| Because then it wouldn't be "cool". So many of the projects I see mentioned here are neat hacks, but that's really about it. People writing a complete operating system for an 8 bit micro made of discrete chips? That's neat, but not really useful, and most people won't ever take the time to boot it once. An FPGA that runs web assembly code? That's nifty, but if we want high performance we probably won't use web assembly to do it. You invented a completely new language that has all the features of C but none of the things that are annoying? We'll add it to the list of C-like-but-not-annoying languages. Found a great new way to estimate how much capital you should try to get when creating a start-up to sell your all-natural soap products in California? That's great for you... a little bit niche for the rest of us. You re-implemented emacs in python? That's a really impressive technical achievement. No one will ever surpass you in either emacs implementation or python hacks. Also, no one will ever use it. Same thing with Hackaday... lots and lots of "cool" projects where neither the creator nor the site mods seem to realize something is just a nifty project, and not the salvation of the world. |
Pure interest and sublime pointlessness are, of course, two of the classic hacker motivations.
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246221 is happily near the top of the front page as we speak.