using GAE and DryDrop to host static sites for free - <AUTHOR> http://www.nata2.org/2011/01/26/how-to-use-app-engine-to-host-static-sites-for-free/

<comment><USER2> I posted the same thing yesterday, but it went nowhere. I guess I should have included the word "FREE!" in the title.

Anyway, here it is. As the blog post explains [1], I created a small Flask app that will let you host multiple static sites/domains _on one GAE instance_ without having to learn Git or push to Github or anything. Just download the app [2], put the static files and media in the appropriate directories, configure the URLs and deploy.

[1] [http://blog.stochastictechnologies.com/easily-host- multiple-...](http://blog.stochastictechnologies.com/easily-host-multiple- static-sites-on-one-app)

[2] [https://github.com/stochastic-technologies/static- appengine-...](https://github.com/stochastic-technologies/static-appengine- hoster)

<comment><USER3> Don't think that your post was wasted. Maybe this guy saw it and decided to submit this one, or maybe the author saw it and decided to write his version.

Also, I like your version of the static hoster way more. Really simple, no git/github. I think friends that use Dreamweaver could use this.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, that's the exact expected use case. You don't need to host your static sites on servers that you might want to move/decommission in the future, you can just host them all on one GAE instance for free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use GAE + Github for several of my tiny websites. I don't use DryDrop as I hadn't heard of it, and I like being able to control the app.yaml myself (particularly useful for when I have a sudden urge to port static sites over to Django, which happens surprisingly often). Also, it looks like DryDrop may actually use script handlers instead of static file handlers, which wouldn't be as performant for my simple stuff.

The trickiest part of using GAE for static files is setting up the app.yaml, since it's different from just FTPing files and having them show up on your server. Here's an example app.yaml for a completely static site, where the root redirects to index.html, and the rest is mapped to a static directory (with nested directories in it): <https://gist.github.com/774838>

<comment><AUTHOR> this was originally how i hosted simple sites on app engine. It works wonders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> GitHub pages[1] is other great option for static site hosting. You are pushing to github repo and your site is regenerating. Jekyll [2] is used as static site generator. I'm using GH Pages for HNresources.com hosting. If I need quickly update site I could change source page on project page on github.com site without even using git.

One question according to GAE hosting: If your application wasn't requested for some time it is unloaded from memory and first request after that require more time. Is it still apply to static sites?

* [1] <http://pages.github.com/>

* [2] <https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll>

<comment><USER4> (I am not on the App Engine team, but researched it recently to give a talk about it)

If the request is going through a static handler (as declared in app.yaml), then the request won't go to the Apps frontend servers at all, it will go to the static file servers. So, no, the app unloading shouldn't be relevant for static files.

I made this diagram for a recent talk that somewhat shows that: [http://www.slideshare.net/wuzziwug/writing-apps-the- googley-...](http://www.slideshare.net/wuzziwug/writing-apps-the-googley- way/16)

EDIT: It looks like DryDrop may actually use script handlers, not static handlers, in the app.yaml, so app unloading would apply.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the link to the talk. Interesting stuff! :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like the idea of having a git backend for site data, but in the case of the author: why not just use a regular host? There are some pay-for-what-you-use hosts (e.g. <https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/>).

<comment><USER8> Well, <https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/> supports git, bash, sh etc, if you follow the instructions from the comments further down you can use git as a backend ^^

<comment><USER8> Actually I was wrong, I read it here: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/279169/deploy-php- using-g...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/279169/deploy-php-using-git)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What do you use as a origin server for your static media? And how does cloudfront work.. when its cached on the CDN, how long does it stay there? Don't you have to pay for files stored on the CDN? Oh, and where's your drydrop fork? :)

Thanks for the post, really nice

<comment><AUTHOR> I use my www as the origin for the static media. I assume that cloudfront files stay in the CDN until they are invalidated. I haven't tested how long they stay. I imagine that if there are no requests, they go away after awhile.

You do have to pay for cloudfront usage. I am not sure the breakdown of custom origin vs s3 is - but i imagine it is similar.

Here yea go: <https://github.com/harperreed/drydrop>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think you can do the same with GAE + Dropbox.

See Option B here:

[http://www.labnol.org/software/dropbox-with-custom- domain/18...](http://www.labnol.org/software/dropbox-with-custom- domain/18349/)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is pretty genius. Free static web hosting, ftmfw. :)</comment>


Snake.li - cryptographic social network - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/snake-the-privacy-aware-social-network So these friends of mine developed this cryptographic social network and are trying to raise funds in order to work on it full-time.<p>Give it a look! <comment><USER2> So...ad agencies will still be able to profile us, unless it's for subscribers only and will thus only appeal to a very limited number of people.

</comment><comment><USER3> Finally someone properly used OTR for a social network, it's really great!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting, and completely described in the PDF thesis on their website!</comment>


Fast and easy Levenshtein distance using a trie (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=114 <comment><USER2> Here's an alternative that is more efficient at large scales (eg. if you have one order of magnitude more entries than just an English dictionary): performing Approximate Nearest Neighbor search [1] over a pre-computed Levenshtein space.

\- hash all your dictionary entries through a Levenshtein-locality-sensitive hash function [2] with a well-chosen hash size. Any two words within a Levenshtein distance D of each other will have the same hash (you pick D).

\- store the hashes into an efficient DB for quick lookup. Each hash will map to one or several (levenshtein-similar) dictionary entries.

\- when presented with a new input, compute its hash, retrieve the entry for the hash in your DB (if it exists).

\- finish by sorting the retrieved dictionary entries by Levenshtein distance to your input... you just recovered all dictionary entries closer than distance D to your input (approximately).

Pretty much unbeatable, and works over spaces that have hundreds of millions of dictionary entries.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nearest_neighbor_search#Approx...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nearest_neighbor_search#Approximate_nearest_neighbor)

[2] Can't find one? Build your own by computing the pairwise distance matrix of your entries, then reducing this matrix through PCA to an appropriate number of components (the length of your hash). The coordinates of each entry in this new space is the entry's hash.

<comment><USER3> > Build your own by computing the pairwise distance matrix of your entries, > then reducing this matrix through PCA to an appropriate number of components > (the length of your hash).

You are kidding right ? I cant imagine anyone seriously suggesting PCA on a half a million by half a million matrix, or evaluating this matrix in the first place.

This actually a fairly actively researched topic: whether edit distance can be embedded, even if approximately in a vector space. It has been surprisingly resistant to such efforts. Yes there are some results but nothing very satisfactory.

Edit distance is a metric, so it was believed it would easy to map individual strings to vectors, such that the distance between two vectors was same as, or close to the edit distance between the corresponding strings. What we want, then, is an (approximate) isomorphism between these two metric spaces. In addition, in the interest of size we would like these vectors to be of small dimension. If the required dimension is high it would defeat the purpose if the string to vector map needs to be stored. Unfortunately it seems edit distance is resistant to isomorphism to a low-dimensional vector space. There is also this question which metric do we use in the vector space, Euclidean, Manhattan...? there are some results on the L1, i.e. embedding on a vector space with Manhattan distances.

Fun story: was an intern in Google's spelling correction team once upon a time long ago. So I was explaining what I was doing, the person I was explaining it to was thoroughly unimpressed: "So whats the big deal, you know/hear the word and write down the spelling". It made me realize how difficult spelling in English is compared to some of the other languages. The variability in the map from phonemes to spelling is quite high in English. This person was Italian, he told me Italian has a lot less variability in this regard.

<comment><USER4> PCA is basically just SVD and computing an SVD of that size is not unreasonable, even of it's dense: 0.5e6^2 = 0.25e12 = 1TB of 32-bit floats. That's a lot of memory but there are reasonably priced machines ($50k or so) with that much RAM these days. If it's sparse, this can be done on a laptop, and it might not even be necessarily to materialize the matrix at all if you use Lancosz iteration.

<comment><USER3> Lets put it this way then, we disagree on what's a reasonable expenditure. 1TB Ram ? $50k ? Could you fund me please :) ok adding _pretty_ please.

Note its not just memory, its computation also. Every entry of that matrix is a solution to a dynamic program, if you dont store it you have to recompute it. The DP scales as product of the lengths of the string, those things have a fat tail.

You could still get away with it if this matrix was close to a low rank matrix and with large gaps between adjacent singular values. Its not and thats a problem. Note you have to store the SVD factors too.

EDIT: Interesting ! my comments seems to have annoyed someone. Did not expect downvotes on my comments here, thought they were pretty uncontroversial. If you dear reader can leave some clues it would be helpful and appreciated. I upvote those who explain what they found unpalatable about my comments, regardless of agreement.

<comment><USER4> It's a lot of computation, granted, but I just wanted to point out that it wasn't completely ludicrous. The proposed algorithm doesn't work anyway since there are no non-degenerate hash functions that map all words within D edits of each other to the same hash value (as I pointed out here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8158942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8158942)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Shameless plug: I have a Java library that does this even more efficiently. It constructs a Levenshtein automaton of a word in linear time and then computes the intersection between a dictionary (stored in a deterministic acyclic minimal finite state automaton) and the Levensthein automaton. It also has other features, such as:

\- Perfect hash automata (an automaton that gives a unique hash for every word/sequence).

\- String-keyed maps that use a finite state automaton to store keys.

More info:

[https://github.com/danieldk/dictomaton](https://github.com/danieldk/dictomaton)

[http://search.maven.org/#artifactdetails%7Ceu.danieldk.dicto...](http://search.maven.org/#artifactdetails%7Ceu.danieldk.dictomaton%7Cdictomaton%7C1.1.1%7Cjar)

</comment><comment><USER6> Also interesting, the cutting edge work lucene has done to make this possible in 4.x, using universal automatons to speed up fuzzy, regex, and other searches.

[http://blog.mikemccandless.com/2011/03/lucenes-fuzzyquery- is...](http://blog.mikemccandless.com/2011/03/lucenes-fuzzyquery-is-100-times- faster.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Here is a smart implementation of the Levenshtein algorithm: [https://github.com/jefarmstrong/sortzzy](https://github.com/jefarmstrong/sortzzy)

I use in a "common pattern matching" for http routes and it works pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER8> Here are some sources on non-standard python data structures (including a text trie) that I've found very useful: [http://kmike.ru/python-data- structures/](http://kmike.ru/python-data-structures/)

Also I've used this C implementation of the Levenshtein distance which much success as well: [https://code.google.com/p/pylevenshtein/](https://code.google.com/p/pylevenshtein/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Either it's not that well known or I'm missing the point, but the BK Tree [1] seems relevant here. Haven't seem it mentioned yet.

[1]: [http://nullwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/the-bk-tree-a- data...](http://nullwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/the-bk-tree-a-data- structure-for-spell-checking/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice write-up and a cool solution. Tries are also an awesome way to implement a boggle solver, did that for a course back in school.

</comment><comment><USER11> Levenshtein is pretty useless compared to damerau-levenshtein or Jaro-Winkler

<comment><USER12> The advantage of basic Levenshtein is that it's a heck of a lot quicker (last time I checked) than Damerau-L or Jaro-Winkler in real world applications.

And I wouldn't go as far as to say it's useless. Basic Levenshtein only misses transpositions in comparison to Damerau-L, but it still catches them as insert/delete combos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > searches contain mispelled words, and users will expect these searches to > magically work

HELL NO, I expect searches to return "result not found". This is important information, as important as actual found results. I dont mind clearly labelled suggestions, but NEVER EVER give me what you think I want, instead of what I actually ask for.

<comment><USER14> You're not the typical user then.

<comment><USER15> I don't think we actually know what the typical user wants. Or is one of us aware of some really good user research on this subject?

One of our common failings as programmers is making incorrect assumptions about what the user wants. rasz_pl is assuming that the user is like him, and values precision. Gigablah is assuming that the user is not like rasz_pl, and does not value precision. Both of those are simply assumptions.

I hear this all the time. "But of course the user will want to be able to choose exactly which columns of data are in the table!". "But of course the user would rather see one nice simple summary number than the actual details!". Both of those are scary.</comment></comment></comment>


Michael Sam, likely N.F.L draft pick, says he is gay - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/10/sports/michael-sam-college-football-star-says-he-is-gay-ahead-of-nfl-draft.html?smid=tw-nytimes

<comment><USER2> While interesting, this is probably not HN material. (I long for the day where stories like these aren't news at all)</comment>


The Science of Irrationality: Why We Don't Like to Think - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203633104576625071820638808.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

<comment><USER2> So, why can't the ball cost .01?</comment>


Why Are So Many Animals Homosexual? - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/why-are-so-many-animals-homosexual <comment><USER2> Because some animals fuck anything that moves and doesn't, including dead animals[1] and other species[2]. Not sure if applying human categories such as "homosexual" to non-human animals is helpful, though.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/09/sex- depravity-p...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/09/sex-depravity- penguins-scott-antarctic)

[2] [http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141117-why-seals-have- sex-w...](http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141117-why-seals-have-sex-with- penguins)

<comment><USER3> That's kind of reductive, and I wonder if you read the article. The goose example is a long-term pairing and not just a roll in the hay. Some people might find your comment a bit offensive.

<comment><USER4> I have read it, it's almost exclusively about some geese, but the title is "So Many Animals."

Actually "many" animals aren't choosy, having no problem jumping on the same sex or even corpses or non-living objects, and don't make long-term unbreakable bonds. There are enough links here in responses.

Honestly, have you never had a male dog trying to copulate with your leg?

<comment><USER5> > Honestly, have you never had a male dog trying to copulate with your leg?

Having trained my four dogs I do not have this issue. I believe they are not copulating but, trying to establish dominance. I'm not sure that particular behavior is proof that they will hump anything. My friend had a female poodle who used to hump furry toys and she wasn't rubbing her parts on it. I think she was small and felt like a boss in doing it.

<comment><USER4> > Having trained my four dogs I do not have this issue.

What happens when they aren't trained against? How far would they go? I claim the untreated and unneutered males would actually ejaculate.

<comment><USER5> Personally having been raised going to dog shows and multiple people in my family owning grooming shops I've never seen a dog ejaculate. I've seen many untrained dogs humping people's legs though.

<comment><USER4> > I've seen many untrained dogs humping people's legs though.

Do people in these situations let dogs do this as long the dogs would prefer is the real question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There was a study on rats that found homosexuality arose when there was overpopulation or overcrowding. This would make sense of non-procreative coupling from an evolutionary standpoint. More recently, there was a study that found a biological basis for homosexuality where there was a genetic misfire during fetal development that caused too much of the wrong hormone to be released for that gender: too much testosterone for a woman, too much estrogen for a man, resulting in the person adopting traits of the wrong gender. I see no reason why these causative factors cannot be found in the animal world as well.

When people describe homosexuality as unnatural, I don't believe they are claiming homosexuality is not found in nature. I believe they mean that the homosexual sex act is not how our sexual organs are supposed to work biologically.

<comment><USER4> > I believe they mean that the homosexual sex act is not how our biological > sexual equipment is supposed to work.

And that's provably wrong, as we have enough examples in nature of "sexual equipment" working on whatever.

<comment><USER7> The sites I never visit (ahem) and discussions with people younger than myself seem to indicate that "inappropriate use" is no longer a taboo or an exception for heterosexual couples, but the rule (or at the very least tried once). This makes the stance of it being "unnatural" extra hypocritical.

PS Don't even get me started about saddlebacking 'virgins'.

<comment><USER4> Wow, didn't know about that expression for that practice, thanks:

[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Saddlebacking](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Saddlebacking)

The religions often depend on sacrifices.

<comment><USER8> You might find this relevant, and funny. The Loophole by Garfunkel and Oates[1].

1: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ZF_R_j0OY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ZF_R_j0OY)

<comment><USER7> I do. They're great, but thanks for sharing. NSFW peeps (no nudity, words)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, the article is about the occurrence of homosexual behavior in some populations of greylag geese. I don't know how this turned into "so many animals". According to Wikipedia, homosexuality has been observed in anywhere from 500 to 1500 species -- out of an estimated 8.7 million currently living (estimate from 2011).

I'm all for using science-based observations to promote tolerance but this feels a little forced.

<comment><USER10> > Well, the article is about the occurrence of homosexual behavior in some > populations of greylag geese. I don't know how this turned into "so many > animals". According to Wikipedia, homosexuality has been observed in > anywhere from 500 to 1500 species -- out of an estimated 8.7 million > currently living (estimate from 2011).

Comparing the 500–1500 number (of presumably well-observed species) with an estimated total number of species is not really a good comparison. Setting aside the accuracy of the estimate of the number of species and how many of those have actually been seen/classified, what fraction of those have been observed well enough to make a reasonable determination of the occurance of homosexual activity? Certainly the fraction of well-characerized species who exhibit homosexual behavior is much higher than the 1-in-1000 rate your numbers imply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I started getting the idea while reading this:

What if individual reproduction is NOT the norm? What if species survival is a combination of reproduction and survival (producing food, defense from predators, etc.). What if only a fraction of a species are required to be "breeders" and the rest perform survival duties? What if the apparent majority of sexual reproduction is only a temporary abberation and now that the species has reached a stepping stone, the "temperature" on sexual reproduction is turning down? Look at bees, for example. Only a minority of them reproduce while the rest perform survival functions.

<comment><USER12> In the early pages of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, Lawrence tries to understand Alan Turing (who is a character in the novel):

"From an evolution standpoint, what was the point of having people around who were not inclined to have offspring? There must be some good, and fairly subtle, reason for it.

The only thing he could work out was that it was groups of people--societies-- rather than individual creatures, who were now trying to out-reproduce and/or kill each other, and that, in a society, there was plenty of room for someone who didn't have kids as long as he was up to something useful."

<comment><USER13> Historically, people not inclined to sex with the opposite gender, still had children.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Someone in the comment section mentioned that there may be a correlation to rise of gays and the rise of urban life. Their reasoning was something about not having to reproduce.

It has gotten me to think about this. In general male and females are the same except we have organs that allows reproduction. Essentially that's it. As we passed the 7 billion people mark (let alone 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 billion) do we really feel the need to populate? Sure a lot of us are embedded with sexual desires, but as the population grows sex for recreation takes place over sex for survival.

This bring me to another thought about conservatives. They disagree with sex between the same gender. In a way they have a point. Googling "conservative" grants the following definition -

"holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation, typically in relation to politics or religion."

Back in the day there was much more of a need for sexual reproduction as the human race had been plagued with deaths, diseases, and unfortunately events. There was no need for "nonsense" like having fun. We had to survive! You'd follow an order (be it wealth, race, gender roles) and that's that. As we began to master or land and really create our own destiny having fun (e.g. sex) became something to do for fun. Its a circle...

Idunno, just a thought. Its an interesting topic non-the-less.

</comment><comment><USER15> so we're calling animal friends homosexual now? wow :)

<comment><USER16> The article doesn't even mention them having sex. I imagine theres something different between goose pair bonding and human romantic relationships that makes the homosexual label technically accurate, but not suited for equating to human homosexuality.

<comment><USER17> Excatly, I feel the same @goda90

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well here is one direct survival advantage in human society: your gay uncle or aunt may bequeath their estate to you and otherwise contribute to your upbringing (with higher probability than if they had their own kids). This is a considerable benefit, and it is to related genes.

<comment><USER19> That's great for you, but not so great for your gay aunt or uncle who would have been far better off (genetically) having their own offspring, and bequeathing their estate to them instead. So it doesn't really explain anything on its own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why are so many animals gay? Because they're watching too much internet pornography, so let's clean up the internet to protect our animals!

</comment><comment><USER21> This is a little like saying "why do so many animals fall in love"? Homosexuality, like love, is a human abstraction and doesn't really apply to the broader animal kingdom. Animals are acting more on instinct than we are, and when they pair up it's due to a survivalist instinct rather than a complicated social construct. So the answer is, there are no "gay" animals just like animals don't "fall in love". We are simply projecting our highly abstract concepts onto them.

<comment><USER22> So you think an entire field of research is irrelevant because "they're just animals"?

That's what people thought about animal suffering back in the 17th century. Descartes argued that animals didn't have consciousness, even, just base instinct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> So many... what a sensationalist title

</comment><comment><USER24> This is highly incorrect. Unless animals are genetically modified, they cannot ever think of being gay! It is the act of science that makes it possible. Nature won't.

</comment><comment><USER25> Why do so few animals identify as straight?

</comment><comment><USER26> It's unnatural, I tell you. Caused by the liberal media and their leftist propaganda!

Goose pride is where it's at.</comment>


Show HN: chickenpie – a Chicken implementation and debugger written in Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/auscompgeek/chickenpie <comment><AUTHOR> I got annoyed whilst trying to 'debug' the Chicken example programs to follow the execution of code (to do so, you would have to debug the JavaScript, adding a breakpoint at _just_ the right line of the code and setting up a bunch of variables to watch), so I rewrote the entire Chicken VM from the ground up, with the main goal of being able to introspect the VM with ease.

This was a fairly interesting learning experience for me, and I would appreciate any comments about it!</comment>


My favorite childhood game Tetris revisited - <AUTHOR> http://blocks.ovh/?playtime <comment><AUTHOR> Cool browser game to destress</comment>


Oom_pardon - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/Articles/104185/

<comment><USER2> That is classic. If only so much effort was invested into eliminating the need for memory overcommit.</comment>


Ask HN: What to do when a Chinese startup clones your website? - <AUTHOR> Dear HN, I'm CEO of a Germany-based eSports startup and we have a problem.
Today we were approached by a Chinese user of our website who told us that a China-based startup has launched a direct clone of our website aimed at the Chinese market.
Our website https://strivewire.com is a host of for-money eSports tournaments in the Hearthstone vertical, but we are working on expanding to other games as well.
The website in question is a very obvious clone of ours and has both .com and .cn domains: - www.haogegebisai.com - www.chosengamer.com
Basically they copied all the design and even our logo down to the actual URLs.
I've added their CEO on WeChat and inquired about this, and he said they are big fans of our startup. But he also mentioned that they already have investors. Their website launched two days ago and already has a bunch of activity.
We've talked about this internally and hope to be able to gain this startup as a Chinese subsidiary, but we are still unsure if this will actually work out.
From a legal standpoint we are very unsure how much you can actually do in such a case. Should we just wait it out? Our should we aim to litigate to put pressure on their investors? I have some experience in international litigation in cybercrime cases, but from a practical perspective it is very likely to bind a lot of resources and focus.
Another huge problem for us is that we are in talks with a very large Chinese IT company (triple-digit $Bn market cap), and if there is a clone growing in their backyard they might pass on us.
It'd be great if people with more experience in these things could give us some advice.
Thanks, Benjamin
TL;DR: Chinese startup is cloning our business, unsure what to do <comment><USER3> Where to start? You won't win putting legal pressure on any Chinese startup since that is an empty threat, but you also won't win talking to any big Chinese IT company. The startup won't care about the threat of legal action and the big company will simply clone your product once you convince them the market has potential.

If your goal is making money and/or securing a partnership you have to put yourself into a position of strength. The best way to do this is to launch an actual Chinese competitor yourself. This should cost no more than 10k USD per month assuming you can leverage your existing code, which makes it much cheaper than going the legal route. Feel free to contact me (contact info in profile) if you need help or introductions to people who can actually make this a reality for you in a week or two. I'm in Beijing and have done three startups in China and can put you in touch with people here who can actually help you.

A live product from you poses an existential threat to your competitors and keeps the big IT company from delaying in perpetuity (the typical modus operandi for big players here is to have middle management rush to agreement on the general principles of possible cooperation and then stalling and never doing anything more substantial -- the delay means they aren't sure if it is worth their while to clone you yet). But the threat of your getting actual traction matters because growth puts a deadline on your willingness to accept other people stalling, and your presence starts imposing actual costs on the startup. Those guys will need to change their branding at a minimum since they can't build an independent brand with you in the market, and once they know you will play hardball you will find them a lot more amenable to compromise if you want to go that route. With that said, if your market reception is good you may not even want to continue talking with them, since most Chinese startups are really inefficient and you can probably blow them out of the market anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much. Your advice sounds on point, and it is maybe even a bit too realistic to really reduce our stress levels.

We're really not sure what to expect from the Chinese market, and if our resources aren't better spent on US / EU only. We'd be interested to explore that option, though. Maybe there is a lot of low-hanging fruit. I will contact you next week if it is fine with you.

We believe for-money eSports tournaments will be the next online poker craze allover the world, because it addresses the basic instincs of competition of a generation of (mostly male) gamers that grow older and have more disposable income.

Thanks for offering your expertise.

<comment> pierre-renaux I've been in China from 2004-2014 and built a startup there that was sold to one of their internet giant.

I can confirm that the parent is on point. Imo, your best bet - if you dont want to give up the Chinese market - would be to raise from a reputable Chinese investor. Without that you wont have much pull with any partner you find in China and they will happily stall and then copy your stuff. That is completly "fair game" to them and most wont even comprehend what your trying to tell them - a bit like the guy telling you that he admires/like what you've done after you asked him why they copied your stuff as-is...

If you want to chat feel free to contact me, email in profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are a few places where you can lodge strong protest and send legal notice:

State Intellectual Property Office of China [http://english.sipo.gov.cn/lxfs/](http://english.sipo.gov.cn/lxfs/)

China Internet Network Information Center [http://www1.cnnic.cn/PublicS/hyzl/](http://www1.cnnic.cn/PublicS/hyzl/)

You can send them emails or even better call them. They all should have people who can communicate in English effectively. Getting in contact with them will help you put pressure on the offender, and also gather info for next move.

The best move is to hire someone from China to do some leg work for you, if that's necessary. No need for lawyers at first. There are many Chinese freelancers active in various international elance type sites. Also, [http://www.witmart.com/](http://www.witmart.com/) is reputable, operating from China.

China, at least the central government, is trying hard to implement tougher policies on protecting intellectual properties. The problems are mostly at the local level. If you know how to get the offenders' attention with effective threats on legal action, they are actually _very_ afraid of being caught. The cut-throat business competitions in China force them to avoid legal trouble and damage to their company's reputations, if they are legit startup trying to make it big, not some college students just playing around (in this case then you don't need to worry too much anyway).

Also wholesale copying western ideas is a widespread popular practice, I feel you are fighting the wrong battle. There is no way you can prevent somebody else (meaning hundreds if the idea is really good) in China doing the same cloning shit. Also conquering the China market needs many many other types of fighting, and preventing cloning is the least you need to worry about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks your advice, kev6168! I will try to get in touch with those two authorities on Monday and maybe they can clear up the leverage we have.

If you look at our website you see that we're using cheap bootstrap, so they are not really cloning our design asset, but the whole product / UX. They add some value for users by providing Chinese translations.

They told us they already have investors, and it seems at least two people are working on this. Unfortunately I was unable to find any info about company registration or the actual investor.

I sincerely hope that we can somehow work with them so we don't have to waste resources in fighting / worrying.

<comment><USER4> oh lots of 'fightings' are needed. Those fightings are very strange and pointless work to a westerner, but actually are the necessary and normal things to do in the Chinese business environment, things like 1. thorough research on whether it's in your best interests to operate in china now, _really important_, 2. much _much_ more carefully than you would do in Europe to examine your potential partners' credentials and validity of their claims, 3. establish connections with government officials (no, you don't need to go crazy on bribe or shady stuff, just good relationship and name recognition), 4, find capable and trusty locals to work together.

The key for anyone to make it in China is to understand that although China is utterly different from the west, it is _NOT_ a random and chaos place. It has its own well-oiled system running for the most time successfully for millenniums! It's scary to foreigners because it's so different so people tend to avoid it altogether. But in fact every issue has a well established way to be dealt with, obvious to locals but not obvious to a foreigner. So getting there and doing the right moves, you might emerge victorious.

Also in comparison to other industries, internet-related intellectual property protection is much easier to enforce by the Chinese central and local government, because they can order ISPs and Cloud service providers to pull plugs on the perpetrators web sites with enough poking from you or your liaison in China. Power to the censors and GFW related technologies! :) So be confident you will find ways to solve the problem. Good luck with your venture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _Another huge problem for us is that we are in talks with a very large > Chinese IT company (triple-digit $Bn market cap), and if there is a clone > growing in their backyard they might pass on us._

If what I've read about doing business in China holds a sliver of truth - <USER2> from stories linked here and elsewhere - it's not a _chance_ they will pass on you but almost a _given_ they will pass on you. I'm almost so suspicious of business practices in that market that I'd be willing to wager a small sum that maybe somebody in the very large Chinese IT company actually prompted another entity to get the clone up and running, or at least is aware of the situation.

If there's a way to take your idea and leave you nothing, I get the feeling that is exactly the path that will be taken. Unfortunately I can't help with direct advice to address, but I do wish you the best in your efforts to stamp out that terribly dishonest approach.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your assessment. I haven't thought about it from that angle. That's a bit upsetting as I am sure they have access to much larger resources than we do.

The thing is that I don't know who the investor behind this business is. If I knew it is a smallish business angel then there would be no reason to worry. On the other hand if they are in Chinese YC we have a problem :|

<comment><USER6> If you can find a way to innovate in a manner that isn't easily copyable I think you can win. Sorry if that isn't much help. The Chinese are experts at copying but it doesn't work for everything at any single point in time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had this happen to a client. The Chinese company was literally hot-linking to everything. I used a site sucker to grab the site they had put up to tell this.

So we changed the domain name, moved the site.

We then replaced the assets under the domain name they were using with assets that might offend folks when looked at.

Not everyone can change the domain though.

<comment><USER8> You'd be amazed what an Nginx configuration serving a conditional message in favor of freedom of expression and self-determination for Taiwan can accomplish. Not much for international politics, but it will resolving the hotlinking problem very, very quickly.

<comment><USER9> I'm surprised this didn't come up with the github script tag DDOS. I know they changed content to try to encourage them to stop, but it was an inconvenience to users, like alert() calls, so of course it was no where near as effective as this.

<comment><USER10> > _I 'm surprised this didn't come up with the github script tag DDOS._

The main Chinese-Github DDOS was the Chinese Goverment/Great Firewall of China was it intercepting Chinese websites for non-chinese IPs, and inserting a script that DDOSed Github. Chinese users weren't relevant here.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point. I just want to be clear that we are not looking for ways to weaponize their or even our own website :)

Just trying to get some input on a tricky situation. Should we expand to China earlier than planned? Should we ignore it? etc pp

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The only thing the Chinese respect is constant execution. You have to out execute them every day and constantly beat them in the market, in order to achieve a position of strength from which you can structure the deals you want. Despite what some other users have posted here, there's almost 0 respect for trademark or copyright law especially if you're a foreign company.

</comment><comment><USER12> Out of curiosity, what makes "What to do when a Chinese startup clones your website?" different from "What to do when another startup clones your website?" Is it just a matter of legal jurisdiction? Or is there some other element here that makes it more nefarious?

<comment><USER13> When a Chinese group does it, you can't sue them. You can't compel their ISP to block them. You can't file a patent or trademark or any other protection for your prior art where it matters. And in many cases, you can't even talk to them, because unlike many programmers from non-English speaking countries, they may really not know English, and/or there may be no intersection in the communication services that you and they are using.

There aren't a lot of other countries that share all those difficult aspects yet still have plenty of capable programmers.

<comment><USER14> It's not China specific though, surely it would be the same in pretty much any non-English speaking country? What happens if a company in Romania/Bulgaria/Nigeria/Chile clones your US startup?

Even in terms of legal jurisdictions if a company in Australia clones it, and hosts and develops everything in Australia, you may need to hire an Australian legal team to fight it.

<comment><USER15> Not sure about Nigeria but you can absolutely seek legal recourse in Romania, Bulgaria or Chile with the aid of a local, English-speaking lawyer. All of these countries have well developed legal systems.

<comment><USER16> Ok - great. A competitor can open and register their company in Panama. Then what?

<comment><USER15> If they conduct business in the United States, it may be possible to seek legal recourse in the United States.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I live in China, I've been here 15 years. My wife is an IP lawyer. I'm also German by third citizenship. My advice is: forget China, work on other markets, totally ignore the situation.

Honestly, the chances you are going to get decent cash from e-sports here are 1 in a million. Every _wangba_ (internet cafe) has pirated titles. Few pay for games. Lots of servers are openly running hacked. New TVs here come with built in pirated content Netflix clones. Nobody cares.

Take it from me, there just isn't have a legal or commercial environment here that is likely to favor your business model.

</comment><comment><USER18> Try to figure out how they do it, and feed them with porn and anti chinese propaganda. If they do it manually then pray for them because they have a shitty life.

<comment><USER19> Write some markov chains that spew out text about Tiananmen square. Actually don't, they might be ripping you off but that might get them killed.

<comment><USER20> I'm trying to work out why retaliation with porn / tragedy propaganda is even vaguely acceptable.

HN would typically be aghast if you served NSFW content potentially to unexpecting audiences (..think of the children!), or even with the real life analog of becoming vigilante on someone who wronged you.

There seems to be the underlying notion that: because it's China, any riposte is acceptable. Again, HN would typically be aghast if you drew sweeping stereotypes over 1B+ people.

There are multiple solutions.

If someone is hotlinking your content, block their requests.

Lodge DMCA requests to remove their SE listing.

If you have a product and a brand that is being copied, Chinese customs are very pro-active on brand defense. Register your brand / trademark: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/danharris/2015/10/12/how-to- prot...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/danharris/2015/10/12/how-to-protect- against-counterfeiting-register-your-china-trademark-with-china- customs/#51489d2310bf)

Innovate and update more often. Copying, legal or otherwise happens all the time, in all jurisdictions. Ratinally weigh up the real damage their site is causing, and act accordingly.

<comment><USER21> Because in the absence of law and order, when the social contract is broken we as humans feel the need for justice.

If justice could be served using legal channels, then it would. As it is in the Free World. Given the parent's examples of why legal channels are unavailable, vigilantism is the automatic next best thing.

Legal channels often serve as the path of least resistance compared to vigilante acts in other cases. Their ineffectiveness in cases like this push people to do what they feel they must.

<comment><USER22> That and it's really funny. You're ripping me off? Surprise! Your site's made of porn now! It's enjoyable in a somewhat twisted way, a la schadenfreude.

I don't know if I would call legal channels "ineffective" and I'm not anarchist enough to say that you "must" be a vigilante when they don't work. But yeah, sometimes it's really enjoyable to get back at people.

There's nothing wrong with being morally wrong. (Just as long as you're not hurting anyone, in my opinion.)

<comment><AUTHOR> They're not hotlinking us, so these approaches wouldn't work in our case.

Furthermore I think (e)Sports is a rather apolitical thing so I wouldn't like to find myself on some Chinese blacklist, as we definitely want to expand in the asian markets.

<comment><USER6> > we definitely want to expand in the asian markets.

Is China required or could you settle with Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, etc?

You might want to investigate the experiences of other businesses who have tried to sell within China. China's judicial system is worse than ours.

I wouldn't pump much time or money into tip toeing around their rules. Ultimately they can just block and clone you. Consider that China's blocking of FB, Twitter, and Google allow them to create their own copies of these sites that create jobs and earn money within China. China likes to say that these sites don't play by the rules, but it seems when you operate in China the goalposts are always moving. Personally I think that's because any government that is not by the people is unstable. That's up to them to decide, however.

<comment><AUTHOR> South Korea is huge for eSports so definitely also a huge target for us. But I am not sure that you can play a role in China from outside.

The current interest in China (and our FOMO) is mainly driven by potential investors or acquirers. We've nearly finished our app with which we hope to bring eSports for-money tournaments to a whole new level.

In our type of business everyone is moving goalposts all the time, we have had interesting experiences with regulators in EU and US so I am unsure if Chinese bureaucracy can really top this.

Obviously, when structuring international business in that region Hong Kong or Singapore are prime locations, but I don't think the big vision can be implemented without having native speakers both in CN and SK.

As a German company, a lot of our "good old manufacturing" businesses have written case study over case study about expansion to China, with very mixed results. But I feel we're kind of forced into that decision right now, because growth can be explosive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Happened to me. Frustrating experience but afterwards you learned very well that you need to create a product and/or business model with a strong lock-in, not just a nice site or app.

<comment> awinter-py yes -- 'what stops a third party from duplicating your model' is a good question to ask before starting a company.

<comment><AUTHOR> People will put money into their accounts on our site and have an online balance, that is a huge factor in stickyness imo (same as with online poker).

We haven't tested their backend logic which is a huge part of our competitive advantage to other platforms, and mainly assessed the thread by visually comparing the sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> TBH it's very lazy of them to just copy your fairly standard bootstrap design and generic lighting bolt logo. If they just used some other similar template and chose some other logo but otherwise had the same business, they would be your chinese competitor vs. your chinese clone.

Maybe the most efficient measure you can do with your scarce startup resources is to treat them as a competitor and enter the chinese market earlier if it's practical. If someone makes their own VRBO or AirBNB website for china and choose to make their own logo and standard web design, are they an AirBNB clone or competitor?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're the first to point out our shitty design :) That was one of the things that shocked me most: Why on earth would they pick our default bootstrap template if there are so many better ones? They even cloned the background gradients of the current match boxes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The ICP license they're using in non-commercial. 京ICP备16007973号-3

Note the 备 which means non-commercial.

Pretty equivalent to a blog, or basic homepage.

Were they to try to commercialise what they/you plan to do, they'd need to apply for an ICP license via a different route, for online gaming (and as you alluded to, potentially betting). That would be a route paved in hell for any small startup.

Dismiss this as a non-threat, both as a commercially viable startup and/or as a ruse of the large company you're currently talking to. Don't waste your time with it.

</comment><comment><USER26> What design did they copy? As far as I can see you are both just using Twitter Bootstrap? The logo - is that the lightning icon?

What is the background functionality? Are you competing in the same market?

If you are worried about looking similar to other sites then spend some time on a more distinctive design than Bootstrap.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think you taking the high road and aim for the "gain this startup as a Chinese subsidiary" route is the win-win situation here. Of course, I can only read so much from your description, and maybe some things don't apply in your case. Temper everything I say with your knowledge of your Chinese userbase (if any).

I mean sure, it might look like an affront on the work you've put in your site, but in the end, you've also found another group doing what you're also doing, probably just as dedicated as you are. Depending on the mutual language skills (maybe even consider using a telephone interpreter service [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_interpreting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_interpreting)), you might be able to find common ground and work together towards a collaboration agreement or outright acquisition -- whatever it is, just _make sure_ to have it in writing that your company came up with the concept and design. Win-win for both sides, and that contract is then legally binding.

Even more, if you're in talks with a very large Chinese company, having Chinese collaborators might actually work in your favor.

TL;DR: You might have more to gain by working on a collaboration deal first. Just never lose sight of the fact that, in the end, they were stealing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your encouraging advice. Your last point really hits home. I have too limited knowledge of the Chinese business world to know whether this behavior is standard operating procedure, or if it is very, very large red flag to not sign any written deals with such business men.

As you said, the huge bonus is that they are dedicated to eSports as well and have put substantial effort into capturing our (potential) Chinese user base. Thank you as well for the pointer to phone interpreting services, I would've tried to leverage some friends in China, but this seems like a good alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Well if by clone you also mean copies your content? You could probably file some complaints with major search engines. Also may be able to file complaints via DMCA. If they are using any US based payment processors, you could send complaints in to them.

<comment><USER29> That's pretty much all you can do. Try to remove from search engines and complain online a lot until people (your clients) notice - so they are aware. Litigation in China... forget about that.

<comment><USER30> I'm just thinking how amazingly fun it would be to spend a few years of your life on a legal case, in another country, in another language and spending vast sums of money in the certain knowledge that you'll loose :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is what ends up happening when you don't have an economic moat [1]. If you want to stay on top, you'll need to out-innovate your competitor and give your market a strong reason to stick with you over them. Do or die.

[1]: [http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/economicmoat.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/economicmoat.asp)

<comment><USER32> I think OP understands the "moat" concept based on his comment here [1]. Also based on this comment and others of his, he seems mostly anxious and worried about the implications of someone near-cloning his front end.

He's just asking around to find what his options are.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11458359](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11458359)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> You should probably ignore this and just get back to work.

You've got plenty of competition on your side of the world. Stop looking for competition else where.

</comment><comment><USER34> If I were this "very large" Chinese IT company and I really wanted to buy your business, I'd create a clone to give me better negotiating leverage.

Edit: just to clarify - I personally wouldn't do this, because it is possibly illegal and absolutely unethical. But very large companies (in China and elsewhere) are not known for being ethical.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately it hasn't progressed so far that we are actually negotiating yet. But the perspective is there.

I can't say our website is very artistic, but here in Germany those laws can be enforced with much strictness, and people just wouldn't imitate you like that.

Maybe this is the payback for what the Samwer brothers have done to silicon valley entrepreneurs..

<comment><USER6> How certain are you that their site has a genuine flurry of activity/users?

If I were a Chinese clone with this strategy, I would try to simulate that activity as soon as possible to make it seem like a legitimate threat. Can you get in touch with any would-be users within China who speak English and Chinese to gauge whether or not this site is legitimate before worrying too much? It seems you are short on facts at this point.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good point. We will have a look at that. They only joined two days ago and all their events are password locked, which makes it hard to gauge real activity.

If they do for-money events then they most likely send around money through some payment apps which is hard to track for us.

We don't have very many Chinese users at hand but I will ask in the team to get more info on their marketing activities.

<comment><USER6> If you do go into acquisition mode, I'd take a good hard look at their numbers. My pessimistic point of view is it'd be next to impossible for you to verify anything, even if you were Chinese, without some inside information. The protections you're used to just don't exist there yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Trevelyan advise spot on about startup local company. Fight on their own turf and it also opens new market for you. With locals on side you can also do better quality research on competitors.

Take kev6168 advice and do your paperwork: trademark and copyright registrations, company registration. With that in hand, or at least started, you can then contact their service providers, like aliyun, and advise of your intended legal action against that clone and their providers.

Above all dont lose focus on your own product. Defending can be a vacuum of time and energy and your own product gets lost in the process. Yes you have to defend, but best defense is a better product and brand awareness.

Cloning/knockoffs is an issue globally and happens in lots of industries. Get over it. Ignore commenters/ppl with vitriolic rhetoric and emotional responses (i.e. the trolls) - you need a clear head to get thru this unscathed.

</comment><comment><USER36> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11455670](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11455670) is a repost with more context

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that is the post where I tried to tell the whole story. This thread is my faulty first submission :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> When UMeng cloned Flurry, I could be wrong but I don't believe we did anything, and I'm pretty sure that was the right call. Any lengthy legal dispute will distract you from other important things; legal disputes that are likely to go nowhere are likely to distract you for no benefit whatsoever.

I empathize - I was a bit annoyed by the first version of UMeng, which was a pretty close copy of Flurry's web design and feature set. But if your situation is anything like ours was, you'll see the companies evolve away from each other over time as you each adapt to your respective markets - and you probably didn't have the staff and cultural knowledge to support the Chinese market anyway.

</comment><comment><USER38> How do you deal with your competitors in the US? i.e. [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/esports- hero](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/esports-hero) (raised $1m)

I feel like you're better off building out your core product and finding user traction in your markets instead of worrying about the plethora of competitors that exist out there. I imagine that if I found one, there are probably many more.

</comment><comment><USER39> German working at a startup in Beijing here. That's a daft case of C2C (copy to china) you've got on your hands there.

You probably won't be able to gain them as a Chinese subsidiary, they'll think you're delusional, hell, that sounds delusional to me.

Them having investors (if they do), doesn't mean much if anything. C2Cs of startups with traction are generally seen as a safe bet by investors, hell, there's teams specializing on it. Money is sloshing around, the silliest things are getting funded.

Litigating is probably pointless. Best case they get scared, drop the thing and another C2C gets sent the code they have.

Clones are to be expected, and as other comments have said, it might even be the Chinese IT company you're dealing with that started the thing, or maybe they've started building something internally. They're probably looking to screw you over as well.

Really, if you're looking to compete in China, you break out your copy of Sun Tsu and leaf through your Machiavelli. Out-engineer them, get some boots on the ground, find some Chinese to work with, lob some nuisances their way, grow in China and squash them. That'll put you in a stronger negotiation position with Tencent/Baidu/Ali/Whoever as well. Your advantage is that whilst chinese coders are cheap, and they can throw 20 engineers at the problem, most of them aren't very good. If you don't allow them to grow more than you do, and you're pushing features whilst they're accruing tech debt, they will loose that war of attrition eventually. Especially if you go for things that are hard.

Good luck man.

PS: If your business plan looks like the work of a paranoid madman, you're on the right track to compete in the land far east.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your blunt advice, much appreciated. It really shocked me because we don't have any significant cash flows at the moment, so they must be buying into our vision (which is a good thing).

Let's hope we can keep the pace and don't waste our potential. Best of luck to you as well, will ping you when I ever put foot to Beijing again.

<comment><USER39> It's a nice city, wonderful air.

If finances permit, I'd still do some Chinese registrations though, just so you're covered on that front. I recommend at least getting a small foothold over there, just in case that once you're big, they decide that haogege is chinese and legal, and you're not.

If it makes you feel better, lots of Chinese are just as clueless about the "West" as we are about China. Met a guy at an event last Thursday who asked me and a friend about the feasibility of selling phone cases in Europe and the US. To be fair, they are a big fashion accessory in China, but really only in China. We told him that if he thinks that going into a saturated market with a low margin product people don't care about that gets replaced maybe once a year sounds like a fun time to him, he is welcome to try. I'm not sure whether he got it.

There's also the thing that really competent people over here would probably not care to copy a German eSports startup 1-to-1. They might have some mediocre PHP programmers and probably someone who knows enough frontend stuff to copy over all the assets. If you drop features, you should watch out for how long it takes them to duplicate them. If it takes as long as it took you to write them, be worried. If takes far longer for them to step up, you've got an edge. If it's instant, you might want to redouble on your security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> >> But he also mentioned that they already have investors.

He's bluffing. The activity could be paid for.

He wants to look strong, either to dissuade you from competing in the same market, or for you start negotiating with him, giving him the advantage.

But it's not like you can sit on your hands either.

Go right ahead and add Chinese translation to your website, I say. You can then use the same i18n infrastructure and hire Vietnamese, Indonesian, Tagalog translators and expand to the rest of South East Asia. Do Traditional Chinese as well, and get into Taiwan and Hong Kong. Translators from upwork.com should be quite cheap. Be careful to only send the translatable message files, though, don't send the code - I've heard of people getting their code ripped this way.

Try do that in a month.

Then you have them surrounded, and you can negotiate with them from a position of strength.

You can send them a grateful email thanking them for introducing you to the Asian market.

Send a bottle of European wine as your regards.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like your leadership attitude :-) From the other people commenting in this thread I figured that cooperation is not a realistic goal, so we will try to up our Asia game.

But we also need some people from the local eSports community to work with/for us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Kudos though for actually building something worth being copied :)

At first it would seem like a very bad thing, but if you think about it, they are merely reinforcing your idea. I say give them the finger and just focus on making the best of your idea no matter what those guys are doing.

I wish you all the best for that!

"Lions aren't concerned about the opinions of sheep"

<comment><AUTHOR> Feels good to hear. Our site has equally large parts of logic on client / server side so I am unsure if they can really out-execute us. But the first mover advantage is there, and we currently can't cover Chinese language.

Working hard on bringing the other stuff on the road, so your advice bodes well. Thanks again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Lets put evil Chinese people aside (joke/sarcasm).

I can replicate your business 100% and I'm not in China. What are you going to do?

<comment><AUTHOR> Food for thought. I don't think you would clone it in such an obvious fashion.

Several other projects tried to do it, and we currently have some SV VC-fueled competitors. But I don't think they have the roadmap we do.

Funny thing is we spent the better part of last year VC-shopping and everyone passed on us. Some shit VC from Berlin forwarded all info to the CEO of EU's largest eSports business and they all said our business idea sucks.

So until some college buddy of a VC has the same idea and gets easy money (I'm looking at you USV) the whole pay-for-money thing still has to grow.

From a technical perspective the implementation of user-friendly real-time tournaments was really hard to get right and can't easily be copied.

<comment><USER16> I think your answered your question: From a technical perspective the implementation of user-friendly real-time tournaments was really hard to get right.

So you have your "secret sauce" (that is real-time tournaments). You just need to make your design not to be plain bootstrap so that it does look like you cloned somebody's else website.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Hey, Benjamin. It's a hard subject you've pointed out. It never happened to me still, I remember when I was on a conference from @archdaily creator David Basulto, he was telling his experience when a Chinese blog starts to replicate his content to the Chinese market, exactly what happened to you. Was quite interesting because he tried everything to pull his Chinese cloned website down with no luck at all, he even went to China to see if he could do anything. At the end he hired his Chinese copycat, proposing to he become part of the Arch Daily's team as a Chinese correspondent, which the Chinese guy accepted. I really don't now how much they've copied you and how they are operating, but have a similar strategy could help you :D all the best,

Pedro H.

</comment><comment><USER43> Here's something you could try.

1\. Find some reputable investors active in China. Start talks with them.

2\. Contact the CEO and say "Thanks for pointing out to us the value of the Chinese market. We will now 1. move into the Chinese market (mention your talks to investors) and 2. proceed to sue you and your investors (who our legal team is contacting now). The alternative is that we set up a licensing deal (or that you pay us a 1-time fee to make this go away).

Long term though my guess is that you should focus on your market and forget about China.

(It is possible I've watched too much House of Cards lately ;)

</comment><comment><USER44> eSports, really? Is that even legal in Germany?

[http://www.gamblingsites.org/laws/germany/](http://www.gamblingsites.org/laws/germany/)

<comment><AUTHOR> There's some room.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> While "c'est du chinois" is really not a valid excuse these days, with so many chinese people/students available all across Europe, ready (and hungry) to help Western companies deal with China's local systems/language, it should be noted that having Chinese competitors has not prevented Google/Facebook/Amazon from making their billions.

Focus should primarily remain on product and users.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the double submission, I now added the text to this post as well.

The thing is that they created the site from scratch but it is exactly like our site only directly aimed at Chinese users.

Our website is www.strivewire.com, and they use www.haogegebisai.com

They are not hotlinking anything, and we're shying away from an open confrontation. Just wanted to know if you know of some good strategies to approach this issue.

</comment><comment><USER46> Fortunately, I was running an image site and they hot linked my images. So I only served users with their referrer thumbnails instead of full size images. I also used image magick through PHP to append a footer with my site URL and logo stuck on the bottom. Free advertising win!

</comment><comment><USER47> The best solution would be to acquire it, but that would lead to companies in china copying other companies websites and products in turn starting an entire chain of copycat blackmails. The situation is definitely hard. But a temporary solution is definitely acquiring the firm.

</comment><comment><USER48> Think good way, they create a market for it. If those customer don't satisfy they will moved to your site. Still need to remember 30 days development e.g will not same with your previous development days and also no matter money and developer they hired, time is essence.

</comment><comment><USER49> Step 1 (going well so far): put their URL on the front page of HN, launching an effective DDOS on their unsuspecting infrastructure. Their site is already creaking under the load. And I'm sure we can all contribute a few more random clicks to eat up their bandwidth ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I see we're working on our own demise ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> When you can't go legal, Go illegal. Hire a hacker and get the site down.

<comment><AUTHOR> Problem is, we're not providing the Chinese userbase any better solution. They have Chinese translations, whereas we're an English-only website.

Furthermore they are hosted on AliBaba's cloud (from what I was able to see), so it looks like a more professional and IT-affine implementation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> There's a dude in India that ripped off my entire business model including branding. I have no idea what to do about that.

<comment><AUTHOR> We can relate to that. What makes us a bit anxious is the fact that they are backed by investors. We have no idea who did invest and how much. This info would help us to assess how much of a threat they are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Do you know what would be nice ? A way to encrypt the data before viewing to the user and the js will decrypt the data by calling a websocket api to give the password. This way for each specific websocket session you encrypt and decrypt the data differently. Also you can hide recognizable information in the data so when copied you will search the history to find who did it.

<comment><USER53> That would not work, would be a poor user experience, would be technically infeasible, and would be ineffective.

You can't publish content to the public and prevent copies being made. That's the lesson we need to take away from the DRM nonsense that we went through (and to some extent, are still going through).

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Do you have any (high) political connections in Germany? You could try to ask for a (huge) favor - have someone in the German consulate ask their Chinese counterparts for a(another huge) favor, and get the Chinese govt to shut them down. A long shot, but if you have the right friends, it might work.

</comment><comment><USER55> I thought with .com domains you could have them deregistered for fraud?

</comment><comment><USER56> one question comes to my mind "if your product copied by Tencent,what should you do?" this question often asked in China.

</comment><comment><USER57> Here's another perspective on this issue, that might be a bit unpopular, but I feel needs to be said:

Why do you feel entitled to do something relatively copy-able and _not_ be copied? Because you're European?

Patents and that sort of legal protection apply to discoveries and inventions (and even then, the rules change with the Chinese). To be blunt, you're making a website for people to organize around video games. I'm not trying to belittle what you're doing (admittedly a huge former fan of competitive Starcraft on ICCup, CS and Halo PC on Xfire, etc) but come on you're not splitting the atom in any sense.

Compete and beat the clones. They're not going to go away, that's reality. Did you know that Facebook has the exact same problem you do with Renren?

So how can you compete? Understand your users better to offer superior customer service; stay on top of new features; build a network effect into your product. Though I'm thinking it already has one, since tournaments need people, and people will congregate on the best platform. I know e-sports is huge (and growing) in Europe, and I'd find it quite surprising if eventually the winning platform for these people to organize tournaments is on a Chinese site!

Best of luck Benjamin, I do wish you the best. I don't think there's an easy answer for you, just stay pragmatic given the realities of what you're up against.

</comment><comment><USER58> I would just find security flaws in their software and use them to appropriate their client base. Most Chinesw clones are thrown together.

It's not like they will be able to do much about it. If they do, you can use it as a bargining chip and go after them for infringing on your copyright.

Parasite companies in China think that they have an advantage by not having to follow US laws, but what they don't realize is that it can also work against them.

</comment><comment><USER59> digital millennium copyright act notice: [http://www.whoishostingthis.com/resources/dmca/](http://www.whoishostingthis.com/resources/dmca/)

<comment><USER60> I don't think US copyright law will be very helpful here.

<comment><USER36> It can at least pull them out of search results to dent any organic/paid traffic they are trying to drive to their site.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're currently not focusing on the Chinese market, and afaik they are mainly focusing on it. The website is in Chinese language, but 100% looks and feels like ours.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A 24-Year-Old Built a $5B Hotel Startup in Five Years - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-25/this-24-year-old-built-a-5-billion-hotel-startup-in-five-years?srnd=technology-vp <comment><USER2> As a customer, I find OYO hotels to be very bad. There are hotels that I otherwise would not even have gone to (since low end hotels in India are appallingly filthy), but the OYO label lends them greater credibility.

I avoid OYO when I can.

A general thumb rule I follow for booking hotels in India is : if you are staying with family, go for hotels priced around or more than 40-50% of the price of the top end chain hotels in that city. For example, in Delhi, try not to book any hotel priced below Rs. 3500 per night. Chances are high that it may be cockroach-infested and grimy. Many of these now have the dreaded OYO label attached to them.

<comment><USER3> TripAdvisor ratings are very indicative and the portal usually shows prices from various booking sites. Then I call the hotel directly and 90% of time I get a better price and a room of choice guaranteed right them which is not at all possible over booking sites where you get a room type and get assigned one when you check-in. Definitely direct booking when the property is on AirBnb - in this case almost always owners themselves ask me to book directly with them and bypass AirBnb.

You are bang on about the cost threshold.

Pro-tip: for real hotel locations use Google Maps in satellite mode. Esp. useful in hill stations and beaches - you'll avoid hotels that claim to have a view but forget to mention it's the bus-stand view.

<comment><USER4> How much can you get off by calling hotels? Maybe 10-20% off Expedia prices?

<comment><USER3> Yatra, Booking, and Agoda are what I usually check. Yes, around 10-25% I'd say and usually the discussed price (over phone) is final i.e no additional taxes unlike on portals where after you go for checkout tax will be extra, sometimes other myriad of fees.

On rare occasions I have been actually told to book from booking sites as they won't be able to offer better prices :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a franchise system.

Franchises are wonderful when you are in _expansion_ phase--especially if you have a nicely banked war chest (which this company does because of the VC backing).

The test of a franchise is when it is in stable or contraction phase.

That's when you find out if it's a business or a pyramid scheme.

</comment><comment><USER6> As an anecdote, this happened at an Oyo hotel: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myhubCtp- DI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myhubCtp-DI)

TL;DW: Western woman was trapped in the room by hotel employees threatening sexual assault.

</comment><comment><USER7> I first heard about OYO through a friend who shared this livemint article:

[https://www.livemint.com/Companies/7CN7u5d4i3bfYgBAZLdLpM/Wi...](https://www.livemint.com/Companies/7CN7u5d4i3bfYgBAZLdLpM/Will- the-real-Ritesh-Agarwal-please-stand-up.html)

The article paints a terrible picture of a guy who has embraced the - fake it, till you make it mantra. Lied about Thiel scholarship, best selling books and even screwing his partners.

</comment><comment><USER8> OYO has made convenient finding hotels and making confirmed reservations in hotels in small town india. Also since all payments are billed by OYO and not the hotel, the hotel cannot fleece you like charging more for a foreign national. They also have a convenient functional app.

</comment><comment><USER9> And his surname is not Patels. :-) The Patel clan own a lot of the Mom and Pop hotels in the US.

<comment><USER10> Is there a reason why? I knew someone growing up whose family owned a motel in our hometown and her family name was Patel too.

<comment><USER11> This submission talks about it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17915049](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17915049)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm so tired of seeing articles like this. WHO CARES? Nothing about this story is repeatable. It deludes the masses in terms of real prospects of starting a business. The headline alone is just clickbait. It's completely unfair, as it robs desperate people of a reality check. I wish I could downvote this.

<comment><USER13> Lot people find this usedful.

\- They are solving problem differently

\- 24 year old scaled a company to $5 billion value

And of course you can downvote.

<comment><USER14> you can only downvote with enough karma/rep/whatever it is here

<comment><USER15> Plus, you can't downvote submissions at all, even if you have the 500 karma necessary to downvote comments. The only thing you can do is to flag it.

<comment><USER16> or ignore and move on to the next article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Another story glorifying a sociopath!

Article on Oyo founder (Ritesh) from 2015 - [https://www.livemint.com/Companies/7CN7u5d4i3bfYgBAZLdLpM/Wi...](https://www.livemint.com/Companies/7CN7u5d4i3bfYgBAZLdLpM/Will- the-real-Ritesh-Agarwal-please-stand-up.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Imagine if we lived in a society where these stories were about _housing_ startups, not hotel startups. Food production startups instead of food packaging startups. Public infrastructure projects instead of scooter renting apps. Actual creation of wealth and value added to the economy instead of endless insipid rent-seeking, shuffling value around from middleman to middleman until one of them figures out a more efficient way to extract.

<comment><USER19> Some people look at societal improvements as byproducts of increased wealth generation. In other words, me getting rich is good for the world, presuming I am not cheating/robbing someone else in the process. Although, apparently that's an optional ethical boundary for some.

<comment><USER20> Wealth generation is not wealth distribution. It is entirely possible for you to become very, very rich thru wealth distribution resulting from processes that retard wealth generation or reduce wealth globally.

Actually generating wealth is hard, it's so much easier to inject yourself into existing transactions and take a cut instead.</comment></comment></comment>


Porting Windows Dynamic Link Libraries to Linux - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/taviso/loadlibrary <comment><USER2> Did this close to twenty years ago. Ported a COM DLL to Linux and one of the executables using it.

I implemented everything it needed. COM functions like CoCreateInstance, entry points like DllCanUnloadNow, Windows Sockets and whatnot.

The registry API! Ha. I mapped HKEY_CURRENT_USER to configuration files rooted in the user's home directory, and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE to /etc.

The lib's DllRegisterServer nicely registered its COM class inside the fake registry.

Don "COM is Love" Box would have teared up had he seen this.

<comment><USER3> Open Group had COMsource: [http://www.opengroup.org/comsource/](http://www.opengroup.org/comsource/)

<comment><USER4> Software AG had DCOM (EntireX?) implementation for Solaris/Linux back in the day It was freely downloadable and came with working examples :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Note that the author is Tavis Ormandy, the guy who (among many, many other things) discovered one of the worst Windows security vulns, that was patched last month -- and from the README it seems like this is part of the toolchest he used for this particular discovery.

To all people wondering why not wine or winelib - this is for ease of debugging and fuzzing DLLs, not for actually running software. Wine and Winelib bring way too much baggage for those uses.

</comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of a tool Jeff Roberts wrote at RAD Game Tools which would repackage libraries so they were loadable on Linux. At the time the motivation was that MSVC was generating much better code than GCC for Bink, so he'd compile on Windows with MSVC and cross-link to Linux with his custom tool.

<comment><USER7> Does MSVC still generate better code than GCC ? I do not find any recent benchmark.

<comment><USER8> Of things I have benchmarked in the past 5 or so years GCC has not been beaten by GCC for any of my workloads or benchmarks. I do mostly things related to 3d graphics and are heavy on the CPU, but what little IO I have done follows this pattern too.

As near as I can tell msvc is strictly inferior except for windows community adoption than gcc/mingw. Of course, benchmark your workload, I could be doing something odd that you are not.

<comment><USER9> GCC has not been beaten by GCC \--> MSVC has not been beaten by GCC

ftfy

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is cool and a lot lighter than WINE, though the important keyword is _self-contained_ Windows libraries. I gather this won't work on DLLs that call any of the plethora of Windows APIs. I'm actually very surprised that any non- trivial DLLs are self-contained in this way, like his example of Windows Defender which I thought would call 1000 Windows API functions.

<comment><USER11> A bunch of C runtime library and Windows APIs are implemented or stubbed:

* [https://github.com/taviso/loadlibrary/tree/master/peloader/w...](https://github.com/taviso/loadlibrary/tree/master/peloader/winapi)

* [https://github.com/taviso/loadlibrary/blob/master/peloader/c...](https://github.com/taviso/loadlibrary/blob/master/peloader/crt.c)

<comment><USER12> Like... in Wine? (Yes I read the readme)

<comment><USER11> Much smaller and without wineserver too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you like this, you might also like the Witchcraft Compiler Collection[1] by Jonathan Brossard.

It approaches from a different angle (relinking), but (as far as I understand it) can help to solve the same problem Tavis tackles. In the end they both allow the dynamic analysis of PE files in Linux. Both tools only work if the architecture is the same in both worlds, I think.

EDIT: [2] is an intro to the Witchcraft Compiler Collection from Black Hat Europe 2016 which is probably more helpful than the link to the repo.

[1] [https://github.com/endrazine/wcc/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/endrazine/wcc/blob/master/README.md)

[2] [https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-16/materials/eu-16-Brossard...](https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-16/materials/eu-16-Brossard- Witchcraft-Compiler-Collection-Towards-Self-Aware-Computer-Programs.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER14> Why not just use full-on WINE? The basic system calls are pretty much fully covered. It seems this duplicates a lot of work.

<comment><USER15> Are the Windows API implementations of WINE usable by a native Linux program (eg as a library of some sort)? That seems to be the requirement here.

<comment><USER16> Yes, I've written a windows dll loader for linux based on wine myself. It's fairly simple to add support for LoadLibrary() and GetProcAddress() to a linux program using wine libraries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Did anyone find info on how are user32.dll and kernel32.dll handled ?

<comment><USER11> There are stubs, or reimplementations on top of the C library, for a relatively small subset of functions: [https://github.com/taviso/loadlibrary/tree/master/peloader/w...](https://github.com/taviso/loadlibrary/tree/master/peloader/winapi) (see e.g. Files.c in there for an example of mapping Windows API functions to libc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very cool, to load .dll, so tests/builds/packaging can be run in Linux. There is also the possibility of signing .exe/.dll on Linux. AFAIK, the remaining stuff is to sign .msi files.

</comment><comment><USER19> I read the readme, but i still can't understand how is different than winelib (and i don't know much of ndiswrapper internal).

I understand that since is a debugging oriented tool has a different scope than wine, but why don't use (at least partially) the already implemented windows function? I am missing something? maybe this is more efficient o maybe wine is not enough modular?

<comment><USER20> Winelib requires you to (re-)compile from source.

This project allows you to load (some) windows DLLs as-is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> why?

<comment><USER22> ...why not?

<comment><USER23> I've always thought why is more important than why not. Example: "I'm going to hit myself in the dick with a hammer."

<comment><USER24> Actually, that's not so problematic unless there's an anvil involved, or the hammer is moving quickly.

<comment><USER8> I still don't think its a problem. I can swing the hammer if AnalogNoise cannot build up sufficient speed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sounds like reimplementing what Wine already does.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't know if I would like software ported to Linux in this way. I already have mixed feelings about WINE. My concern is really on the legal side of things. What if these things are patent protected and people start getting sued?

<comment><USER27> Do you realise this is a debugging tool?</comment></comment>


Permission escalation vulnerability in Egnyte reveals user credentials - <AUTHOR> http://blog.foldergrid.com/2012/07/why-we-stopped-trusting-egnyte-a-cautionary-tale-for-users-of-cloud-services/

<comment><USER3> There are security vulnerabilities in every interesting product out there. The way a company responds to a vulnerability report is much more telling than the vulnerability itself.

It doesn't look like Eric notified Egnyte before he told the world about the vuln. Not nice.

</comment><comment><USER4> If what this guy says is true, the real story here is that Egnyte lied - <USER2> good news is that they now have $16M bucks for HIPAA breach penalties!</comment>


Stories from Putin's Economist - <AUTHOR> https://www.libertarianism.org/media/free-thoughts/stories-putins-economist <comment><USER2> Incredible depth, thanks for posting

<comment><AUTHOR> I found it truly fascinating. I'm glad you seem to have enjoyed it!</comment></comment>


Facebook Memorial Mode: I'm not dead yet - <AUTHOR> http://thulbourn.com/not_dead.html <comment><USER2> I see a movie coming... serial killer memorializes victims' Facebook accounts 24 hours before the murder...

<comment><USER3> I could see this as a "Law & Order" plot. They have done a few other stories involving social-networking sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The solution seems to be straightforward to me:

When an account is in memorial state the account holder should be able to log in, her account then should change automatically into normal state without any administrator approval, and she should be able to prohibit her freinds to put her account into memorial state again (with a checkbox).

As she is the only person who may know her password it is not logical not to allow her to log in.

<comment><USER5> I don't think that when the account holder logs in that it should automatically revert. It's more than possible spouses etc. would have a dearly departed's password.

But they should certainly still be able to log in, and once logged in have the option to recover back from memorial mode - without needing to go through support.

Edit: Also, it would be nice to have a feature where I can nominate an "in case of emergency" contact that, if my account falls into memorial mode, they will then gain access to it... to maybe post a little more info about what happened, or contact friends that they might not necessarily know themselves, but would like to invite to the funeral?

<comment><USER3> The great part about being dead is that you probably won't care too much about any of this. It won't be _your_ problem, anyway.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps arrogantly, but I believe that if it happens when we still care in any way about our Facebook accounts - and not the next big thing - then I imagine that it will be upsetting for my friends and family, and I care _now_ that it is as easy on them as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _cough_ I told you so =)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=905436>

</comment><comment><USER7> Wouldn't surprise me if this was an automated system that malfunctioned

<comment><USER8> Not to mention that his name just sort of looked like the one in the actual memorial.

<comment><USER9> and that that name was the name of the reverend conducting the funeral service, not the deceased

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So they just memorialize the account without sending a "Hello, are you really dead email?" to check first. Design flaw.

(Hmm, maybe we need a form with "Just a flesh wound" or "I'm feeling better!" options.)

<comment><USER11> _(Hmm, maybe we need a form with "Just a flesh wound" or "I'm feeling better!" options.)_

Or at the very least, a "pining for the fjords" checkbox...

<comment><USER3> What if you're just resting?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well, that didn't take long.

<comment><USER13> "If your first version is so impressive that trolls don't make fun of it, you waited too long to launch."

Methinks revision 2.0 of the Mark Your Friend Dead button is right around the corner. ;)</comment></comment>


Twitter pulls down bot network that pushed pro-Saudi talking points - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/exclusive-twitter-pulls-down-bot-network-pushing-pro-saudi-talking-n921871 <comment><USER2> Now consider what happens when twitter pulls down a network of real people and calls them a botnet.</comment>