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Comment by gizmo686 | Hacker News Reader

There is no such thing as building something yourself. When you make something, you use tools, materials and methods made by other people.

The most important part of building something that isn't crap is being able to recognize the crap in what you are considering for use. Then deciding if you can contain the crap, or find a less crappy alternative.

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Well you can actually build something yourself. Sure, someone else built e.g. the code editor you‘re using, but if you come up with an algorithm yourself, you did, by definition, build it yourself.

If you create an algorithm, it is likely based on previous algorithms you learned, and millenia of mathametics.

To implement it in a computer, you likely rely on an operating system to run on, layers of userspace libraries, layers of firmware, many independent hardware components. An electrical supply.

There is such a thing as building by yourself. Otherwise you do end up with 90% crap, and there exist people which are annoyed by that.

Eg build systems without autotools, cmake or even more horrible bloatware (meson, bazel, conan, scons, nix, ...).

That's why e.g people ship header-only libs. That's why suckless exists. XML configs, YAML configs, SOAP, Java, ... oh my.

I think the point was, simply pointing out flaws is an activity that requires very little effort. A more laudable activity is to provide a better way or work toward making an improvement.

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