alt Hacker NewsNo. I actually don’t do that and I don’t think that all human work should be O(n) deduplication gated.
Written about it here before: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-09-08/Intellectual...
It isn’t something I care very much about, except when it’s used as a certificate of achievement. I almost never do literature searches with an attempt to dedupe. I only ever do it to see if someone has explored something better than I have. That’s often the case but other times it is not.
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sunshowers • yesterday at 9:49 PM
Okay, well, I actually do think it is part of the basic duty of an engineer to do that.
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If they knew it from working at Meta, it wouldn't be O(n), it would be O(1).
I agree that there will be cases where you implement tricks that others have had before you, without knowing. A few years ago, I had a delightful idea, experimented and wrote it up. One commenter directed me to a post that described it as "folk knowledge". There will be other cases where you encountered an idea before, but didn't remember it.
Still, crediting what you can easily know you cited is good. Even aside from credit, comparisons to existing systems are part of how we understand what a system does.