
When to Copy Ideas, When to Steal Ideas - davnicwil
https://davnicwil.com/when-to-copy-ideas-when-to-steal-ideas/
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samsquire
Take my ideas, please!

[http://github.com/samsquire/ideas2](http://github.com/samsquire/ideas2)
[http://github.com/samsquire/ideas](http://github.com/samsquire/ideas)
[http://github.com/samsquire/ideas3](http://github.com/samsquire/ideas3)

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gumby
There's even more to this. davnicwil says just use the same sponge cake and
excel in your area of expertise: the icing. Good advice.

Alternatively, if you are a "fast follower": after the other company has
evangelized the new feature (sponge cake) and started to build an audience for
it, you can see what features seem to really matter and either make a
simplified one or one that addresses the limitations of it.

A great example is the iPod, the famously lame latecomer ("no wifi, less space
than a nomad. Lame"). Apple launched into a market which was already
developing (tiny MP3 players), and not only put their own "icing" on it (e.g.
design) but addressed a couple of the fundamental problems with the existing
ones (the complexity of getting music into them and navigating to find what
you want). So they weren't even really competing with the other players.

~~~
npunt
Agree, and to dive in a bit more to the icing, one of the most important and
least remembered ingredients in that icing was the 1.8" Toshiba hard drive.
That allowed for the miniaturization of the iPod relative to other, clunkier
players like the Nomad that used much larger 2.5" laptop hard drives [1], or
flash-based players that could store only 25-50 songs.

Combined with iTunes, they solved for the end-to-end experience: easy to use,
easy to carry around, easy to manage your library. Other players only solved
for the narrow experience of playing music.

To be honest, though I do like the industrial design of the first iPod, it was
perhaps the weakest part of the icing. The click wheel hadn't even been
invented. It was all about the three pillars of iTunes, compact size, and
'1000 songs in your pocket'. Despite the subject of the post being about
copying, on iPod they actually copied very little from existing products of
the time, in style and substance.

[1] [http://www.iretron.com/blog/posts/technology-flashback-
creat...](http://www.iretron.com/blog/posts/technology-flashback-creative-
nomad-jukebox-2000/)

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phsource
> Copy [means] to borrow an idea for its known useful results; steal [means]
> to take ownership of an idea and extend it to create some novel result.

> Copy the same sponge any cake could use, then using your own creative
> talents as icing to make something uniquely great (steal) in the areas that
> make a difference in your product's niche... Steal strategy! Copy tactics

As an engineer working on product, this is good advice. It's often appealing
to reinvent the wheel and succumb to "not-built-here" symptom. Especially when
it comes to questions like "what stack and language to use", often, the best
answer is "whatever has worked before." Rather, what's worth reinventing is
the actual features or user-facing aspects of the product.

Don't go crazy making your own global Javascript store: just roll Redux or
MobX. As someone who loves engineering challenges, I find myself reining
myself in a lot on this at Wanderlog
([https://wanderlog.com](https://wanderlog.com)). But I realize whether we're
successful or not isn't going to be our technical infrastructure. That needs
be solid, but what really matters are the little things we can do to wow
travelers

~~~
sidesquid
Why do people always plug their companies in their comments? It turns me off
completely.

~~~
hazz99
WanderLog is a YC company. This is a YC website.

It also shows that where their experience comes from, adds validity. In this
case, I can go directly to their website and see the results of them "reining
themselves in" on a production website.

~~~
sidesquid
I’m more inclined to dig into his company if his comment offers insights but
when you just plug your company in, it just makes your comment feel insincere
like pr speak.

Am Googler, ex-FB, Uber, want me to list my resume?

~~~
bryanrasmussen
I think his plug was only about a 4th of his post, I would have expected a
little bit more shamelessness if that were really his goal.

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NiceWayToDoIT
"I am not bothered they stole my ideas, but that they have not had any of
their own" \-- Nikola Tesla

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yesenadam
>"Good artists copy. Great artists steal"

Who said that? Steve Jobs? It seems so.

The tireless Quote Investigator[0] locates many sources, including a
progenitor from the 19th C, but can't find Picasso (who Jobs credited) saying
it.

I was familiar with the T.S. Eliot version "Immature poets imitate; mature
poets steal", or in its context:

"One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets
imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets
make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet
welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different
from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which
has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time,
or alien in language, or diverse in interest."

The point of that is, in part, that good artists _don 't_ copy.
Copying/imitation of the greats is how you learnt to make art, but it's part
of learning, part of becoming an artist–not part of being one, let alone a
good one.

I always think of the way Shakespeare took a plot, say _King Lear_ , from
historical sources, and made it his own. It's akin to a "cover" (in the rock
music sense), but made so completely his own that every other version is
forgotten.

[0] [https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-
steal/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/)

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gunshai
To start, how about South Korea's approach to testing corona virus.

I fully accept that this is a low effort and mostly off topic comment.

~~~
magicsmoke
That implies having the technical competency required to copy. You can't copy
another project's code when you can't even find the power button.

------
lawrenceyan
If all you ever do is copy and steal, you'll never learn how to develop the
skills necessary to innovate and create.

~~~
davnicwil
That's the theme of my post :-)

I used _copy_ and _steal_ in the same deliberately ironic way they're meant in
the famous quote "Good artists copy, great artists steal" \- i.e. wrt the
creative process of reusing and extending existing ideas to innovate and
create new things!

