The Highest Form of Flattery | Hacker News Reader

The Highest Form of Flattery

keen.io

33 pointsmwetzler21 comments

One of our customers just alerted us to this copycat website. We view it as a really nice compliment to our designer, Micah Wolfe! I love the comment someone left in their feedback "an original website". https://recomio.uservoice.com/forums/198081-general/suggesti...

Did you contact them before smearing them in public?

In what way is this a smear?

Reminds me of kids in secondary school who copy their homework directly from Wikipedia and then forget (or don't know how) to remove formatting and hyperlinks, bringing to their teachers printouts full of blue, underlined text.

If copy-pasting without leaving such obvious traces of it is such a difficult thing for people, then our civilization is doomed.

Yes the design looks similar but it looks like just a UI copy. The styling, scripts are pretty much different.

Fun fact:

keen.ico (OP) : banner_icons_light.png 800 x 454

recom.io(Alleged copier) : banner_icons_light.png 3928 x 2228

our designer made that icons banner, and the github button, and the gray arrow, and we wrote the text about "the old fashioned way". we also designed the tabs for the code samples :)

Definitely a copy -- they even ripped off the Typekit code — which won't load from a different domain. No need to call it alleged.

keen.ico (OP) : banner_icons_light.png 800 x 454

recom.io(Alleged copier) : banner_icons_light.png 3928 x 2228

The image on keen.io has "_small" in the filename (not as you typed it). The large version of the image is also hosted on keen.io's AWS: https://keen_web_static.s3.amazonaws.com/img/banner_icons_li...

If the rip-off company is hot-linking images or CSS files then it gives keen.io an excellent opportunity to mess with them. Keen.io just has to copy the files to a new folder, update their HTML - then start having fun with the old images.

Keen web static included on recom.io isn't copying?

Lazy web developer and most likely a lazy ceo, who made them copy it.

I'd definitely fork that

I like how they're linking directly to the keen S3 bucket that hosts google prettify's CSS.

There used to be a great website for this kind of thing (http://pirated-sites.com/), but it's unfortunately dead.

Maybe that's a nice project for someone else?

It looks completely different now: http://ctrlq.org/files/screenshots/b76a925667955563e430ac0d7...

They're hosted on EC2 (or some platform running on EC2). I wonder with what granularity Amazon responds to DMCA notices? Do they terminate the instance, delete the AMI, suspend the account?

meh, its just a bunch a rules in css and some simple images. its more a question of fashion rather than intellectual property.