That's a pretty high bar to impose on a guy's personal blog site. I mean, he also has a poetry section. From clicking around on his blog it also appears he has a PhD from MIT, so he's certainly no stranger to research, if that were his project in this post.
> And put that posting on tech forums, HN, linkedin, reddit, whatever.
It doesn't look like that happened here. The blog was written by a guy named Rick Manelius, and posted to HN a guy named by Dan Moore. While it's possible there's some collusion going on here, I say we "assume positive intent"; that is, assume Dan found Rick's blog entry insightful and posted it to HN for the rest of us to consider.
1) Since this is going to happen regardless of how you feel about it, arguing that human beings "should" do something differently just leads to dissatisfaction on your part. I simply roll "cites prior work" and "compares to similar approaches" into my set of criteria for judging the utility of a work or idea.
2) There is inherent value for learners in revisiting familiar (to us) concepts on their own terms. If they get excited about learning something or producing something that has been around for decades, great. They don't diminish the other works by producing theirs. And sometimes there are kernels of something new.
That said, I do require every engineer who wants to introduce some new piece of technology to do a "literature survey" as a means of teaching them how to think critically about problems.
The bulk of my comment is about the general trend, as well as the coding community.
Applying Hanlon's Razor, I don't see any malice in this comment at all. It's just a sharp comment with a logically valid point that is a little off base socially. Behavior like this is a feature of analytic/software/STEMy people, not a bug!
What really seems to grind your gears is the curation. The fact that this "inexcusable" blog post made it to the HN front page. Blaming the author for not living up to your (extremely ambitious) standards seem silly to me.
You'll gain a better understanding of the ideas, show others how to do the same (if you publish your efforts) and perhaps create new ideas through accidental new combinations or the concerted effort to integrate multiple existing ideas in an unusual way.
I think the issue isn't the recreation/repackaging but the omission of an honest discussion of how the new approach differs or what is done differently.
This kind of work irks me. No offense to the author, this is a widespread trend, not a single example.
You write a whole blog-post on a topic and not mention Hanlon's razor. It is inexcusable that you didn't know about it. It was your job to do "literature survey" or some google search, or an intellectual discussion with a handful of people, (ideally all three of them, and more) before you blurt out a whole essay on a topic. And then in the essay you create an image of yourself originally coming up with such a brilliant idea.
This is just a piece of writing (and maybe I am a bit harsh but I'm just trying to point to a trend). We're on HN. This is way worse when it comes to coding/github projects:
You create some kind of code, put it on github, create a blog-post in some shiny flat/material design, grey font, maybe medium or nautil.us posting. And put that posting on tech forums, HN, linkedin, reddit, whatever.
And you fail to mention other projects preceding you on this same exact topic, much less discuss the pros and cons of your approach vs previous approach(es). Who knows you might've ended up finding out your own code was a complete reinventing of the wheel and completely redundant (maybe you're too afraid to find that out). (As an example, look at my recent comment about 'building your own linux' vs LFS [1]).
Creating something new and original is hard work. Part of that hard work is searching for existing efforts, related work, doing a literature survey, and whether or not they were successful, and how they compare/contrast with what you did or are going to do, and so on. Short of that, you're just contributing to the noise, the bloat, and the information overload of your content consumers.
What's worse. Not putting in the full effort works for these people too. More often than not, such people are looking for a quick karma-whoring to meet their immediate objective. A github coder is looking to put something quick on their resume, to land a job interview. It's the job of the interviewer or potential employer to hold such people accountable, but I doubt they do.
I don't know. This irks me to no extent. I'm big on minimalism. I spend a lot of my efforts making sure I don't say something that's already said ('say' = a piece or writing, or a piece of code). I don't like to contribute to information bloat. Maybe it's a self-defeating habit (i.e., if you don't say anything most of time, people think you have no talent, you're a nobody).
edit: It also reminds of NIH (not-invented-here) syndrome, something Google is known for. To be clear, it's worse than when it's done by noobs (e.g., for quick karma-whoring to land a job interview, at least they're desperate). When you're in a position of "status", you definitely can do better. It also reminds of the website LessWrong [2]. Those self-entitled wannabes have created a whole universe of philosophical/logical terminology for themselves without consulting the outside world and trying to find out whether "their ideas" originated elsewhere or not.
edit 2: In case anyone wondering, yes I am advocating the opposite of 'publish or perish'. And 'publish or perish' is part of the reason we have so much information bloat (on the internet, in the libraries, everywhere). And that's part of the reason why I say my approach is self-defeating.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15030582
[2] http://lesswrong.com/