Pie doesn't need to be original (unless you claim it so)

As others have mentioned, a pie is consumable, and thus a good one has value even if it isn't original.

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.

Aside from duplication there's also competition. If you bake for your family, your pie will be appreciated, regardless of its novelty. But if your pie is meant to go onto a supermarket shelf alongside other pies, you need to give the consumer an incentive to choose yours - by making it better and/or different.

I like it. We can bike-shed and ackshually the analogy to death, but it's a useful one.

How well does this pie scale?

Sorry, it's a pie. If you want some, I'm sharing.

Going to skip the analogy, because everyone has tortured it sufficiently already.

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.

??? is this a troll post?

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 mean, recreational programming and creating a side project for fun is nice and all, but a peach pie is something you can consume and is thus of interest to anyone who likes peach pies, whereas software that does nothing differently or better than the existing (well-known) solutions is just, well, not interesting to anybody else than the person who wrote it. Kudos to you for writing a generic TODO app, but why should anyone else be excited about it? I'm not sure why we even need to compare baking pies to writing software, it's apples to oranges.

Except it is not a pie but a shovel. So the question how does it differs from ShovelMaster 3000 that is used on all other construction sites is not unreasonable.

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.

It also makes sense for the maker to have some empathy for the chosen audience/recipient

What does this person want with your peach pie — why is it relevant to them? What do they get from the interaction

Loved this article and couldn't agree more with Geoffrey's point.

"How's it different?" is an excellent metric.

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.

Other analogies that might also work:

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.

Better title would be: Don't show your pie to losers on a website; feed it to the hungry.

Nothing from the outset appears that original, in a world of nearly infinite information, when you start. So just do the thing, it will become original in your execution of the thing.

At the time I write this reply, the word "pie" shows up 98 times on this thread.

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."

Software isnt pie. It isnt even food

food analogies don't work for pretty much anything

A pie is just for enjoy a Snack. Software is mostly for getting work done

Pie cannot be duplicated. Even if you're offering me a worse pie than I ate yesterday, either I enjoy yours or I have no pie.

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.

I agree with the idea that many projects are just fun and stand on that basis, but the analogy doesn't work IMHO.

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.

> The friend has assumed that your goal is to "efficiently" reach the goal of a delicious pie, or perhaps even to create a new kind of pie. But that's not the goal at all!

> 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.