Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by setr 2178 days ago
If you take enough sources, any particular combination of them is very likely to be unique -- but anyways uniqueness never mattered; everything interesting in CS was discovered in the 70s. Even cloning & updating a forgotten paper can be of extremely high value.

The bigger risk is that by not knowing your sources, you end up repeating the same work from the same start, and end contributing little