) people dont challenge things enough, for example the keyboards we use, the most accessible area is around the thumbs, and we have one giant button there, instead of 4-5 super nice buttons, this leads to carpal syndrome and all kinds of issues, and yet, now in every school they teach computer classes and touch typing to 10-13 year old kids, who cant reach backspace without twisting their wrist 45 degrees, and in the same time on windows ctrl+h just does not work in 99% of the apps. So those kids will grow up and rarely think about using a different keyboard. It is not that easy to break out of the "dont reinvent the wheel", as "the wheel" is beaten into you since you were 5 years old.
- KineticLensman 4y ago
  > I don't like how this article wants you to waste time getting tripped up and frustrated with basic problems just for the sake of figuring it out on your own. It does make the point that some novel and useful wheel applications have arisen very recently in the wheel's overall history, e.g. putting wheels on luggage. Clearly, finding something new to do with a wheel is quite a challenge, but in general developing a new application for an existing thing can be very profitable. There's a commonly quoted observation that taking an existing product to a new market is much simpler than taking a new product to a new market.
bullen 4y ago
I agree about re-inventing anything. What people really mean when the say "don't reinvent the wheel" is "don't copy the wheel": http://move.rupy.se/file/wheel.jpg http://move.rupy.se/file/wheel.jpg
PedroBatista 4y ago
Like anything in life, context is everything. This "Don't reinvent the wheel" thing comes from the observation some people (software engineers in this case ) tend to spend a huge amount of time ( aka money ) creating things that were already created AND could just be used by them. It's a very valid point, especially when you have to pay salaries every month and don't have a money printing machine. However.. the motto is also used to justify mental laziness and protect egos from ignorance. People learn by doing, you can read all the books you want and you'll be a very competent parrot but you'll never really know. The question is, what do you choose to know and what to you choose to parrot? Since time is finite (for you ).
- jesuscript 4y ago
  Or more importantly, definitely re-invent the wheel on your own fucking time.
  - panzerboiler 4y ago
    Time is being stolen to work on uninteresting things, and should be reclaimed.
- nz 4y ago
  Related to inventing, reinventing, and adopting-the-already-existing: Alan Kay on inventing the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ Jonathan Blow on "reinventing" your own game engines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOtxjOLst2k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOtxjOLst2k
  - throwaway71271 4y ago
    Casey Muratori on "don't reinvent the wheel": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQeqsn7JJWA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQeqsn7JJWA
    - nz 4y ago
      This was quite good! The money quote: "It always bothers me when people say 'why reinvent the wheel', because the wheel is an _amazing_ invention. It is almost perfect -- or quite possibly perfect -- for what it does. It perfectly turns static friction into dynamic friction for moving objects. It is something that so elegant and beautiful, that if you were to ask why we would want to reinvent it, I would say _of course_ we do not want to reinvent it. It has worked for thousands of years, and has been unchanged for thousands of years. _Nothing_ we have developed in the past 30 years of game-development, is a wheel. In the future we will have so much more powerful tools for game development, that people will laugh at the things we did to make games. If we want _to get to_ a wheel, we need people that will _attempt to make the wheel_."
moron4hire 4y ago
I know of at least 3 times, off the top of my head, that the literal wheel was successfully and usefully reinvented in the 20th century alone. People saying "don't reinvent the wheel" to talk others out of their project ideas is one of my biggest pet peeves.
photochemsyn 4y ago
If you re-invent the wheel and try to use it as a component of a more complex system, by far the most likely outcome is that you'll discover that your novel wheel has some interesting failure modes that you hadn't considered. Hence, if you need a simple database for your desktop application, using sqlite is a better option than trying to cobble together something similar using your own special hash tables and b-trees. However, trying to do the latter will certainly help you understand a quite a bit about database architecture. However, many people who say 'don't re-invent the wheel' are really saying 'you're just a worker bee and so you don't need to know anything more than how to operate this here machine' - and that's a trap, as you're then not developing your skills and knowledge to a higher level.
- TSiege 4y ago
  > However, many people who say 'don't re-invent the wheel' are really saying 'you're just a worker bee and so you don't need to know anything more than how to operate this here machine' - and that's a trap, as you're then not developing your skills and knowledge to a higher level. This seems a bit extreme no? I think more often the concern is, you've reinvented the wheel and then you took a job elsewhere and now we have to maintain the new wheel ourselves. Or new wheels are great until it breaks and a customer of ours is pissed off and we have to wake up the one person who knows how to fix it
  - ivanhoe 4y ago
    These are all legit concerns, and on paid projects you really don't want to reinvent the wheel as long as the existing wheels do the job. You'll save time/money, it will be easier to maintain and safer, and all those other pros mentioned are 100% true. However, problem with this popular approach is that it has become a sort of gospel preached to people, and they effectively brainwash junior devs in believing that they shouldn't ever dare to challenge the existing libs, and try to make their own improvements. Ever. And that is obviously very wrong. People shouldn't be scared to fork a project and make their own customized version that solves their particular problems better. That's what OSS is all about. Yes, most of it will suck, but that's how you learn. And some will make actual improvements so we will have better wheels in the end.
zach_garwood 4y ago
You can reinvent as many wheels as your heart desires when you're in your own home, but when you're at work, just go take a wheel off the wheel shelf and get on with your day.
kodah 4y ago
Often people think something is a wheel when it is rather more of a pulley. My experience has taught me to avoid this saying because the real questions are: - Do I gain anything valuable (including knowledge) by doing this myself - do we have the investment to do so (time and money) Too often when this phrase is evoked it's because folks want an engineer to simply wrap and extend when the proper thing to do sounds a little too expensive.
th70w4w4y 4y ago
A wheel is a circle. A circle has infinite edges. Therefore you can always make a rounder wheel.

Reinvent the Wheel

70 points by nz 4y ago

smitty1e 4y ago

"We can make it rounder."--Me

indymike 4y ago
The eternal quest for a rounder wheel is a great way to describe the tech industry.
- mikro2nd 4y ago
  Well, YES! since so much of the tech industry has a triangular thing that they insist is a wheel and obstinately refuse to engage with those round things, despite the round things having been around for quite a long time. (I'm talking about programming languages, of course. See the Stop Writing Dead Programmes talk.)
  - nz 4y ago
    Link to talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ab3ArE8W3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ab3ArE8W3s
th70w4w4y 4y ago
Stole my joke :)

TuringTest 4y ago

> Diversity, then, means voluntarily accepting that not everything be optimal. I think a better mental model is to accept that optimal is contextual, i.e. it depends on the environment on which you build your gadget. Diversity happens because the environment is not homogeneous, so each region produces local forms optimally adapted to its niche conditions - and some generalist forms that work well in a large range of conditions without beint optimal at any of them.

Ygg2 4y ago
To optimize you first need to know what you want to optimize for. That's why optimal is a misnomer. Optimal for what?
- TuringTest 4y ago
  That depends on the function of what you are building.

epolanski 4y ago

That was a very well written piece.

openfuture 4y ago

For me this is how I learned mathematics up until university. By just going unprepared to exams or doing extracurricular competitions and then "inventing the math" in the exam. In the case of competitions it was a bit more fun than exams which would still just be testing one or two ideas with a few examples but still it is in my opinion the more fun way to go about it. All these kids who were memorizing things, or studying the thing to death, a lot of them had trouble understanding what it was that they were doing.

onemoresoop 4y ago
I remember doing the same thing in my exams but the problem was that I'd always run out of time and wasn't getting the best grade. I was doing pretty good otherwise and my understanding was deeper. I wouldn't recommend doing that in exams if you care about grades. I didn't and still don't but not to the point of having bad grades or failing at anything.
- openfuture 4y ago
  Yeah my grades were terrible but there was this one time that the teacher had to regrade everyone because I spotted something he hadn't seen himself and so my solution was better than the one everyone was repeating by rote memorization. I always took the elite classes so that stung a lot for all those perfect students. I don't give a fuck about grades, that system of assessments is cruel and inaccurate. It makes people stupid.

Theodores 4y ago

I have reinvented the wheel. My 'reinvention' could be considered as swapping the 'bearing bits' around a bit if you wished to mock my efforts. I was only interested in one particular application, the goal to reduce the parts count, to make servicing easier and to have a lighter/stronger product. As a thought exercise I highly recommend reinventing the wheel, not for the sake of it but to solve a real world problem. For instance, if people struggle to use your widget and assemble it incorrectly. Or if regulatory and safety requirements have made the original design somewhat cumbersome. We live in a great time for reinventing the wheel with open source CAD tools and 3D printing making it possible to create a functioning prototype. You can also check your homework to see how far others have got. Patents relating to wheels are what you might call numerous, however, with first principles thinking and an in depth understanding of how it works there is the possibility to devise something that is actually novel, even if it is just swapping a few 'bearing bits around'.

vsareto 4y ago

I don't like how this article wants you to waste time getting tripped up and frustrated with basic problems just for the sake of figuring it out on your own. There are major companies doing research on wheels in a variety of contexts and constraints (trains/planes/automobiles). The folks involved all likely have engineering degrees which taught and challenged them in more effective ways than just having them sit down and reinvent wheels on their own for 4-8 years. >You should reinvent the wheel because it’s fun. Passion is great, but it can wax and wane because we're humans, and that's where discipline keeps you moving forward so you don't drop out of reinventing wheels and waste all of that time you invested because it stopped being fun one day. Discipline means you block out some time, do a wheel iteration knowing it'll suck to do and it isn't fun, then forget about it. Only the luckiest people constantly have fun with a subject and then actually contribute to the state-of-the-art.

throwaway71271 4y ago
> folks involved all likely have engineering degrees which taught and challenged them This is part of the wheel :) people dont challenge things enough, for example the keyboards we use, the most accessible area is around the thumbs, and we have one giant button there, instead of 4-5 super nice buttons, this leads to carpal syndrome and all kinds of issues, and yet, now in every school they teach computer classes and touch typing to 10-13 year old kids, who cant reach backspace without twisting their wrist 45 degrees, and in the same time on windows ctrl+h just does not work in 99% of the apps. So those kids will grow up and rarely think about using a different keyboard. It is not that easy to break out of the "dont reinvent the wheel", as "the wheel" is beaten into you since you were 5 years old.
KineticLensman 4y ago
> I don't like how this article wants you to waste time getting tripped up and frustrated with basic problems just for the sake of figuring it out on your own. It does make the point that some novel and useful wheel applications have arisen very recently in the wheel's overall history, e.g. putting wheels on luggage. Clearly, finding something new to do with a wheel is quite a challenge, but in general developing a new application for an existing thing can be very profitable. There's a commonly quoted observation that taking an existing product to a new market is much simpler than taking a new product to a new market.

bullen 4y ago

I agree about re-inventing anything. What people really mean when the say "don't reinvent the wheel" is "don't copy the wheel": http://move.rupy.se/file/wheel.jpg http://move.rupy.se/file/wheel.jpg

PedroBatista 4y ago

Like anything in life, context is everything. This "Don't reinvent the wheel" thing comes from the observation some people (software engineers in this case ) tend to spend a huge amount of time ( aka money ) creating things that were already created AND could just be used by them. It's a very valid point, especially when you have to pay salaries every month and don't have a money printing machine. However.. the motto is also used to justify mental laziness and protect egos from ignorance. People learn by doing, you can read all the books you want and you'll be a very competent parrot but you'll never really know. The question is, what do you choose to know and what to you choose to parrot? Since time is finite (for you ).

jesuscript 4y ago
Or more importantly, definitely re-invent the wheel on your own fucking time.
- panzerboiler 4y ago
  Time is being stolen to work on uninteresting things, and should be reclaimed.
nz 4y ago
Related to inventing, reinventing, and adopting-the-already-existing: Alan Kay on inventing the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ Jonathan Blow on "reinventing" your own game engines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOtxjOLst2k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOtxjOLst2k
- throwaway71271 4y ago
  Casey Muratori on "don't reinvent the wheel": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQeqsn7JJWA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQeqsn7JJWA
  - nz 4y ago
    This was quite good! The money quote: "It always bothers me when people say 'why reinvent the wheel', because the wheel is an _amazing_ invention. It is almost perfect -- or quite possibly perfect -- for what it does. It perfectly turns static friction into dynamic friction for moving objects. It is something that so elegant and beautiful, that if you were to ask why we would want to reinvent it, I would say _of course_ we do not want to reinvent it. It has worked for thousands of years, and has been unchanged for thousands of years. _Nothing_ we have developed in the past 30 years of game-development, is a wheel. In the future we will have so much more powerful tools for game development, that people will laugh at the things we did to make games. If we want _to get to_ a wheel, we need people that will _attempt to make the wheel_."

moron4hire 4y ago

I know of at least 3 times, off the top of my head, that the literal wheel was successfully and usefully reinvented in the 20th century alone. People saying "don't reinvent the wheel" to talk others out of their project ideas is one of my biggest pet peeves.

photochemsyn 4y ago

If you re-invent the wheel and try to use it as a component of a more complex system, by far the most likely outcome is that you'll discover that your novel wheel has some interesting failure modes that you hadn't considered. Hence, if you need a simple database for your desktop application, using sqlite is a better option than trying to cobble together something similar using your own special hash tables and b-trees. However, trying to do the latter will certainly help you understand a quite a bit about database architecture. However, many people who say 'don't re-invent the wheel' are really saying 'you're just a worker bee and so you don't need to know anything more than how to operate this here machine' - and that's a trap, as you're then not developing your skills and knowledge to a higher level.

TSiege 4y ago
> However, many people who say 'don't re-invent the wheel' are really saying 'you're just a worker bee and so you don't need to know anything more than how to operate this here machine' - and that's a trap, as you're then not developing your skills and knowledge to a higher level. This seems a bit extreme no? I think more often the concern is, you've reinvented the wheel and then you took a job elsewhere and now we have to maintain the new wheel ourselves. Or new wheels are great until it breaks and a customer of ours is pissed off and we have to wake up the one person who knows how to fix it
- ivanhoe 4y ago
  These are all legit concerns, and on paid projects you really don't want to reinvent the wheel as long as the existing wheels do the job. You'll save time/money, it will be easier to maintain and safer, and all those other pros mentioned are 100% true. However, problem with this popular approach is that it has become a sort of gospel preached to people, and they effectively brainwash junior devs in believing that they shouldn't ever dare to challenge the existing libs, and try to make their own improvements. Ever. And that is obviously very wrong. People shouldn't be scared to fork a project and make their own customized version that solves their particular problems better. That's what OSS is all about. Yes, most of it will suck, but that's how you learn. And some will make actual improvements so we will have better wheels in the end.

zach_garwood 4y ago

You can reinvent as many wheels as your heart desires when you're in your own home, but when you're at work, just go take a wheel off the wheel shelf and get on with your day.

kodah 4y ago

Often people think something is a wheel when it is rather more of a pulley. My experience has taught me to avoid this saying because the real questions are: - Do I gain anything valuable (including knowledge) by doing this myself - do we have the investment to do so (time and money) Too often when this phrase is evoked it's because folks want an engineer to simply wrap and extend when the proper thing to do sounds a little too expensive.

th70w4w4y 4y ago

A wheel is a circle. A circle has infinite edges. Therefore you can always make a rounder wheel.