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Comment by gyulai | Hacker News Reader

I merely pointed out that the "don't reinvent the wheel" knee-jerk reflex that some people are exhibiting in a broad range of situations is an absurd absolute. Negating something and then stating it as an absurd absolute does not prove nor contradict the original proposition.

Sometimes it's more economical to reinvent some wheel than not to, sometimes it's not.

Sometimes reinventing a wheel leads to a net-improvement in the state of the art of engineering, sometimes it doesn't.

That sort of relativism makes for boring reading, but it also happens to be the truth.

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That's why the better approach is: learn how to build wheels and how they work, then use off-the-shelf wheels - unless you know that you need some peculiarities that are not found on the market; only then modify those wheels or build your own.

I'm saying: When you know how to build wheels, you may well want to build your own. If I have old bread and five minutes of spare time and a pan, I'll happily make my own crutons. There might be many reasons for why this might be the right course of action in a given situation. Maybe it's more economical to make more of the resources I already have rather than expend more by buying them at the store. Maybe I like keeping alive the heritage and knowledge of cruton making and will teach my kids how to make crutons one day. Maybe I like not being subjected to worldwide cruton-shortages when they happen. ...I just don't get the universal law of "if there's crutons available at the store, you must never ever make your own", and I don't think it is one.

Goldman Sachs thinks that risk management software is so core to their business that it makes sense for them to do it in-house while their competitors used off-the-shelf software. One weekend in 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed. Figuring out your risks after such an event was something that nobody had programmed into their software. But Goldman Sachs was able to get their people to work through that weekend and know what their risks were when markets reopened on that Monday. In the year that followed, they had one of their best business years and massively outperformed their competitors.

"You think reinventing the wheel sometimes makes sense? Haha, well I guess you also think that Google and Amazon should be manufacturing their own computers then..." ...this is something that somebody might have said sarcastically 20 years ago. Well guess what. They are.

> I guess you also think that Google and Amazon should be manufacturing their own computers then..." ...this is something that somebody might have said sarcastically 20 years ago. Well guess what. They are.

So, if you don't have the resources of Google or Amazon it may make sense to get your wheels from somebody else, right? It's called specialisation of work.

There are costs and risks associated with subcontracting.

You won't really know how to make wheels without building your own and putting it to actual use nor know when making your own wheels or using existing wheels makes more sense without the experience of both using your own homemade wheels and off the shelf wheels.

After all many wheels on wheelhub nowadays exist because someone got frustrated from their experience with using existing wheels.

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