But a slight change to the original scenario makes asking about originality much more reasonable:
Imagine you write a peach pie recipe over the weekend, and you give a copy of the recipe to your friend. They respond:
"Wait, how is this different from every other peach pie recipe that's ever been written? It seems really similar to another recipe I have."
That's not an unreasonable answer.
When I was in a band, one of the most valuable things my songwriting friends and I did for each other was tell each other when our work sounded like something that was already out there.
If you make a new piece of software and offer it to a friend to use, it's not unreasonable for them to ask how it's different from something that's out there already.
Being told any of these things by a friend you show the chair to is entirely pointless and maybe even mean. The only angle that has some level of social acceptability is an angle like "check out this chair that's like what you wanted to build, maybe you could learn something from it", but even that is a 50/50 on whether its taken positively or taken as "oh, you don't think I don't know how to build a chair, wtf bro".
Pie recipes are different. Music is different (VERY different) (incomparable).
If I write yet another rails app that does nothing to push the industry forward and isn't novel (to a computer scientist) it nonetheless provides business value. And since it isn't consumed on use it's clear that we're talking about a bespoke durable good — a chair, a shelf, a thing that is useful without it being novel.
Software might be made of words but that doesn't make it a recipe or a song.
edited to make the point clearer
I wouldn't create a new office suite for the joy of creation then offer it along side ms word or google docs. I might make one then put it in a portfolio as a showcase of skill or do it to learn some skill. But having two word processors is useless in a way that having 2 of a consumable good is not.
Almost no material cost.
I'm a big advocate for originality, but its worth noting that most bands will have covered at least one song.
> If you make a new piece of software and offer it to a friend to use, it's not unreasonable for them to ask how it's different from something that's out there already.
If you're comparing baking to software then I'd argue that the software equivalent of a recipe is going to be frameworks and the programming language. And people do very much flock towards common frameworks that are known to work well. Just like how a lot of people prefer to use recipes that are known to work rather than chancing on something unknown.
Everyone? You'd be amazed at the number of songs people think are the originals but are actually covers. I bet there's some songs even you didn't realise were covers
> Even so, bands that do original music often try to do the cover in their own style
"often" is a pretty telling term here because it's also often when the cover is extremely faithful to the original.
> so the question of "how is this different from the original" is still relevant.
People ask that question about all sorts of things. But what the point originally being inferred was, is that if the secondary item isn't distinct enough from the original then the secondary item doesn't have much value. And I'm making a point that doesn't apply to music (and nor do I believe it applies to baking either).
The entire premise of some pastimes, such as karaoke, is centred around the concept of replication rather than originality.
Personally, I prefer originality over replication too. but it would be stupid for me to ignore the fact that a significant number of the worlds population just want to enjoy something without caring about how original it is.
Asking how a product is different is always relevant when allocation of your own resources is involved.
Personally, it takes me less time to decide whether some new software is crap and not worth my time than it does to eat a pie.
1. I value music that is a honest expression of a feeling, some sort of musical idea or whatever
2. Personally I would not usually feel satisfied with my own musical expression if I copied a thing that works for someone else
This means that I also find it unlikely that a popstars scripted appearance just happened to authentically produce expressions that just coincidentally happened to reproduce sucessful music (especially given the fact that they don't write the songs themselves usually). Additionally I apply the standards I apply to myself to others. This is something e.g. programmers are probably deeply familiar with.
Now this is a bit like in the Matrix films where Cypher betrays our heros, because he would rather enjoy his steak in the simulation than face the desert of the real. Only I believe the choice isn't really there. Either you can ignore the simulation or you're allergic to it. I could pretend I like whatever music people listen to usually, but it both bores me and makes me actively hate myself for listening to it.
Now music that is good is something else. And it doesn't even need to be a new idea or particularily complex to play. There just needs to be something within the musical expression that itself goes elsewhere.
> That's not an unreasonable answer.
Pies are not supposed to be unique. Recipes are freely traded. That "friend" is an a-hole.
Or its an envious a-hole since such message is clearly denigrating, still lacks basic emotional intelligence, and then just run and don't look back. If I ever saw 2 women commenting each other's efforts like that, there would be a fight soon or at least lifelong hate would have firmly started.
Normal response is for example a mix of appreciation of effort, curiosity about uniqueness and methodology, other recipes, etc. One can chip in other attempts and compare, that's how mankind lived till now and its considered normal human interaction (TM).
Bad relationships are much worse than no relationships, be it friends or romantic type. Many folks are very afraid of loneliness, but there is strength in it with right mindset for everybody (us introverts thrive in loneliness just sparingly sprinkled with quality human interactions, but others consider it daunting to the point of preferring serious harm)
"Support everything I do blindly" is NOT what friends do its what sycophants do.
Your friend is supposed to lift you up when your right, and tell you "you are being a moron" when your wrong.
It seems like the main difference of opinion in this thread comes down to one's default assumptions about whether you expect your friends to give you honest feedback or just smile to save your feelings. Maybe this is a generational or cultural difference, but I think if you can't get honest feedback from your friends you'll never get it at all.
More precisely, it's a rival good [1].
No, I meant what I wrote. Another comment mentioned a chair [1]. A comfortable chair is not consumable, but it is rival. Rivalry is what makes pies and code economically distinct, not consumability.
Put another way, if you have access to infinite identical pies, they behave like code. They're still consumable. But not rival.
This is totally fine from economic perspective. But when it comes to side projects that aren't selling to consumers, there's no reason to bring down someone if you see no value in their work. Especially when they're sharing it for free with no expectations, like most software side projects we see here hosted on GitHub.
Look at many show HN, someone sharing their little fun project, then you've some entitled users asking
What does this offer over this product of fortune 500 company? Why should I use it?
I doubt that most creators sharing their work as a Show HN have no expectations.
It’s worse, “what does it offer for a Fortune 500 company”
How well does this pie scale?
Sorry, it's a pie. If you want some, I'm sharing.
This is a good point. The comment section implicitly argues for novelty because it seeks a dopamine hit for something new -- after all, that's what people are looking for when they browse an aggregator! However, novel isn't everything even if you get more Internet points for it.
Is it original to execute something really well? Some would say yes, and some would say no. Lots of software that has had an outsized impact started out as very similar to other things, with "just" some improvements here and there. And I guarantee you there were over-eager commenters telling people to not be excited because it isn't new enough to them.
This isn't arguing for toxic positivity, either. Just a recognition that the bored/cynical users need for novelty is not something that everything listed on the Internet has to fill.
A pie is a physical object which enjoys a barrier to competition by being geographically near the consumer - other pies are not near your mouth.
A pie degrades quickly over time - last month's pie is not a competitor to today's pie.
A pie is destroyed during consumption - the pie your friend ate cannot be then eaten by you, no matter how delicious they say it was.
Software (and especially web/mobile/SaaS) is nothing like pies - your friend eats a delicious piece of software, telecommunicates this to you halfway around the world and you can put down the pie you were eating and instantly eat the same pie as your friend, then tell more friends. Pretty soon, nobody's eating the previous pies.
“I made a thing!”
Hey, nice! Lots of us have made the thing, so if you want feedback or advice, just let us know!
That’s quite different from “I made a thing, and I think I can sell it.”
Hey, nice! Lots of us have made the thing so there’s many on the market. What differentiates yours?
There can be many reasons. The practical availability or licensing of the work is the most common one. It is great that google has an amazing implementation of whatever state of the art algorithm. It is not much use to anybody else if they can't read the code, or can't build on it.
The other practical reason is that people building the thing are building their mastery. You are not going to wake up one day and make a state of the art contribution on your first try. You need to build up your skills to it through a series of steps. This would matter even if all software ever written would be equally available and unencumbered for everyone. But if you want people to push the boundaries of what possible they have to get there first.
Do you want someone to be able to bake a beautifully decorated 3 tier wedding cake? That journey starts with them baking a simple sponge cake. Then learning how to put icing on that. Then learning how to make a good cream filling. Then putting simple decoration on. And so on and so on. If you don't let them progress through all these steps and you demand that they bake 3 layer beautifully decorated cakes on their first day then increasingly less and less people will be able to push the state of the art.
And if someone's doing a thing to learn then why is it being shared, how does that change how it's interesting to other people? I often argue such things should be put in portfolios to show off skills, but that doesn't really make it interesting beyond the scope of evaluating someone's skill. This kind of academic or portfolio work is also clearly not what we're discussing because of course it has inherent value in just the creation.
If you make it to do app and share it with me, I really don't care. Unless you're trying to show me that you can use language XYZ with tool set ABC and your to-do app does that. But even then I don't care about the to do with I care about your skills.
Sure.
> This kind of academic or portfolio work is also clearly not what we're discussing because of course it has inherent value in just the creation.
You are no boss of mine, i discuss what i want. :p What you are saying here is exactly the point I am making. You only see the value of the software which is provided by its direct use. So much so that you don’t even want to discuss the alternative values and cide me for even bringing them up.
Imagine that you take steel bars and forge a garden fork out of it using blacksmithing techniques. There is value in that, in as much as the person who made it become a better craft person by doing so. Even if you can get a better fork at home depot for much cheaper.
> If you make it to do app and share it with me, I really don't care.
That is up to you. If you make a todo app and share it with me i will ask you what made you interested in making a todo app. But yeah a todo app is not a particularly inspiring thing in the grand scheme of things, so unless you are a very junior developer or you are trying some new technique you are unlikely to get much accolades for it.
But todo apps is not the only thing one can do. If you implement some cool artistic image filter, or write a process scheduler, or make an auto-router for pcb traces i will celebrate that with you even if there are better solutions out there. Because those are your “garden forks” and the skills you learned while making them can’t be taken away from you.
Re: the open source, you know how often open source projects die because the maintainers get bored or busy or there's disagreement about the direction of the project? A fuckload. Having multiple open source projects that do the same thing - and let's be clear, nothing complex is ever exactly the same - is healthy. It means if they diverge in the future that you may prefer project A and detest the changes made in project B. If project B was the only one to exist, you'd be angry.
And there can be a lot of good answers - it is lighter, it looks cooler, the grip is more ergonomic, it is made of chinesium and cheap and if you are only building a shed - it will get the job done without using the unholy trinity of docker, ansible and terraform, and it will be in your hands in 5 min and not require overnight delivery by amazon.
And you can see this here on hnews - when someone shows us something that is entertaining, no asks how it differs from Heroes 3 or Quake. But we do for the next cloud synced postman clone that is on it's way to becoming as worse as Postman when they get the VC money.
What does this person want with your peach pie — why is it relevant to them? What do they get from the interaction
Why pay you, a person with this as their resume, when I can pay someone with 10 other 'hits' on their resume and their software also does this?
Why pay the newb is a great question to ask.
The answer to 'How is it different' is a whiteboard interview problem. If the developer cannot immediately extol the virtues of their product, do you want to give them money? Are they confident in their skills? Were they just copying other's recipes?
You'll know the answer to that and many other questions the minute the developer has to think and answer this fundamental question.
You'll also know if they're full of shit almost immediately.
It doesn't matter what the developer's prior relationship to you was. When they hand you software, and expect others to pay for it they need to be asked this question. Their answer will assist them in understanding their product and how to sell it to others.
Playing a classical piece music. You’ll never be anywhere near the top musicians, but people still do it because it’s enjoyable. They also share it with others.
Painting: you’re not a professional, but creating and sharing your works is still a joy.
The word CRISP? Will show up once, when I hit "add comment".
This has brought out the worst of Hacker News in a very obvious way. I suppose it was damn near guaranteed to, but you didn't have to literally every one of you bring a CRISPer to a pie fight.
"As a peer reviewer for the CRISP organization (ok, three times) the author is very obviously wrong about pie. It is a moral duty that pie be original work, properly cited, and advance the state of the art. I stopped reading after the second paragraph."
Hmm... While I try to refrain from picking sides in a beatdown on an analogy, that's an interesting suggestion that seems worth examining.
There's a lot of software I use that isn't for getting work done. Even the software that's meant for getting work done doesn't have to be used that way.
Software, on the other side, is duplicated on a whim. If you are not offering me new solutions that I need, I'm not even going to bother looking at it.
So I can not only easily keep getting that one great pie infinitely, I can discover and sample every great pie in the world to find the very best one for me. With actual pie, I'd probably had to travel to Vienna (sachtertore!), or Seattle (apple pie?) to be able to "sample" it.
Same thing happens with software. You grab the same libraries and languages and build the same thing.
I think I get what you’re trying to say when it comes to software but sometimes one might switch even if the new software doesn’t offer new solutions.
Not so with software. Duplication and distribution are essentially free. Copies are perfect replicas. Why not then insist on the best version? Also, with food, the varied experience of slightly different pies is fun (“variety is the spice of life”). Unless I expected variation in my software, I would be extremely annoyed that it did not do what I wanted.
That’s just a different pie made with the same ingredients and recipe, it’s not the same pie I ate yesterday, it’s not a duplicate. I can never have that pie I ate yesterday again.
I can, however, make as many perfect duplicates of software as I want.
Absolutely true but the point of the article is not about duplicating software. Is about developing something someone else already developed in a similar way even though the act of doing that doesn't produce something that's "original".
Pie of Theseus has entered the chat
I'm not, I get what they're saying. If I want to eat pie, I need to bake one first or find someone to bake it every time. If I want to use a software, I only need to write or find the software once; then I can keep using it indefinitely. Therefore, the common assumption is perfectly justified. Most people who write software do so to create something that isn't already available.
That said, I still agree with the post. Justified or not, the assumption is frequently wrong. Coding is fun for its own sake.
Well I guess we must work in a different environment because over my 13 years as a web dev I've seen people trying to reinvent the weel and coding the same thing over and over again. Just think at all infinite JS frameworks.
Are they technically identical? No. Was the problem "solved" already? Probably yes. Was it not solved the exact way the developer wanted? Also probably yes which is why they decided to code something new.
When you bake a pie, it gets eaten, so who cares if it's just like another pie, in fact it's probably great if it is. And the more people baking peach pies, the better!
The analogy should be with pie recipes. In that case, your pie recipe really should bring something different to existing ones. It doesn't need to be 'better' necessarily, but if it's essentially identical, there's no real point to the recipe, except for you to practice writing out recipes.
Because maybe it is the same recipe with the same ingredients but the end result can still be different. Maybe yours is handwritten and I like your calligraphy, maybe you’re more meticulous and you documented all the steps more in details.
It can still be the same recipe. It can still provide the same service and yet there might still be useful differences.
As a software example, 'ls' but written in rust.
There's of course nothing wrong with re-implementing 'ls' in C with all the same patterns, and sure, that could be fun, and maybe even earn a slither of respect, but no-one is going to care about your project as something useful or interesting, quite rightly.
If you consider those part of the recipe then I guess yes.
> but no-one is going to care about your project as something useful or interesting, quite rightly.
Which is totally fair and I think part of the article argues that there are situations where that's absolutely fine.
> Baking a pie is a creative act. It's personal, it's inherently delightful, it's an act of caring for others. It's also a craft that one can improve at over time. Just buying the "best" pie would defeat the point.
Not sure author realises the irony here. Creating "the pie" is not art. It is not even craft. It is baking ingredients, and people did that bazilions times before.
He still cannot replicate her pies.
Your mom's case is different and much more interesting. She must make truly transcendent pies.
My half-dozen forays into making "from scratch" pie crust and filling have been surprisingly successful, but I might be missing something. I followed recipes from either Mark Bittman or America's Test Kitchen.