Engineering is about constraints. Any damned fool can build a 10km suspension bridge given enough unobtanium and micraculum. That's cheating.
You can get quite interesting and very creative solutions when you apply artificial constraints.
This stuff happens in the real-world all the time, especially in consumer electronics. I've had to do video-rate unpacking of samples that were aligned on really nasty boundaries. Far cheaper (in this instance) to do it in software . . . so we got clever.
Meta comment: For you maybe. I found it rather boring and skimmed it after the first para. It's about javascript to begin with ;) And looks a bit poo.
I prefer startup news and programming advances. That's not really programming news, it's just a rather dull writeup about how someone made a picture of a rose, something I have no desire to do.
And we've been able to do it for decades. Apart from some reason now HTML5 has a canvas a lot of people seem to have the need to reinvent the wheel.
My point, we're all different, there's no such thing as perfect. These kind of articles are fun once in a while but HN would be fairly useless if that kind of article was all that dominated it.
Sounds like you're unclear on the concept of "hacker" and "hack". Remember, if people never reinvented the wheel, we'd still be rolling our carts around on discs made of three pieces of wood.
