Creativity Isn't about Ideas; It's about Execution  - <AUTHOR> http://speculativeintent.com/2013/11/15/creativity-isnt-about-ideas-its-about-execution/ <comment><USER2> I make computer programs for a living. Perhaps in the future, if opportunities arise, I hope to go into hardware production business.

So being in a situation where I must exert my "creativity" in order to succeed, I must say that this article is a resounding confirmation of what I had known all along. In fact, one of the earliest words on this topic that I remember hearing, was from my own mother, who is an artist. She told me that great, creative ideas came from observing many different great ideas produced by others, and juxtaposing them intelligently to make it your own.

I have two things that I want to talk about on this topic:

So firstly, I want to talk about the value of possessing(or experiencing) great, well-designed products. Although I try not to be so visible about it, my closest friends know I am completely anal when it comes to quality and design. As an example, when I am hanging out with my guy friends, and we decide to rent a movie online, I am the one that insists on renting the HD version. It's because of these type of situations that my friends would joke that I am a snob or too materialistic. And perhaps that is some truth to those statements, but I always felt that there was something much more important in the reasoning of my desire. I always felt that great products and great experiences set up the environment for me to be creative. I think Steve Jobs said it best when he said, "In order to create something that deserves to sit alongside the best products in the world, you have to have spent enough time interacting with the best products."

Now as for my second comment: It seems to me that most of the people in the world have this idea that creativity is purely original, and thus are so appalled when they see things such as Apple taking cues from Window Phone's flat design concept, and so on. And although technology is a relatively new thing, creativity has been around ever since there were civilizations, and so people were "stealing" ideas for centuries. How is it, after all these years, that the general public still have this almost mystical view on creativity? It's as if this is a deep, dark secret that all "creative" people in the world try to conceal from the general public to keep themselves in the business and to attach a "magical" appeal to their work.</comment>


Ida the missing link to human evolution - <AUTHOR> http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Missing-Link-Scientists-In-New-York-Unveil-Fossil-Of-Lemur-Monkey-Hailed-As-Mans-Earliest-Ancestor/Article/200905315284582?lpos=World_News_Carousel_Region_0&lid=ARTICLE_15284582_Missing_Link%3A_Scientists_In_New_York_Unveil_Fossil_Of_Lemur_Monkey_Hailed_As_Mans_Earliest_Ancestor

<comment><USER2> It's not often that the site describing the research is more hyped and graphically annoying than the news story about it. I was going to replace the url of this news story with the direct link to the research it described,

<http://www.revealingthelink.com/>

but after following it I decided to leave the news story.

I don't think I've ever seen research promoted in this way. It's like the web site of a movie. It makes me immediately suspect all their conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone know if the research team around this has actually published anything? Everything that I have seen on this is all in some mass media format. There's a book, a film, and a few pictures of a suspiciously intact skeleton, but I haven't seen any links to actual research yet.

Really, this thing seems to be throwing out pretty much every warning sign possible.</comment>


YouTube TV is now live in select markets - <AUTHOR> https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/04/youtube-tv-is-now-live.html <comment><USER2> I tried sling.tv but canceled it, too much lag and terrible UX experience. Seems like the lag was even worse on chromecast. This UI is already much better, so if the DVR works as expected it will finally replace cable for me. Live sports is all I use cable for and youtube tv includes ESPN and FS1/FS2 in Chicago.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone making money from Allposters affiliates programme? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I have a number of niche sites that attract a healthy amount of targeted traffic and send allposters a lot of unique visitors, but the conversion rate is extremely low.
Has anyone had any success with allposters.com affiliates? Any thoughts on how I could make these sites into money makers?
If you want to check the site out :
http://www.spanishcivilwarposters.com/ http://www.ww1posters.com/
I know they are not exactly oil paintings, but the bounce rate is lowish(50%). <comment><USER2> First thing I would do is mask the affiliate links using something like [http://www.w1posters.com/go/<insert-unique-id-for- each-p...](http://www.w1posters.com/go/<insert-unique-id-for-each-poster-you- link-to>);

Second thing I would do is emphasize current coupon codes for your visitor to use. Free shipping, 25% off, etc etc

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your response.Good idea regarding the coupon codes, that is something I will look at doing. Do you think people care that they are affiliate links?</comment></comment>


14 years ago today, the first full racks of aws servers were ordered - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/jim_scharf/status/1044379485531856896 <comment><USER2> I'd be really interested in an in-depth tour through one of AWS data centers, including a detailed look at the server and network architecture they're using nowadays.

Maybe AWS would benefit from being a bit more open, because that e.g. might explain things like the incredible high data transfer charges.</comment>


BT sues Google over Android 'patent infringements' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16243414 <comment><AUTHOR> BT are the same people who realised, a bit too late, that they had the patent for hyperlinks.

(<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1072484.stm>)

They did, eventually, lose that.</comment>


Uber Hires Former Lyft COO VanderZanden - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2014/10/06/uber-hires-former-lyft-coo-vanderzanden-to-spur-international-growth/ <comment><USER2> Ouch, that must hurt. I love Lyft and I despise Uber's anticompetitive tactics, so this is sad news.

<comment><USER3> Lyft has apparently engaged in the exact same competitive tactics. It's allegedly how they got the majority of their supply in NYC. Lyft has also apparently done twice as many cancellations of Uber requests as uber did from Lyft. Uber seems competitive, but I'm not buying that they're anti- competitive, or that Lyft is better. If anything Lyft is worse for crying about "unfair" tactics while engaging in those same tactics. At least Uber owns the fact that they're aggressively recruiting new drivers (something that's good for all the drivers regardless of their company).</comment></comment>


Rep. Ilhan Omar Went After Elliott Abrams for Lying to Congress; He Did It Again - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2019/02/14/ilhan-omar-elliott-abrams-hearing/ <comment><USER2> [https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/01/19/james- clap...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/01/19/james-clappers- perjury-dc-made-men-dont-get-charged-lying-congress-jonathan-turley- column/1045991001/)</comment>


CSS @apply Rule Specification - <AUTHOR> http://tabatkins.github.io/specs/css-apply-rule/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is basically the spec'ing of the cross-scope styling implementation in Polymer: [https://www.polymer- project.org/1.0/docs/devguide/styling.ht...](https://www.polymer- project.org/1.0/docs/devguide/styling.html#xscope-styling)

It looks like there are just a few minor syntax differences, and it'll be faster and more dynamic.</comment>


How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio - <AUTHOR> https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/06/hacked-my-universitys-registration-system-python-twilio.html <comment><USER2> I was in the US and want to immigrate to Canada because of US broken H1B immigration system ( for me it will take 9 years to get a greencard). Here is what I did -

The immigration website of Saskatchewan province opens up randomly to apply for immigration. I missed it many times because there is no indication other than the "Apply" button being enabled and a small text in their homepage which says "Applications are now 'open' ". They will close the application intake when they have reached X number of applicants. So timing is very important.

So I hacked up a script which diffs their home page every 10 minutes for "open" regex. When there is an "open" keyword in the diff, the python script calls twilio API to make a phone call to me along with an SMS.

So this script was running in AWS for many weeks and one day I got the call. Logged in to Saskatchewan's immigration homepage and applied. Now I am in Canada as a permanent resident. Thanks to Twilio.

edit: add H1B to make clear which type of immigration is broken IMO.

<comment><USER3> Nice story, and great that Twilio worked out for you - but this really is the sort of thing that email alerts (or IM alerts, or IRC alerts) should also work fine for.

I would argue that the fact that you find SMS/phone calls a more urgent alert is a fault with your phone/communication setup - and twilio is an interesting hack around that.

But there really _should_ be an easy way to make just as much ruckus from a simple email, based on topic/sender filtering... (hm, maybe there's a nice side project for an app in there...).

<comment><USER4> Yeah, this isn't really a major Twilio win or a hack - it's a basic scraping technique.

I found a house for myself and a friend in a similar way, reverse engineer mobile app from MLS, scrape all listings once a day to get new stuff as it hits the market and you can now be far more selective than the crappy search on the MLS site allows.

<comment><USER5> Yeah you can sends texts to your phone just like sending an email.

<comment><USER6> How to do that?

<comment><USER7> Put the phone number in front of a domain for each carrier, a list is here.

[https://github.com/WilliamFCipriano/FreeSMS/blob/master/data...](https://github.com/WilliamFCipriano/FreeSMS/blob/master/data/gateways.list)

<comment><USER8> There are several international lists too, here's a couple:

[https://martinfitzpatrick.name/list-of-email-to-sms- gateways...](https://martinfitzpatrick.name/list-of-email-to-sms-gateways/)

[https://www.opentextingonline.com/emailtotext.aspx](https://www.opentextingonline.com/emailtotext.aspx)

<comment><USER9> Do they work? For Portugal it still lists Telecel - which hasn't existed since '99.

<comment><USER7> My list is accurate as of a year or so ago, or at least they don't bounce back when you send an email to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I did this for one of my classes as well. But since it was just a one off, I just put this bash script in a cron job on a free-tier AWS ec2. It just did a quick and dirty parse of the html, which for my university wasn't behind a login wall.

      $seats="$(curl $URL | sed \"140qd\" | sed -nE \"s/<TD CLASS=\\\"$CLASS\\\">|<\\/TD>//gp\")"
      if [ $seats -gt 0 ]; then
          echo "Go register for class $URL" | msmtp -a "default" $EMAIL
      fi

<comment><USER11> Yep. This is what I did. Also, I just used the email address for my phone's SMS. I'm not sure why you need Twilio for this, seems like over kill to me.

<comment><USER12> It's an ad for Twilio, of course Twilio is needed for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you were able to do that prior to taking CS101, you might not need CS101.

<comment><USER14> If you want to get that piece of paper that some companies require...

<comment><USER15> At my school, they would waive requirements if you take a higher level course in the same track. For example, if I just took CS102 that requires CS101, I wouldn't have to go back to satisfy the CS101 requirement.

Obviously everywhere is different.

<comment><USER16> How... are you taking CS102 that requires CS101... without taking CS101? Are the requirements not actually required?

<comment><USER17> IDK about the parent's school, but my at university (RPI), when I was there, students could simply opt to skip "CS101", and move to "CS102". I think it was also encouraged (but again, not required) to have taken one of the AP CS tests if you did so.

I think you could also opt out of "CS102" if you desired. It was on the student to determine how much they knew. The school just understood that a number of CS students had been doing this for some time on their own, and had mastered some of the basics.

I skipped the "CS101" course, which was mostly intro to programming, control flow, etc. I decided against skipping the "CS102" course; the first half wasn't that exciting (I knew how linked lists, vectors, hash tables worked) but trees got me (and some of the more exotic stuff at the end of the course), so I'm glad I took it.

<comment><USER16> Interesting. At least when I was at my UC 10 years ago we weren't able to skip any classes. Maybe they have wisened up and made them optional or have a system in place to prove them unnecessary. It makes some sense to make sure everyone has the same level of fundamentals though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you're using Python, please don't reinvent the wheel and write your own scraper. Use Scrapy ([https://scrapy.org/](https://scrapy.org/)). It's one of the most tested and powerful scrapers out there.

<comment><USER19> For a use case like in the article would it make more sense to use beautifulsoup or is there an advantage to scrapy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I did a similar thing my freshman year of college, and by junior year I created an API based around the class registration system and an iPhone/Android app for it that sends push notifications to students when the class they want opens up (shameless plug: [http://www.eaglescribe.com/](http://www.eaglescribe.com/)).

This past semester, the active users was between 1/3-1/2 of the undergrad students in the school. As you can imagine, popular classes had dozens of people "subscribed" to receive notifications when it opened, so it became a race to sign up once the push went out. On the plus side, this gave us a treasure trove of data on the most popular courses, and we've been in communication with the school to see if they would be interested in this data.

</comment><comment><USER21> Twilio is great and all but an SMS or other notification doesn't actually guarantee you a class that's available to all students.

A class was sniped from me one time while I was still on the confirmation screen. So unlike OP I fully automated the process.

EDIT: A notification & response is good for solving a captcha if they have one, if you don't want to outsource that to mechanical turk (or trust their timing / accuracy).

</comment><comment><USER22> This is an interesting proof of concept. I'm impressed at how simple the SMS signup code is.

For many universities though, it won't be this simple. Many hide the open seats behind a login, which means you need to be a student there to see them. Many also use student information systems that are a real pain to scrape like this. Once you get to the point where interacting with the student information system is done via AJAX requests mediated by a mess of JavaScript, it starts to push the limits of what you can do with this technique.

When it gets to this point you either have to carefully dissect everything on the Network tab of your developer tools, or use a real browser. I've used PhantomJS (basically a headless WebKit) and Selenium WebDriver with great success on sites that are not amenable to scraping. The neat thing is that you really only need to use that for the interaction to get to where the information is. Once you've navigated there you can just have it dump the rendered page as HTML and parse it using the same techniques shown here.

<comment><USER23> Author here--you're totally right. When we did this for our actual registration site, we spent hours inspecting requests in a proxy[0] to get to ~194 lines of PHP.

0: We used [https://www.charlesproxy.com/](https://www.charlesproxy.com/)

<comment><USER22> Yeah, that's more what I'd expect to see with a standard student information system. I can only imagine the amount of work it took - the last time I encountered a site like that that I wanted to scrape I gave up (this was before I discovered PhantomJS).

It's really too bad that universities don't foster creativity like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wondering why you didn't also automate the process of actually signing up for the seat? Getting notified that a seat is open is helpful but automatically taking the open seat sounds a lot more helpful.

Though at that point you'd have a lot more luck with selenium or some other web driver.

<comment><USER25> Would you rather fail to register for an open seat or fail to find an open seat? Maybe I'm biased because I made the same choice as an undergrad, I stopped short of registering for the class automatically.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, automating that next step is making the failure mode much worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Need to be careful about this one. A student at my alma mater was suspended for doing the same thing: [https://www.reddit.com/r/ucf/comments/xo5ye/ucf_student_pena...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ucf/comments/xo5ye/ucf_student_penalized_for_writing_program_to)

You have to love the education system...

<comment><USER28> In your example, he was charging for the service, which was against the terms of use of the web site he was scraping.

So in general, do be sure to not violate a site's terms, but I don't see what that point has to do with your final comment...

<comment><USER29> What a horrible university. If a system is so bad that people will pay for the improvements, they are doing it wrong.

<comment><USER28> I don't think "people will pay for <thing>" is justification for "any university that doesn't do <thing> is horrible".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I tried building a similar service at my university when I was in undergrad, and it led to lots of administrative conflicts, because people using my service were thought to have an unfair advantage in the registration process.

</comment><comment><USER31> Burp is probably the better tool for the job in most cases since you're usually just looking to repeat a request until you get the response you're looking for.

If you just want to automate registration to ensure you get a seat in a course you should be looking into your school's network topology to minimize latency.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm dating myself, but when I went, it was a standard phone AVR, with touch tone menus. I used a war dialer to get into all my classes. Ahh, the good ole days.

<comment><USER33> Which wardialer?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> For the curious, if you just want to one-off this for yourself, you probably don't need twilio to do it. Most carriers have a special domain that if you send email with the recipient's phone number, it turns into a text. I've got Verizon and its as simple as this from the command line:

 _echo 'Text message text' | mail -s 'Subject will display in braces in the message' -a 'From: firstname.lastname@example.com' 'email@example.com'_

This ended up working faster than Twilio for me. (Less than 10 seconds from enter key to text on phone).

<comment><USER35> Is the SMS free? If not, who pays for it?

<comment><USER36> In the US, the recipient pays for texts.

<comment><USER8> So we can drain your account sending you texts, how mad is that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Some time ago Berkeley switched from Telebears to a new registration system developed by PeopleSoft/Oracle. Needless to say, it's garbage. I wrote a couple scripts to pull class data from the API in an effort to help me get into our heavily oversubscribed CS courses by searching for open sections, but the system seems to be designed to make using it as painful and worthless as possible. Luckily this semester the EECS department has put dummy sections in for all classes so students who are able to register for a lecture don't get permanently stuck on the waiting list because of a full section.

College administrators who are considering Oracle for your registration needs, please consider anyone else instead, for everyone's sake.

</comment><comment><USER38> I remember a classmate of mine doing the exact same 'hack' and distributed it to the whole school (Well, it was posted on school's major Facebook group with 10k-ish members) but it didn't have the SMS bit (It notified you via E-Mail, AFAIK).

<comment><USER39> I don't know about you, but for me receiving an email and receiving an SMS are identical notifications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is pretty cool. I did something similar with adwords scripts a few years ago. I was doing facebook advertising a few years ago and the ads featured products that would occasionally sell out, but there wasn't a way to monitor them so if something sold out, the ad would go to an empty product page. I rigged up a system that would take a list of URLs, look for "sold out" on the content of the page and then send me a text if it found a sold out product. I used Adwords scripts because it was able to run jobs hourly and all I really knew at the time was JS. It was a fun little project.

</comment><comment><USER41> I used to work in University IT and registration time is the worst. The systems never handle the load well and everyone freaks out. I think your work might anger the sysadmins b/c of the increased load.

<comment><USER42> Couldn't you just let anybody sign up for $LONG_ENOUGH_PERIOD and then randomize who gets in the classes? It sounds like a much better solution in general.

<comment><USER43> My university switched to that for some (mostly optional) classes. This resulted in a lower attendance rates because as a student you end up registering for pretty much everything instead of one or two classes you really want. There was a system in place to fill the empty seats with students still in the waiting queue by the second session but most students already got into other classes and just didn't remove themselves from the queues. So the students got an email that a seat was free for them which they ignored and because you can only miss two sessions before failing the classes, the seats stayed mostly empty.

<comment><USER44> Okay, so what about this:

Students _rank_ their course preferences in an order and submit it. For each course, free seats are first allocated to the students who ranked it as their first choice, then what is left to the students who ranked it as a second choice, and so on until the round _n_ and there are less seats available than people who ranked the course as their _n_ th choice: the remaining seats are allocated by a lot to them. (For a very popular course, they would have to start with the random selection right away on the round n=1).

However, instead of enrolling the lucky students right away, everyone gets notified about which classes they have been _tentatively_ admitted, and they must confirm their attendance before they can take their seat. If they don't confirm in a timely manner, they lose the opportunity and the free seats are propagated to students left in the waiting list until someone accepts (again using random lot).

The one problem I can think of: the process (especially the propagation of rejected offers in the waiting list) may be too long-winded to be practical. So maybe skip the confirmation part: there's a set maximum number of courses you can take, M, and slots are filled until you're enrolled to maximum of M courses.

But in any case, if the overbooking is enough of a problem so that you are looking at methods like these, the real problem is that have too many students compared to the teaching resources. All other attempts can only mitigate the symptoms of the root cause.

So maybe staff should choose limit the amount of students eligible to take some very popular courses by an entrance exam, or imposing certain mandatory minimal GPA requirement in the prerequisite courses. This option should be especially considered if the attrition rate is high (there's a problem of students taking much-coveted seats in the class but who fail to show up or otherwise don't put in enough effort to pass). Usually that would have been done on the admission level already, though.

<comment><USER45> You might be interested in bidding systems for enrolling in courses. The National University of Singapore has one [http://www.nus.edu.sg/registrar/events/module- enrolment.html](http://www.nus.edu.sg/registrar/events/module-enrolment.html)

"All students are given an equal amount of points per semester to bid for modules... The allocation of modules is based on the lowest successful bid points against the last available quota for the module at the end of each bidding round. If supply (module quota) exceeds demand (number of bidders) for a module for any bidding round, the lowest successful bid will be 1 bid point. If there is a tie in the lowest successful bid points, the outcome will be based on first-come-first-served. Unsuccessful bidders will be fully refunded. Any unused bid points after each round will be carried over to the next bidding round or to the next semester at the end of the registration exercise."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I built a similar service when I was in school at UNC. Unfortunately, the IT dept blocked my server IP and asked me to shut down the service after it got press (and lots of usage.)

</comment><comment><USER47> There exists something like this for Rutgers University. Anyone can submit a course to be tracked along with email, and once a course pops up as open, an email is sent. Text messages are not used since they are not free and this project is maintained by students, not university. But it can be easily modified and self-hosted since the source is on Github: [https://github.com/v/sniper](https://github.com/v/sniper)

</comment><comment><USER48> I've done a similar thing with Southwest Airline's check-in. They let people get seated based on the order in which they check in for their flight. So right before the 24 hour period began I would run a script that tried to check me in repeatedly until it succeeded. Usually got really good seats.

EDIT: to those asking for the source, it was just a bash script that I have probably lost. The GitHub linked in this subthread looks a lot better than what I had.

<comment><AUTHOR> Greg from Twilio here. I _love_ Southwest[1] and have wanted to do something like this forever. Would you be up for sharing the source? Can drop me a note at email@example.com.

[1]: [http://baugues.com/southwest](http://baugues.com/southwest)

<comment><USER49> I used this last year for ~ 10 flights. [https://github.com/aortbals/southwest- checkin](https://github.com/aortbals/southwest-checkin)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is great. And RUBY!! Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I did the same thing at UCSB 10 years ago to constantly poll for seats opening up in a class. This was back when GOLD was a primitive web interface that was clearly screen-scraping an IBM AS/400 terminal app. I used python and twill-- put values into forms (no JavaScript and the form IDs never changed), login, search for the class, and scrape.

<comment><USER51> Same at UCSC, I even considered trying to monetize the script given what an atrocious system it was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Odd that this is still an issue 20 years after the first time I heard about this.

This reminds me of the story of beartracks, and how it was shut down by the University of Alberta to make everyone register by phone .. and eventually was brought back by the university.

Tried to find a link I had read about the story, but can't seem to find it.

</comment><comment><USER53> [https://github.com/ChrisCinelli/scraperNotifier](https://github.com/ChrisCinelli/scraperNotifier) \- This can check if regex exist or do not exist. It send an email or a message on Slack using a hook.

I used successfully with Eventbrite for hackthons sign up.

</comment><comment><USER54> I've written a similar thing for the Dell Outlet: [https://outletmeknow.redfern.me/](https://outletmeknow.redfern.me/). SMS notification isn't actually working at the moment as I've run out of Twilio credit, but Email should be fine.

</comment><comment><USER55> I remember I made this same thing when I was in undergrad b/c my uni didn't have waitlists. So people could waitlist on my app. Their priority in the waitlist is determined by a market.

I remember getting SMS's in the middle of the night alerting me that a seat opened up!

<comment><USER56> _" Their priority in the waitlist is determined by a market."_

I'm very surprised registration systems aren't (generally) some kind of phased auction. There's got be some research, experiments somewhere exploring different strategies.

I worked on student facing software in higher ed. Admins were obsessed with fairness. Our registration systems had all sorts of arcane rules. Which were hard to explain, validate, troubleshoot. And probably neither fair or effective.

Some kind of auction, where blocks of seats were made available to different populations, progressively over time, would greatly simplify the implementation and understanding.

For (a greatly simplified) example, GRADUATION REQUIREMENT ABC has 200 seats. 50 seats are released every hour. First hour, seniors have first shot. Second hour, opens up for juniors and program enrollees. Third hour, sophomores. Fourth hour, freshmen.

Of course, there are other factors, like multiple sections (same class offered at different times).

\--

We also talked about predicting demand (capacity planning). A novel solution there might moot the entire registration stampede. Perhaps a "buying club" type solution, where students state which classes they'll "buy" and roughly when. Then registrars form up sections to satisify the largest number of students. This could reduce the twin connundrums of waitlists and over capacity.

Anywho. It's an interesting problem, ripe for innovative optimization, matchmaking, auction/market solutions.

<comment><USER57> I'm very surprised prereigstration systems exist at all for college level lecture courses. Personally, I prefer the system where anyone can sign up for (almost) any class and then the university hires/reassigns teaching assistants as needed:

[http://www.thecrimson.com/admissions/article/2013/9/10/cours...](http://www.thecrimson.com/admissions/article/2013/9/10/course- selection-shopping-week/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I did a similar thing like this back in university, I made it a mobile app with notification and passed around. It got popular and I received cease and desist from my university shortly afterwards, now the system has a captcha on every page haha.

</comment><comment><USER59> Is there a generic page scraper library or toolset? I can see a ton of demand here and it seems like something you could use on your day to day. Things like this actually seem like an outlier, I'd imagine airfare would be a huge one.

<comment><USER23> The nearest thing I can think of is Scrapy ([https://scrapy.org/](https://scrapy.org/)).

For airfare, I think there's already a few players in the "this flight got cheaper" space (Kayak and Hopper come to mind), but they don't have data on some airlines (because of the airlines' ToS IIRC).

</comment></comment><comment> Paul-ish Someone started charging for this service near the end of my time at University of Washington. I think the university implemented their own notification system so that class registration didn't become pay to win.

</comment><comment><USER60> Why not just send yourself an email? Much simpler than using Twilio. Your smartphone will alert you either way.

</comment><comment><USER61> for sending yourself updates when a bug is encountered or a condition is met, isn't it better to use something like PushBullet instead of normal text messages?

</comment><comment><USER62> A lot of things here smells like pure advertisement. hmm...

</comment><comment><USER63> Can we stop calling screen scraping scripts a hack?

</comment><comment><USER64> Cool! But I'd use a Telegram bot for free. :-)

</comment><comment><USER65> Now just figure out a way to sell the whole solution back to the university, and you'll have paid for your tuition fees.

<comment><USER66> Sounds like the quickest way to get a call from the university's IT department…

<comment><USER65> It's the IT department he should be selling it to.

It sounds like exactly the sort of service they should be providing.

<comment><USER66> Yes, but IT departments at universities are lazy and quick to label incidents like this as "hacking".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Probably the word "hacked" made it click baity, atleast in my opinion. Automation, yes. Not sure there was a vulnerability involved.

<comment><USER68> It's also a bit risky, as some University administrators may not understand that he isn't actually being malicious. Automated scraping can be considered a violation of some IT policies though, so OP should be careful about something like this.

<comment><USER69> I'm in higher-ed infosys and we see a number of automated registration sniping hacks in our monitoring / metrics. We usually don't run it up the chain unless it's malicious or impacting the service for other students. Otherwise we just investigate it a little bit and share it on Slack with the group if it's clever. The only time we've ever reached out to a student is to ask him to stop sharing it with others (and fix it) because it was performing some really aggressive polling.

Some other schools in our system are really reactionary, though, and consider _any_ automation a ToS violation and will freak out.

e: And if you know the URL pattern / platform of your Uni's registration system, there's probably already a couple of examples on github of a registration bot.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Best approach to processing uploaded images - <AUTHOR>

How would one go about manipulating uploaded images on dedicated image server?  Every upload, do you use ftp to pull the images from web server to image server?  Any other alternatives that is available? <comment><USER2> Give them a unique ID, correlate it to the upload in your database. Then upload the image to S3. Also drop a description of what needs to be done in an Amazon Simple Queue.

Your Image Processors poll the queue. Receive the work order, fetch the image from S3 and then store it back there or do whatever you need to do with them.

Loosely coupled. Scalable. Fault tolerant. Oh and simple to implement.

Ping me if you need help with this :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Solution will change as size and needs of the deployment change. If accepting images from the wild, dedicated image processing is a Good Idea because there are some images out there that to nasty things to any/all of the image manipulation libs available.

For giving the image to the image processor, I kind of like just using NFS. Simple, works up to a pretty big load, and when it does you will have a better feel for your operational needs -- everying _is_ different.

In terms of libraries to use, I think ImageMagick (via C!) and JAI (Java) are probably the best available. There are more, and YMMV, but I'd start with one of them. In terms of designing the app, well, that depends on what exactly you need!

<comment><USER2> /* NFS dorks */

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If the volume and processing effort is high and variable enough that you _sometimes_ need multiple processing machines, Amazon EC2 + SQS + S3 may be of help. I think that's what SmugMug uses.

<comment><USER5> Here's a recent and very good blog post by the Chief Geek at SmugMug:

       http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/06/03/skynet-lives-aka-ec2-smugmug/

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> this is for plurk?</comment>


I'm Tired Of Companies Ripping off our site, So I'm Calling Them Out - <AUTHOR> http://andresmax.com/post/42279937752/im-tired-of-companies-ripping-off-our-site-so-im <comment><USER3> I think you might just be taking the wrong approach. Shaming them is a bad idea, at least as a first move.

Seek-out and contact the owners of these businesses. Point out what you have discovered. There's an outside possibility that they have no clue that their web designers have done this. They might actually feel rather embarrassed to learn so. If I couldn't code my own sites and had to rely on designers who took this approach I certainly would feel pretty bad upon learning about it.

What to do then? Tell them that you'll gladly allow them to use the design for a small fee. Or, perhaps better yet, if they actually hired an outside firm to build their site, propose that you take over their site design and that you'll fix what they got wrong.

If the deed was done in-house or you are up against a coder-designer-founder that just go lazy, figure out a win-win. Out of respect they ought to at least pay you something. You could even lobby for a link in the footer with "Site design based on ...". I wouldn't opt for "Site designed by" because if they screw it up it could look bad for you.

Aikido vs. Karate. It can work wonders.

Oh, yes, I also concur with those who proposed that you might want to consider productizing your design. As a minimum-viable-product you now know that there are people willing to steal it. With the right approach you might be able to find people willing to buy it.

You could even consider expanding upon this and creating a few more designs. Post them openly on your site with an invitation to use them and the condition that you are to receive payment after a thirty day trial period. Just a thought.

<comment><USER4> Wow. I don't agree with this response at all. "Allow them to use the design for a small fee"?

The original site design was the product of careful branding, long hours of coding, and probably countless revisions: the point of all this work is to create something that uniquely represents the company.

Responding to piracy by "homogenizing" an original design isn't the answer.

The rest of the business world is definitely not that generous (trust me: if you steal an image from Getty Images, they don't let you get away with paying a "small fee"). Neither should OP.

<comment><USER3> The OP is a design house. Is this particular design the last drop of creative juice they have? I would think they can certainly evolve their site into another equally interesting design.

It's almost like what happens to Mercedes Benz. Companies like Mitsubishi shamelessly copy MBZ designs. They've been doing it for years. MBZ's answer is to continuously innovate.

Obsolete you own product.

<comment><USER5> so now you're saying they should change/evolve their design because other companies have blatantly ripped them off? it's not just "some design", it's their brand. if Mitsubishi put a MBZ logo on their car MBZ wouldn't "continuously innovate" on their logo.

<comment><USER6> Bingo.

Also, there's a legal concept called trade dress, which protects the signature elements of a product. Mitusibusi copies Mercedes, but only to point. And that point is defined by law. This law explains why the imitations are so pale, and why the markets for Mitsubishis and Mercedes have so little overlap.

That doesn't mean that Mercedes can stagnate. It's a design icon, after all, and has to fit within a larger sphere that is always changing. But protection for its brand does mean can move at a more considered and deliberate pace (good conditions for thoughtful, lasting design), then it could if competitors could make perfect copies with no appreciable latency.

Slow moving design is a feature, not a bug. You'll note that cars that hit on a relatively unchanging design that doesn't date itself quickly have higher resale values than those that don't (like, ahem, Mitsubishi).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting, given the copying of the js directly, you could use that to your advantage. Have it behave one way if the page is served up from an IP address you own, and slightly differently served from a foreign address.

Could be sublime, like adds a menu item/link to their pages that has "Web Design Services" that points back to you, to the silly "Get free copyrighted material here" and a link to some dubious content site. Or it could just break periodically and cause them great frustration until they give up and use something else.

<comment><USER8> I completely agree to this method. Break their site with your js.

<comment><USER9> Hey, if we have execute of JS on all those clients, why not _REDIRECT_ them to your site? Free traffic. All relevant.

<comment><USER10> Wait, they've not merely copied his js, they're having him host it too? Oh exploitable. Figure out to make it benefit you. I'd have a hard time resisting the urge to play some mischief though.

<comment><USER11> No, at least the one I looked at didn't. But if they're just copy-pasting, he could add a domain check (or IP address check) and make it behave differently.

Edit: apparently some of them are! <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5165238>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think there might be a commonality here – a number of them _seem_ to be located in Australia (with one in India and one in the UK) – a whois check shows a few AU contacts and an AU-based whois privacy guard, so I can't be _sure_ , but the do seem to be oddly clustered, IMHO.

My bet would be that some third-party web firm/designer has sold all of these companies a "unique design" and more than likely most of them are unaware of the origin of the design, much less the other sites with the very same design.

<comment><USER13> My impression, by how widespread it was, was that someone adopted it for a Wordpress theme, and it's now on Themeforest.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps – but then why the geographic coincidence/clustering I noticed in the sites cited by the author? It certainly could be just dumb luck, but it seemed unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Make a premium WordPress theme based on this design, slap a price on it, and distribute through WordPress theme sites thereby creating an additional income stream for your company. I'm in Miami and I'd be happy to help.

<comment><USER15> I might actually do this, we were just discussing this at the office!

<comment><USER16> I probably won't be interested in a Wordpress theme, but if you make a Bootstrap theme quite like this layout I'd definitely buy it.

<comment><USER17> In the mean time, either of these might be a good starting point for you:

<http://wrapbootstrap.com/preview/WB0D8R213>

<http://wrapbootstrap.com/preview/WB0459130>

(disclosure: my site)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You could easily use this to your advantage: 1\. Your portfolio is now larger (my designs + people who ripped off my designs) 2\. You could create a "Submit sites that ripped off our design" for your customers and create a conversation around it 3\. Ask the sites to reference yours in their footer 4\. Modify the ripped off source files to display modified header/footer on external sites

You should be thanking them for creating so many opportunities for you. Why not expect everything will be stolen and go from there? It's all public files in the end.

<comment><USER19> "Our designs are so awesome we have a bunch of imitators (<link> <link> <link>) but we think you'll agree that our original designs are better! Often imitated, never duplicated."

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> While I agree that these other sites have "ripped you off," I don't think you should spend any more time worrying about it or "fighting" them.

From a quick glance, these sites appear to be tiny "companies" that probably saw a nice site and decided to copy it rather than think up something great for themselves. They are probably not taking away any measurable business from you via their copies sites, so any time you spend "calling them out" or even drawing more attention to them is just a waste of your time.

Go think up the next great design for them to copy and focus on making your own company better instead of putting down the others who decide to take a shortcut.

<comment><USER21> I think in this day and age, people who take the high road often get squashed. The "nice guys finish last" adage has never been more applicable.

<comment><USER22> I like to think nice guys finish in a race of sufficient length. This is idealistic thinking on my part, but it helps me keep my thinking positive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Haha, the smacontech guys even include a javascript file with your site's name on it:

line 173: <script src="./smacontech_files/ideaware.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

<comment><USER24> Even copied their google analytics js file.

<comment><USER15> This is how I first noticed them, our GA was showing some weird links.

<comment><USER25> Hahahahaha! That is seriously incompetent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This post is pretty childish. Competition and copycats have existed for centuries and will continue to exist long after you're gone. You think calling them out is going to cause them to have a sudden change of heart after they presumably ripped off your design? Probably not. And I'm almost certain it won't affect any of their future business. You've not only placed yourself in an antagonistic position, but are now open to rebuttals and return attacks. Didn't you read OXO's response to Quirky "calling them out"?

The best thing to do is either ignore something like this or find a way to use the situation to better your business, perhaps with a post about how you value design innovation at your company or, like others have suggested, selling a Wordpress theme.

Don't concern yourself with trivial crap like this; just smile, make the best of it and focus on doing your thing.

<comment><USER13> I'm inclined to agree with you, but already a few of the sites on his list have been taken down for "upcoming new design!"

It seems shaming does have a palpable effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> OP is going overboard with the accusations. <http://www.capta360.com> <http://www.creativegerms.com/about> <http://pearlwebstudio.com>

^None of these people are "copying" him, at least visually. OP did not invent links with vertical scroll or the vertical parallax effect.

OP: Clearly some of the sites outright ripped off your design, but stop trash talking sites with designs you merely think are "similar" to yours.

<comment><USER28> I thought the same thing, they are pretty different. <http://www.capta360.com/> is not even close. Maybe he's saying they use his js

<comment><USER29> Could you not observe that capta are for a start using the exact same opening image as he is? Without you even noticing that glaring ripoff I doubt your commentary carries any weight. Drink your first cup of empathy and put on a solutions cap if you want any shot at growing. :-)

<comment><USER28> Don't be a cunt.

OP was mad people were stealing his websites design, not his photography, for all we know they both sourced it from the same image warehouse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've seen a few posts on HN complaining about people copying their sites, but I'm not sure I sympathize.

Websites are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, all of which is open text and easily copied. You shouldn't have any illusions that your design and code is copied and reused somewhere else.

In this case, the websites that are using the design aren't competitors and aren't taking away business from the original developer. What are they expecting to get out of it? An additional revenue stream of HTML templates?

I agree it's a problem if they are hot-linking to assets on someone else's server, but that's a problem in that it's consuming someone's bandwidth and server resources.

I say, call it flattery and be proud that you made a design that other people want to copy. If you're really paranoid (I don't see why), ask for attribution like "Site design by ..." at the bottom of the page.

<comment><USER31> It's because it's a lie. Many times the copied sites have copy asserting that so-and-so is a great firm, make great products, when they haven't made anything. If isn't such a big deal, why don't the copied sites say 'We copied this entire website, minus copy changes, from X.'?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Ouch: "Your website is slower than 95% of all tested websites" with a 28.85s load time.

\- [http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/eDa8U8X2P/http://ideaware.co...](http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/eDa8U8X2P/http://ideaware.co/)

<comment><USER33> Funnily enough, their website loaded slower than the ones who were ripping it, so I was initially confused about what the argument was as the large background image took ~20s to load/push down the rest of the layout. The JS on the navigation never started working either.

<comment><USER34> The direct copying by other sites is definitely lame, but I don't see anything here I'd want to copy. The crazy load time makes the site almost unusable (as I write this, the page is frozen, and still loading... maybe use fewer http requests and compression?), and the design is nothing to write home about (it's decent though).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I love how so many of them are just saturated with buzzwords and typical empty suit jargon. I guess stupidity and lack of ethics go hand in hand.

<comment><USER36> One actually gives birth to the other...

<comment><USER37> I'd say they both feed into each other bidirectionally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> You might want to add rel="nofollow" attributes to those outgoing links. This indicates to search engines that you do not want your links to influence the other sites' rankings. Not sure if this is possible with tumblr though.

<comment><USER15> Done, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? Pehaps you could reference these guys on your site as evidence of love for your design chops :)

Incidently - did you check whether these are individul copies or multiple clones by one person/organisation?

Anyway, if assets are being hotlinked you could have some fun...

<comment><USER40> Exactly. It's a really nice layout, but honestly -- should the essence here (full page photo, small menu at top right, logo at top left, Title/quote in middle with "more info" button) really be "protectable" IP? I just don't see it, sorry.

That doesn't make those designers (or probably just one) honorable or talented or honest. But they have the right to clone layouts too.

<comment><USER41> It's definitely IP theft, down to the minute details like the red underline on links. The way the images uncover the footer on the bottom is really unique too.

<comment><USER42> Took me a second cup of coffee to detect the sarcasm. I like you.

<comment><USER41> Sorry, I wasn't being sarcastic. The links on the top right aren't standard. The footer also has a funky styling. Check out the page to see. Just from reading my comment and not examining the styling I see how it could sound sarcastic.

<comment><USER43> There is nothing anyone is designing that is original.

<comment><USER37> The direct rip is still bad form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This reminds me of one of Douglas Crockford's talk. The story goes some thing like this.

* Some Russian Porn site uses jsonp using Crockford's host and he get a huge bill

* He polity asks them to host their own version and they don't reply

* He redirects the site to '<http://fbi.gov>

* He receives a call from the FBI, because they have been getting suspicious traffic from some Russian site

* He then goes on to add a alert box with a annoying warning saying the site stole his bandwidth. Who cares for warnings any ways?

* He finally puts a loop in the JS file so that the other site wont load. He finally wins

</comment><comment><USER45> Finally! A .co site that isn't abusing the Colombian TLD for some stupid naming gimmick.

</comment><comment><USER46> A design company that rips off the design of another design company! That's a new one.

/sarcasm off

Ok, it really is shameless. Especially the one that even hosts the javascript on your server (that opens up some interesting possibilities). But it really is flattery, the good bit is that you can now show them in _your_ portfolio.

On another note, this design, while nice isn't all that original. I've seen it in other places too and maybe they ripped you off as well but for sure it's been around for a while.

Fun anecdote: I once sued company that had ripped off our script for doing plug-in-free video streaming. In court their defence to the claim they ripped us off was they had not ripped it from us but from one of our licensees.

It was a very short session.

</comment><comment><USER47> It is interesting to see how the community reacts when someone steals their work. There are some good suggestions like contacting the owners of the offending sites politely.

Quite a few of the comments seem pretty malicious in nature. Like serving up javascript which behaves mischievously. It doesn't seem to matter to these people if the site owners were victims of bad and lazy designers.

(Never mind the fact that the original design is not that original.)

I can't believe that almost the same people then go on to rage and demand, more or less in spirit, everything else be free and open. (academic papers, iOS, music etc)

Free, open and being kind are rules which are good to apply to others. Isn't it?

</comment><comment><USER48> This might be a web design company reusing your design. The sites listed may have no knowledge of this being a copy, and most likely paid a high dollar amount for this cool design.

Get in touch with the site, hear their side. Worst case, sue them.

</comment><comment><USER49> You provided the links to those websites, and added that you're not sure how to proceed.

From your post, I get the impression that you have not yet spoken to those companies about it.

That would be a good start.

<comment><USER50> That's what I was thinking.

1) What if someone took their design, created a template of it, and sold it on a number of website template sites - and these companies were none-the-wiser.

2) Was the design created in-house, or did they hire a designer? Some designers claim the design was all of their own doing, but it was quite obvious they "borrowed" from a template site first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Isn't your design inspired from <http://www.spotify.com/se/> ?

<comment><USER4> These two sites looks completely different to me:

Spotify: [https://www.evernote.com/shard/s3/sh/dca1e28e-c43e-4c93-84cf...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s3/sh/dca1e28e-c43e-4c93-84cf-8b2637a5759c/32c19f314f10e1fbda0ef1e1eee4fd5e)

OP: [https://www.evernote.com/shard/s3/sh/846bba48-7b78-4040-9f18...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s3/sh/846bba48-7b78-4040-9f18-1fdbb3c279c4/ff11e11f9d0d7e48a199b09cd71cfcda)

<comment><USER51> Yes, the visual assets are different. But, the novelty is in the scrolling effect idea, which is quite the same in both. And I think spotify did it first, although I'm not too sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> This is what happens when a company contracts someone for $9/hr and says "Make me something like [url] for my site".

<comment><USER53> This may very well be the case!

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> wow, some of those copies were just blantant. Is there a way to embed a specific string in the website (either through html or css) so later you can somehow google search anyone is copying you?

<comment><USER55> Given that they might not have very good CSS skill, you might embed a CSS comment or CSS properties which look like they do something but don't -- a would-be stealer probably wouldn't delete something which they didn't understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I think that at the end of the day, when it comes to people copying your design, you really need to take the emotion out of it. I've had my design work copied before, so I know that there is an emotional response that comes along with having your work copied. But there also needs to be a practical assessment of what impact the copying will have on your business. If the site(s) copying you aren't big names and aren't competing with you, it's likely a waste of your time and energies to be pursuing them. That's time being taken away from your core business to focus on other people that ultimately have an inconsequential impact on your ability to be competitive and make money.

<comment><USER57> Also, interestingly enough, by publicly shaming them, you're providing traffic to their site. Does the saying "any press is good press" still hold?

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Hi all, I'm a designer and I have been under a similar situation - I have been, many, many times as a designer, asked to design something _exactly_ like what my client has showed me, which most of the times was, another site. I haven't accepted a single offer from such clients, but I know how exactly they all work.

Here's how it works:

1) The client keeps _stalking_ a particular site he likes, which is usually a competitor in his own field.

2) There are some clients who like just want:

a) certain elements of the site, for example, the way something is done, instead of that something in its entirety itself,

b) and there are the rest, who just want the same exact design to be replaced by their own logo.

If you notice, in the original article, all of the examples the author provides, either fall into category _a_ or _b_. You can be convinced that people who work in the category _b_ are designers with a fair level of reasoning, and they are much much better people (comparatively) who don't want to rip off the site entirely, but would like to make it as much similar as possible to the original site, so they can somehow convince their clients.

The designers who belong to the category _a_ are the most arrogant, desperate people you would ever find. Not to say that they are bad people, but they are desperate and they don't care about ethics. The only thing they care about is money.

I hate to bring in this topic of 'regionalism', but MOST (not ALL) of these designers are from India, Pakistan, etc. There are many popular 'call-to- offer' services in these countries wherein you just call these service centers and tell them you want a design to be completed, the next minute there will be 'design studios', 'agencies', 'professionals' offering you to design a website (of any kind) for something as cheap as $20. Yep, you read that right. $20 for a WHOLE website. These are the designers who resort to such tactics.

So, what do you do if you don't want your designs to get ripped off?

I will tell you my strategy - It's not fool proof, but it works REALL REALLY well.

BEFORE deploying your website to production, make sure, you follow these steps:

1) Create a duplicate copy of your homepage (which is the easiest target of being ripped off), and

a) Re-Name IMPORTANT class names, for example, rename #logo to #fewji903. Something unreadable. I usually write a handy script to automate this for the rest of the class names and ID's.

b) Add redundant containers - If you want to add styles for your logo, don't just write it as

        #logo{
        display:block;
        position:absolute;
        top:10px;
        background:url('some-image.jpg') no-repeat;
       }

But re-write it as:

       #aw469srfa #fewji903{
        display:block;
        position:absolute;
        top:10px;
        background:url('some-image.jpg') no-repeat;
       }

BUT, in your actual HTML file, what you do is DON'T include the logo container with ID 'fewji903'. Instead, write a tiny Jquery script to load this container dynamically. Something like:

        $(document).ready(function() {
        //do a check to see if current url is YOUR website
        if( url_is_mywebsite()){
        $('#aw469srfa').html('<div id="fewji903"></div>');
        }
        else{
        // don't load the container
        alert('fuck-off');
        }

        function url_is_mywebsite(){
        //do something to check if the current url processed is your own, something like
        if (current_url=='google.com')
        return true
        else
        return false
        }
        });

Now step 2):

Minify your CSS and make it unreadable. MOST rogue designers have no idea as to how to 'beautify' it.

As for your little JS snippet - Either just minify it, if your code is already complex, or obfuscate it. I always obfuscate my code. There is a downside to this - Your page load time might slow down a tiny,tiny un-noticeable bit, but like I said, it's un-noticeable for the most part, and it's a very good compromise for not having your entire website ripped-off:

This is how the above code, when obfuscated will look like:

        eval(function(p,a,c,k,e,d){e=function(c){return c.toString(36)};if(!''.replace(/^/,String)){while(c--){d[c.toString(a)]=k[c]||c.toString(a)}k=[function(e){return d[e]}];e=function(){return'\\w+'};c=1};while(c--){if(k[c]){p=p.replace(new RegExp('\\b'+e(c)+'\\b','g'),k[c])}}return p}('$(a).b(3(){2(0()){$(\'#9\').8(\'<1 6="7"></1>\')}4{j(\'c-i\')}3 0(){2(d==\'e.h\')5 f 4 5 g}});',20,20,'url_is_mywebsite|div|if|function|else|return|id|fewji903|html|aw469srfa|document|ready|fuck|current_url|google|true|false|com|off|alert'.split('|'),0,{}))

I always use <http://www.jsobfuscate.com> for this purpose.

While I have shown a demo only for the Logo container, I urge everyone to follow this for as many important containers as possible. Now, when someone rips-off your website, even copies all the files and uploads it to their server, it's not going to work. They're just going to see a broken, half-assed website.

At that point, they could:

1) Reverse engineer the code to see how it works.

2) Try to re-design it from scratch

3) Cancel the project, or take too much time to complete it.

Do you know what I've seen most of these rogue designers do? They chose 3! Because, since you made the code a little complex for them, they don't want to spend time reverse engineering THE MOST COMPLEX code. What we wrote there wasn't THE MOST COMPLEX code, but it's the perception of complexity that matters. When a rogue designer is going to see code like that, he's going to think, "Oh shoot, these guys must be clever, look at all those complex class names. I ain't touching anything hot like that." He's simply going to assume it's way too complex to handle it.

How do I know this works? Most of these people who rip-off websites are not complete designers. They are either newbs, or in-experienced coders or someone else, trying to earn a buck or two from design. And that is why this works, especially now that we're clear about our target audience.

NOTE: I actually encourage you to do this with the final version of a back-up copy of your homepage design. Homepages rarely change, in my experience. So, it's a good compromise. Any developer is going to work-up on the un- adulterated code, not on the obfuscated version.

And for completeness, here's advice #3:

3) DON'T write a blog post linking back to the ones who ripped you off. You're just giving them free publicity (pageviews). Atleast if you do write, just mention the website and don't link it. Perhaps post screenshots of their homepages. They don't deserve your extra pageviews.

Cheers.

<comment><USER59> What? You are going to

        - break your CSS by making it dependent on javascript
        - use inefficient compression, easily reversible, to "obfuscate" javascript
        - both of these slowing your page loading time

That's like the worst of DRM _badly_ emulated in a browser. You do realize that the script which checks the URL can also be modified by the copycat? Minifying CSS+HTML+JS as usual already gets you the most benefits, while being good practice. This is shooting your own foot.

<comment><USER60> What? You are going to add a lock to your door that is going to

      - break your door by making it dependent on a key

      - use a easily reversible locking mechanism

      - slow the time it takes to enter your home

You do realize that any locksmith can open your lock in less than a minute? Closing your door already gives you most of the benefits.

Only half kidding, but I get tired of people dismissing clever tricks because it's not fool proof. Stealing is usually a function of reward/effort.

<comment><USER61> > Stealing is usually a function of reward/effort.

Except that for digital media it's a Smart Cow Problem[1], the effort is only there for the first person who wants to circumvent it, then it becomes trivial for everyone.

However, I'd suggest that the reason some on HN react strongly to these suggestions is that they rely upon security through obscurity, which can be dangerous by providing a false sense of security when none exists. While this probably isn't as big a deal when it comes to your HTML and CSS, security is a case of err'ing on the side of caution.

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_cow_problem>

<comment><USER60> Yes, I agree. However, I don't think website designs have as much of a smart cow problem as say pop music, so your "DRM" is more likely to succeed its goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> The propeller site I'd consider flattering imitation, at least they are in a totally different lob :)

For the other guys, talk to a lawyer or just someone who knows "legalese" well enough to formulate a serious sounding email complaining about copyright infringement and threatening with a lawsuit. And have someone with a title of "copyright lawyer" or "IP legal consultant"or anything along the lines co-sign that email. They will shit their pants and change their design (they probably hired a freelancer that copied your work...). Unless they're based in a place forsaken by the IP gods, like China or Russia, then it might get too complicated to be worth the effort on your side...

<comment><USER63> The propeller site actually uses the ideaware site's background image, slightly blurred, as it's cloudscape background.

<comment><USER64> This is an amazing observation. I can't believe they used the actual image from your front page on theirs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> If it makes you feel any better, I wouldn't copy that design ever.

</comment><comment><USER66> We've been ripped off way worse than this. I'm talking about wholesale ripoff of a full application, not just a tiny brochure site. What must have literally been a multi-month development effort to rip off tens of thousands of lines of javascript, css and html, and building a new backend from scratch to plug it in to. Because they were an eastern bloc country there was no point in trying to prevent it or even getting upset. The way I see it it's tremendously flattering.

<comment><USER67> serverside code cannot be ripped off unless there is a security flaw. If you are concerned about something people might rip off, do it serverside. All the front-end code will never be protected...

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> We had a similar situation several years ago with our site:

<http://www.sparkfun.com>

And this Chinese knock-off:

<http://www.geeetech.com/>

Not only did they rip off our design but they also use a bunch of our product photos. We himmed and hawed about doing something about it but ultimately realized there really was nothing we _could_ do to enact any real change. At the end of the day any site's CSS is open source by virtue of the technology (and our product images were already CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 licensed anyway).

So we said screw it. We decided that the best way to assert this design was our own was to _run a better website_ , and more so, _just run a better business_. In the end it hasn't dented our traffic. GE Tech looks sort of like SparkFun but it sure is a lot more rough around the edges. We've continued to refine our design with less of a Geocities palette while never really caring what those Chinese ripoff artists are up to. It's irrelevant. We'll continue to define our web presence _without_ using them for context, and if they continue to grab skin-deep features from us then terrific - we're a source of inspiration and should be proud.

</comment><comment><USER69> Most of these seem pretty egregious, but am I the only one who thinks that Gear Tree studios did enough work to differentiate their design?

I mean, it's one thing to complain about some of those direct copies. You should. But it's another entirely to not expect people to lift your code out. That is the way the web has been for a long time, and it's not going to change just because of some practically unenforcible laws unevenly defined internationally.

</comment><comment><USER70> We had a similar problem with a talentless rogue designer at my old agency.

It only became clear he had blatantly copied other sites after he left, unfortunately (he was also sacked from future jobs for the same thing, I suspect).

He even had the audacity to claim an award for one of his rip-offs, including attending the vegas ceremony (IIRC). I really don't know how he slept at night.

I'm not going to name names as this was a long time ago and I'm hoping he's changed his ways.

</comment><comment><USER71> We really can't prevent anyone from copying a design. It might not be the ethical thing to do, but there no real way of stopping someone if that's their goal. However I still wouldn't shame them. I would call them out in a more gracious manner. Something like a list of those companies and title it "Copying is the sincerest form of flattery" or along the same line.

Why not use them to your advantage, use them as marketing tool and if they refuse then force them to remove the design. Maybe only then, at that point it is ok to call them out and shame them.

Shaming someone just created an adversarial effect and it brings some negative publicity too. If you can show that you are gracious and is able to manage and find a middle ground in such a situation, it'll show a better you. I rather work with a company that I can always negotiate with than one who always take the hard line.

</comment><comment><USER72> One of the worst things is that a lot of times the ripped off design, while being really nice eye candy, doesn't suit the content at all. See the submarine propeller company linked to in the post for a great example. The information is organized and laid out in a visually pleasing way but at the cost of completely ignoring what the user is looking for and what kind of person the typical submarine propeller shopper is.

I'll admit I've heavily lifted design ideas from other sites but I've never once actually copied and pasted a single line of code from another site without permission. I would always always always recreate the elements I liked from scratch and the majority of times this gives a site a different enough appearance to not be a total ripoff. Just because you can view source doesn't mean the whole web is open source.

</comment><comment><USER73> There are lots of sites that lifted their copy from ideaware.co too. What kind of design/development/branding shop can't come up with their own "About Us" or "Process" page? Frankly I think this is even lazier than lifting the markup/script to make the design work.

At least copying the HTML and JS saves a lot of work.

</comment><comment><USER74> Your post is confusing an unclear. Based on how I read it initially, I am interpreting that post as you being are angry at site that look like yours, to which I have to say 'tough luck'. The internet is all about copy-evolve-retry. I'm sure 2/3 of your design ideas are based off someone else's innovation from months or years ago. Unless you invented the the whole CSS/HTML/JS stack yourself....

You believe that no one should build a similar design? You believe that they are using exactly your css? You believe that they are using exactly your images? You believe that they are using exactly your javascript?

It's unclear what you are raging at. If it's just a look-alike design, that I think you are playing the fool, and pretty anti-innovation. If they are just loading your css/images/js that that is a bit of a different story.

</comment><comment><USER75> The propellers site is so similar I halfway wonder if it's a parody of your site. "We handcraft propellers."

<comment><USER76> It must be because I can't imagine anyone would prefer handmade propellers to industrial manufactured ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Just noticed - based on the IP lookups 3 of these websites are located in Houston. Coincidence?

<comment><USER76> Either those companies are with a bigger/popular hosting company (IIRC The Planet was located in Houston and I guess their datacenter wasn't closed down after their acquisition) or it's a link bait.

Either way - too few information to make an educated guess.

<comment><USER78> Or a Houston-based "web designer" ripping off a single design for local clientele?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Initially i was of the "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" mindset. But after going through a few of the sites i couldn't stomach the blatant rip offs.

Especially by companies like <http://smacontech.com/> which claim to be design firms. Worse still, they seem to regurgitate the design into some of their client's sites as well (<http://www.smipropellers.com/>)

Not sure how you can proceed here. But if you are intent on naming and shaming them publicly, try posting a message on their facebook fan page's wall. That should make them situp and take notice of your complaints.

</comment><comment><USER80> The best is RevoBlue: Their about_us page still has a map of Barranquilla, Colombia, where ideaware is from! (Just scroll down on the "about us" page)

<http://www.revoblue.com/>

</comment><comment><USER81> Is ebay one of those companies? <http://www.ebay.com/new>

Or are they maybe close but not close enough to call out considering the size of their legal department?

To be honest, not being much of a designer, I've seen this scrolling with background switching 'style' become popular on a few sites recently.

I have no reason to doubt that OP developed it from scratch and clearly some of the linked sites blatantly ripped off the entire design, but the question of where inspiration ends and what constitutes 'independently developed' gets murky really quickly.

</comment><comment><USER82> This is a joke right ? or is it just a clever marketing trick ?

if not, I Seriously think this whole copyright thing should die. apparently this design is very typical, its not like you have invented some unique jquery scrollTo plugin, or the fonts/icons.

so a few people copied your website as is, some others might change it a bit more, what's the big deal ? I see your website as a copy of some other hundred websites I've seen before here and there (check theme forest for example).

Let people copy and do what they like .. if you want to protect, probably dont put it on a client side.

welcome to the internet ..

</comment><comment><USER83> Trouble is - web site design is very fashion oriented. You can tell a 2011 site from a 2012 site. I find a lot of sites are very similar and put it down to a common fashion more often than copying. Font selection, icon colours and general layout is bound to "cluster" around a limited range of values at the leading edge. Look at the "please review our start-up" requests here on HN - most of those web sites pretty near interchangeable.

Having said all of that - copying is a no-no - taking inspiration from others - well that would be normal.

<comment><USER84> I always feel like its a flash website at first :P

But yeah, I didn't realize either so many just flat out copy website designs. I guess this is a pretty common thing now :(

<comment><USER85> It's _always_ been a common thing. Stuff like Google analytics just makes it way easier to tell that they're actually copying _you_.

<comment><USER84> Alright alright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> Oh calm down. You had a good idea and started a trend. Don't whine about copiers - you're the source of great ideas, so come up with another one. That, or be the best at implementing this idea.

<comment><USER87> There's a difference between taking influence from a site and downright stealing and even hot-linking assets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> Looks to me like you've now got a fantastic portfolio page.

"Our creative & design is so good, its copied by a number of digital agencies and businesses including Dapatical Global, ..."

Perhaps even parody testimonials are in order.

"Our in house designer was out of ideas and the drafts from 99sites were sub par. That's why we 'borrowed' the work of AM - it was far superior to anything we could have done ourselves' - Max, CEO RevoBlue.

Yeah it sucks that a heap of sites Cltr-C'd your work. But there are better ways of addressing this.

</comment><comment><USER89> You should call them out on twitter, they are more likely to make amends if your shouting is visible to clients (future/current).

* <https://twitter.com/SmaconTech> * <https://twitter.com/dapatical> * <https://twitter.com/saraswathimetal>

Or maybe it won't make any difference, looking at the stats on these accounts

</comment><comment><USER90> <http://www.capta360.com/> doesn't really look like a copy of your site. Neither does <http://www.creativegerms.com/> or <http://pearlwebstudio.com/>.

Granted, a lot of those do copy your design but if you're trying to claim the above three do, you're a little overzealous.

<comment><USER91> <http://www.creativegerms.com/about> and <http://pearlwebstudio.com> are copying the text messages

<http://www.capta360.com/> copied the background photo

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> There's a great 37 signals article somewhere about this same topic. The gist is, that if you steal someone else's design, it's never going to meet your needs properly because it's not born from your business. Especially true for service based companies.

This is the same reason I started obfuscating javascript, css and html. It at least make it difficult enough to copy/edit that people may consider creating something themselves.

</comment><comment><USER93> I've seen my site copied verbatim several times. Clearly some bot just scraped the entire site and posted it somewhere else. At first it upset me but after a few minutes of righteous indignation I assumed it wasn't worth the time to worry about it. The copies aren't getting much traffic AFAICT and I'm assuming one way or another they'll eventually lead people back the original so I just stopped looking.

</comment><comment><USER94> Looks to be true, but if this is a day-to-day concern for your business things must be running themselves. Consider it a badge of honor, like your application being valuable and important enough to become warez. I'm guessing your value-add proposition goes way beyond looking good on your first page. I would however take concern with those so sloppy they are using your bandwidth.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm getting a lot of email requests from people who want to license the design/theme.

Not sure, don't want to whore out the company by selling our site!

</comment><comment><USER95> Bummer, this is an uphill battle with almost no positive resolution for you. The only upside I can see is that doing it this way will get your site some traffic.

One of my companies is a screen printer and over the years we've found 5 - <USER2> other sites using our copy, word for word. Usually people are pretty embarrassed when you call them out privately and just handle it.

</comment><comment><USER96> "Imitation Is The Best Form Of Flattery"

"Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal"

"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

You have recognised that people want to utilise your designs, but you've establish how to leverage that.

Imagine if instead you "called them out", you released it design as open source.

This would be great publicity and it would give you the opportunity to come up with something even better.

</comment><comment><USER97> Your design also has some similarities with the Mercurial Wordpress theme does it not? I'm not sure which one came before, so I can't comment on who imitated who.

Also there are a couple sites on the list that shouldn't be there. They look just as similar to your site as your site looks to the Mercurial theme.

</comment><comment><USER98> SMI Propellers: "Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of intelligent effort..."

Man, isn't that the truth?

</comment><comment><USER99> On a purely technical basis, how can we tell that andres is not ripping off one of these other sites? My gut tells me he isn't, but in the age of perfect digital copies, assuming that justice was cheap and easy to obtain here (and it clearly isn't) how would you establish primacy?

</comment><comment><USER100> When they are even referencing/loading resources from your server, you could serve some "Thx for copying my design, the invoice is on its way."-images to their pages: <http://altlab.com/htaccess_tutorial.html> ;)

</comment><comment><USER101> Is it just me, or are there tons of redundant repaints of the same background image in the "Recent Work" Section, with the black and white cellphone?

Beautiful site, but my framerate really took a dive when I got to this section! Hurts the experience.

</comment><comment><USER102> 3 out of the 5 sites are Indian, <http://smacontech.com/> is a company run by 3 kids. If you give a look on the start up web design firms like this, you will find a lot of copy cats.

</comment><comment><USER103> I've had this happen to a number of clients; for the most part we were able to get the sites changed/taken down through DMCA submissions (copyrighted materials, art).

I don't know if this avenue is available to you but you might want to look into it.

</comment><comment><USER104> Weak. Just because the parallax scrolling effect is pretty new and popular these days doesn't mean that this guy 'invented' it.

Sure, one of those sites is a blatant rip-off of his, but I've seen it done a lot of times in many similar ways.

</comment><comment><USER105> _This is just ridiculous, what makes people think they can just rip off your work for free?_

The fact that they absolutely can and do? I'm not sure there's much that can be done here, but the call-out is a great way to handle it.

</comment><comment><USER106> Well.. didn't Apple got some money from Samsung recently over design rip off?

The same can be applied over web design.

If you don't believe me go ahead, make an exactly copy of Apple.com, put your logo on it, and advertise as your website.

</comment><comment><USER107> Why does crap like this make front page these days? Honestly, any half decent site that gets featured on a CSS gallery gets ripped these days.

Your website itself looks like dozens of similar templates on ThemeForest.com

</comment><comment><USER108> I wouldn't link directly to their sites. Only makes them rank higher in SEO

</comment><comment><USER109> Have you thought of using a javascript minify-er? At least then it would be more obvious they copied you directly. It would also make it easier to inject javascript that would mess with the copy-ers.

</comment><comment><USER110> There are some blatant ripoffs amongst the list of links in the post, but I think you should remove the last two. Pearl web studio and the germ one are far from ripoffs of your site.

</comment><comment><USER111> I'm getting CocachingSessionExceeded errors visiting your blog and trying to get to your site is blocked by our proxy server as having been detected to be a threat!

</comment><comment><USER112> When I open the submission on an iPhone, the link to the site moves when I try to tap it - it isn't possible to use the link. Does anyone else get this behaviour?

</comment><comment><USER113> I'm pretty sure i've already seen those tiles somewhere aswell, is <http://www.studiodvi.com> a candidate too?

</comment><comment><USER114> I would have preferred that you just gave the URL (plaintext) with screenshot and some code snippet. I wouldn't want those sites getting clicks.

</comment><comment><USER115> I'm most amazed by the last link you posted that copied it, they did not even modify the background image. Only the logo and text were changed.

</comment><comment><USER116> The slogan on dapaticalglobal.com is grammatically incorrect. If I were looking for a firm, that would stop be from going any further . . .

</comment><comment><USER15> Thanks for the support guys, I'm not too mad but definitely wanted to bring some attention to this.

I will reply to some of your comments in a bit.

</comment><comment><USER117> I'd be more worried about the horrible loading times. That's what will hurt your conversion rates, not those copycat sites.

<comment><USER53> I'd like to see an A/B test. Clearly- if the features don't contribute to higher revenue, why stick to it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER118> Well one good thing about the rip off sites is I'm able to see what you designed originally while HN hammers your server!

</comment><comment><USER119> Save the names of the people involved in a blacklist. Make a list of agencies to avoid with these people in them.

</comment><comment><USER8> Did anyone notice that most of them couldn't get the font correct. Coz the morons must have never heard of custom fonts. Only one site did managed a Google Web font, I guess. Ha ha...and that propeller thingy has some reputed clients under its belt. I'm from India and I know the clients. You want me to call them up and have some harmless fun from your side. I can act as if I'm your legal agent. Kidding!

</comment><comment><USER120> I think 37 Signals is quite a bit more pissed off about their pricing page being emulated by 10k+ startups.

</comment><comment><USER53> Copying has been going on for centuries. If someone copied you, you're clearly a leader. Take it in stride!

</comment><comment><USER121> Isn't this inspired from <http://www.ebay.com/new> ?

</comment><comment><USER122> It's even worse that some of these comps not only stole the design but also stole the copy. Shameless.

</comment><comment><USER123> I can't see much resemblance in capta360.com. What features do you consider similar there?

</comment><comment><USER124> I would be flattered by them copying you, validating that you're at the top of your game!

</comment><comment><USER125> That last one is particularly bad. They didn't even try to make it look a bit different.

</comment><comment><USER126> All those other sites are complete shit compared to ideaware.co.

The only blatant ripoff is revoblue.com

</comment><comment><USER127> Looks like you could start selling this design and at least profit from these people.

</comment><comment><USER128> RE: "Not sure how to proceed here."

Take the compliment - mimicry is the highest form of flattery.

</comment><comment><USER129> You might want to add rel="nofollow" to your links.

</comment><comment><USER130> To be fair your site design is pretty awesome.

</comment><comment><USER131> you can probably add this one to the list: <http://newbirddesign.com/>

<comment><USER132> Why? They are distinctly different, and unless I missed it, are copying none of the assets.

Are you merely referring to the fact that they both "scroll" the same way, a way which is _not_ unique to the OPs website?

Be careful when calling people out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER133> with so many near identical knockoffs, is it possible someone has already made a theme/template and is selling it?

</comment><comment><USER134> the propeller one made me lol. ripped off a design without any attempt of fitting the design to the brand.

</comment><comment><USER135> I find this type of scrolling annoying.

</comment><comment><USER136> Imitation Is The Best Form Of Flattery

</comment><comment><USER137> Did you invent the wheel too? lol...

</comment><comment><USER138> Here's another: hireup.net

</comment><comment><USER139> site certainly worth "learning", but copying completely is just lame

</comment><comment><USER140> If you had any class, you'd take them to court. Slander isn't doing you any favors.

<comment><USER141> How is it slander? It's pretty obvious that these companies did steal the design (JavaScript and all).

</comment></comment><comment><USER142> That's blatant!

</comment><comment><USER137> lol, did you invent the wheel too?

</comment><comment><USER143> Two words:

Design Patent.

</comment><comment><USER144> open source your design.</comment>


Law of Triviality – Bike Shedding - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality <comment><USER2> I've attended way too much meetings to actually support the claim. When I read Parkinson's Law (which I can recommend to everyone alongside the Peter's Principle) I couldn't agree more on that one.</comment>