skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Clicking the link (to http://blog.curebit.com/) I'm getting 'Error establishing a database connection'.
Design done well is fantastically useful, fantastically creative work.

It is an art, and you do not reward those who are good at it by copying not just their ideas but their actual works.

I agree, as a developer who does not have much talent for design, that it would be a 'better' world for me if I could just grab the html from places that do have that talent and not suffer for it.

It is hard in an area where you dont have much to offer, to accept that you do not have a right to take from those who do, but accepting that and learning to work within those constraints will make you both a better person and a better developer.
Please. Hundreds of startups use a 37signals-inspired pricing page with 3 plans and the middle "most popular option".
Now you're just going on a witch hunt.
Great post - straight from the heart and full of courage
The G+ square icon is higher than the others
Look for Google Cache link few comments up.
One wonders how this ever happened and why on Earth they didn't have HTML and front-end skills enough to do their own presentation.

The fact that their blog is now down with a database error does not exactly inspire much confidence.
A quick check of the HN guidelines would encourage you to email 'info@ycombinator.com'

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to info@ycombinator.com."
You won't have the some degree of flexibility provided by WordPress, but good old Blogger is a solid choice if you don't want to deal with the hassle of hosting your own thing.
Just informally talking with the women in my household, they all seem to hate the idea of not having sales. I told them that JCP will still have sales (Christmas, Valentines Day, etc.) but they were nonplussed on the whole idea. The first thing my wife did when she got her new JCP catalog was look for coupons and she was sorely disappointed.

I think it's hard-wired into some people's (read: women's) brains to not purchase anything unless its on sale. Every single one of them said it was a bad idea.
Canada Is About To Pass Sopa’s Evil Little Brother. Politely
Don't you have a Google+ account you could've posted it to instead of trying to host it in your own? Are you seriously trying to micro-manage your damage control this way?

I thought they vetted these people or something and would have a damage control recipe in place after the AirBnB debacle last year.
CEO to the Board: please give me 1 dollar in compensation.
Looks like they didn't spend their $1.2m on getting a decent web server either - website down.
honest question

The direct-linking is obviously a stupid move, but if the design was the same (minus the linking), would there be the same reaction?

As a non-designer, if I saw 37 Signals page and told my designer, I want it to be like that, but with our info, I would expect it to look like that. (I'd also expect that they'd mock it up themselves).

I can understand the uproar about the linking - that's a jerk move. But copying the overall design inspiration doesn't seem like a big deal to me though. Am I misunderstanding something?
I think they shouldn't have done it, and that they compounded the problem by not taking the initial complaints seriously enough.

I'm going to kill this now though.
Oops, I mistyped my comment. I meant fewer calories.
The whole debate is frankly embarrassing for both sides... Of course, admittedly more so for Curebit - but I can't be the only one who thinks that DHH's cocky attitude, publicly tweeting things like "Fucking scumbags", is just embarrassing when he is the main face of a friendly and professional company like 37Signals...?
How Swedes and Norwegians broke the power of the ‘1 percent’
Ekranoplane; part plane, part boat, and part hovercraft
It's a little more than skin deep.
If you can't just walk away, and most other candidates can't just walk away, then they've probably already figured out that you can't walk away, and there's really no way to recover from that. And no amount of clever negotiating is going to fix that.
On the other hand, this is a very public issue, and (as of writing) at least 32 people want to know his opinion. So, by community decision, I'd say that this post is appropriate.
it is a common tactic of climate change deniers to line up some number of scientists to convey the sense that there is some question about climate change. but this isn't how science works; it's not the case that because one or 10 or 100 scientists have questions about gravity it means that gravity doesn't exist.

the existence of climate change caused by humans is settled science. no amount of wall street journal editorializing or smears by conservative politicians is going to change that.
Site down; see cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7NYBhgZ...
I would say that the "Choose Plan" buttons are a little more than "inspiration". In fact, they're exact copies:

http://imgur.com/Foah7
This article is a bit high on polemics and low on science for my tastes (unsurprising since it's a WSJ editorial, but still). Is there a more sober whitepaper version that spends less time explaining that CO2 is colorless (true but irrelevant) and talking about the ominous drumbeats of their opponents, and more time on their thesis? Not just a rhetorical question; it seems like they might have a defensible thesis, especially about the cost/benefit profile, but it's hard to tell as presented.
When does it cross the line from inspired to copied? The HTML markup for the 3 panel middle thing is almost identical. The Choose Plan buttons are pixel for pixel identical according to imagemagick compare. Was the other page just inspired also?
I'm still on Vista and perfectly happy with it. I'll just wait for 8 before upgrading.
The LaunchBit one is particularly egregious. http://yfrog.com/odx67yoj
I agree.. BUT: i.e. the "Choose plans" buttons are just copied without any change from the 37Signals signup page. Compare http://highrisehq.com/images/btn_chooseplan_small.png with http://www.curebit.com/images/icons/choose_btn_small.png?132...
Maybe it's times like these where this bookmarklet is useful:

javascript:void((function(){var a=location.href.replace(/^http%5C:%5C/%5C/(.*)$/,'$1');location.href='http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:+escape(a);})())
this is an example of the kind of sloppy stuff that happens when an angel investor with a big mouth and no taste puts money into 500 startups. you can't expect the best folks are gonna work with c-rate investors. cut rate investors = cut rate entrepreneurs. shame on this company for their blatant theft.
You 're not the only one. I would even call it an understandable mistake for someone who just launched. Telling them to go get some ethics, calling them indecent and scumbags is not the right response. You point their wrongdoings, and let others come to those conclusions, esp. when the accused shows some signs of repent.

For comparison, when the Oatmeal found his comics stolen, here's how he responded: http://theoatmeal.com/blog/funnyjunk

PS. i'm not defending anyone, but as an outsider i found the response was over the top and allangrant didn't call any names
It's truly shocking to hear DHH use profanity.
Unfortunately, according to the Curebit apology blog, they do in fact admit to stealing, or as they word it: ripping off. Imagine that.

Case closed. No need for lawyering, they know what they did and they know it's wrong.
And where's the apology from 37signals, venturebeat, and the submitters for helping to turn HN into TMZ?
Are you taking issue with a company posting an apology on their own website? I'm not sure how that qualifies as micro-managing.
No I don't have the time to watch a 90 minute video. I did however read his website and what he is proposing undermines the concepts of ownership and free trade in a free society.

This is extremely political, the fact that he is too extreme for democrats only underlines that.

I'm a libertarian and I don't spam HN with pro free-market links because it doesn't belong here.
Salary is not the same thing as total compensation.
Googling the cosignatories names revelas that several work for Exxon. I don't see how the WSJ didn't consider this relevant information to disclose, instead presenting them only as 'distinguished scientists.'
Broke, a Cautionary Tale from a Startup Founder
Nice sarcasm. The fact still remains that maybe DHH should take a deep breath and remember back before he was a millionaire. I'm by no means condoning what Curebit has done but unless DHH tried to contact them discreetly and they told him to go hell, I think maybe he could have taken it down a notch before he went roadhouse on these guys.
Precisely. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Steve
Balakk is correct. There are a lot of similarities between Windows Azure Tables and DynamoDB, and the release of DynamoDB validates the Data Model we have provided for a few years now with Azure Tables

• They both are NoSQL schema-less table stores, where a table can store entities with completely different properties

• They have a two attribute (property) composite primary key.One property that is used for partitioning and the other property is for optimizing range based operations within a partition

• Both of them have just a single index based on their composite primary key

• Both are built for effectively unlimited table size, seamlessly auto scale out with hands off management

• Similar CRUD operations

How Windows Azure Tables is implemented can be found in this SOSP paper and talk:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2011/11/...

As mentioned by someone else, one difference is that DynamoDB stores its data completely in SSDs, whereas, in Azure Storage our writes are committed via journaling (to either SSD or a dedicated journal drive) and reads are served from disks or memory if the data page is cached in memory. Therefore, the latency for single entity small writes are typically below 10ms due to our journaling approach (described in the above SOSP paper). Then single entity read times for small entities are typically under 40ms, which is shown in the results here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2010/11/...

Once and awhile we see someone saying that they see 100+ms latencies for small single entity reads and that is usually because they need to turn Nagle off, as described here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2010/06/...
You don't think hotlinking images and CSS is stealing bandwidth?
Does creating all these throw away accounts impact the system much? You know you're gonna say something offensive to someone so you create a burn account.
If your only mission is to adjust one asset by 2 pixels, they're similar. If you want to see how those 2 pixels affect the design in its entirety, then photoshop is a much better option.
The science and engineering behind Lego Man's balloon voyage
Don't you think this is akin to piracy? Why are people so outraged about someone using a simple HTML page (or parts of it) without permission when illegally obtaining and using content such as movies or music is a daily occurrence, but you don't see people making a big fuss about that.

I'm not saying what he did was right as it obviously isn't, but making such an outrage about this seems a little bit over the top, IMO.
> I don't see how the WSJ didn't consider this relevant information to disclose...

It's a WSJ editorial. They probably wouldn't consider it relevant info if the article writer worked for Exxon.
Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (standardized directory structure for Linux)
What country are you in?

I'm in London in the UK, do a 37 hour week, earn $80k equiv, work from home 4 days a week and live about 5 miles from the company (just over an hour scenic river walk or cycle).

Stop selling yourselves into slavery, grow some balls and either get paid for what you do or stop working so much.

Time is finite, don't waste it.
Regarding your dhh comment, quite a few engineers cultivate this image of themselves very consciously (and some companies, although not 37Signals, have a reputation for having higher concentrations of such engineers).
At the very least, they're smart people and therefore are likely conscious that the way they publicly speak influences how most people will view them and the company they represent.

It's a shame that we all can't be polite and friendly and remember pg's golden rule every once in a while, but alas there's not much we can do about it.

Let's spend our time on more important things :)
Sixteen Thousand Concerned Scientists: Get These Posers Out of Our Hair and Let Us Save Your Food Crops
How To Facebook Comments on Blogs
It's possible to get 16 people to come forward and back any particular claim or position. So take this with skepticism.
PDF of the presentation: http://gotocon.com/dl/SPJ-%20keynote.pdf
How to work with firehose data
Officially published or leaked?
What does it mean that 'open source is ot Opn Source' just because Donkey.bas was published a couple of years before FSF foundation or didn't comply some rules?
thanks. think you meant "when an angel investor with a big mouth and no taste like 500 Startups puts money into..."

regardless, we don't shy away from helping our founders, even should they go astray. not proud right now, but we hope to be helpful where possible.

live & learn.
Nope, it's an iStockPhoto illustration.
http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-illustration-9935405-retro-...

Both Launchbit and ShareBooster is breaking the iStockPhoto TOS by using it in their logo though.
Ask HN: Which communities like HN do you follow? 
HN is a gem of an online community for hacking and startup related news/talk.
What other communities, similar ot HN, but can be on any subject, do you follow?
On the point of music. I don't think they can do much about it. In the UK the BBC can basically use any music they want - even if the artist doesn't want it used - but as soon as it reaches DVD or is shipped abroad it becomes expensive and complicated.

An example is the series Monkey Dust. It had an amazing soundtrack and was a cult hit (until the guy behind it died). The distributors for the UK DVD release had to pay bands to perform cover versions for a lot of the tracks because it was too difficult to get the rights.

The alternative is to limit their choice and pick the music with the aim to sell it. I am not a fan of this. It's like when you see a BBC show that's been made for advert breaks, so every 15 mins we (people in the UK) get a recap and some padding that they obviously plan to cut later. Or the show is only 40 mins, instead of 60.
This calls it:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/petergleick/2012/01/27/remarkabl...

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has long been understood to be not only antagonistic to the facts of climate science, but hostile. But in a remarkable example of their unabashed bias, on Friday they published an opinion piece that not only repeats many of the flawed and misleading arguments about climate science, but purports to be of special significance because it was signed by 16 “scientists.”

(Note: I wish he hadn't put the word "scientists" in quotes as it, sadly, undermines a good editorial piece.)
Being a rude person for a long time should not grant rights to be a rude person in the present.
actually, both LaunchBit and Curebit got the logo from istockphotos. both are in process of changing I believe.
Gut feelings are part of objective reality.
You're half right. Although this will make me sound like an absolute narcissist, I needed a haircut when I took the pic, so I photoshopped my twitter pic onto my own body rather than get a haircut and retake a bunch of pictures.
Well the headline at least is correct: even in a dire emergency, panic is the wrong response.
Are you talking about Adobe Edge? http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/
I'm shaking my head in disbelief, not really taking issue with anything at this point. Either this guy is trying his damnedest to minimize fallout, unserstandably yet so very amateurish, or he's really that clueless and incompetent.
This is an excellent talk. The presenter has tremendous energy.
You will find most arguments for and against global warming a bit high on polemics, and a bit low on science. Asking whether or not the earth will be warmer in 100 years is about as fruitless as asking whether or not it will rain in 100 days. The earth has warmed and cooled dramatically long before human existence, and will continue to in spite of us. Our CO2 output is only one of many factors in a very difficult to compute equation of thermodynamics. Keep in mind, its not just activity on earth, but the state of the sun that largely determines temperature, and both are very complex systems that are virtually impossible to model accurately.

Downvote this if you agree with me. :)
"My current salary? Then out of curiosity, what do you currently pay your developers?"

I've never answered that, but that should be entertainingly confusing, if you're not in any particular need of the job and have a strong bargaining position. (Or if they're really cool people.)
No matter how people on both sides react, they are all at the very least decently smart persons and an acceptable apology shouldn't be only a place for redemption. I can't imagine people at Curebit assuming that the ripoff wouldn't be discovered. So why did they do that?
I'm repeating what's commented on the page, but big warning if you put headphones in to listen to this (which you might want to as the audio is quiet): pause it and turn down your volume before 55:00 or so because the q&a is not normalized and the volume spikes up when the hand a mike off to someone for a question.
I'm sure I've seen the design of that "Error establishing a database connection" page somewhere before..
You can't look at the two pages, side-by side and say that curebits was "inspired" - it's blatant copying, and poorly done. Look at all the elements that were basically cut & pasted:

o FREE "On all Accounts" up top.
o Thicker border on center rectangle
o Offset rectangle in center
o Black / Same shade of blue for the Name, description of price.

Interesting to note, there was a (successful in my book) attempt at original design by using Red/Orange instead of Black for the price.

o "Choose Plan" - Same name, positioning - and bit-for bit identical.
o "Cancel Anytime" Immediately above three options
o Statement of "Confidence" (Trusted vs Safe Secure)
o Quoted endorsement below the statement of confidence.

It's not illegal, or even particularly immoral - what it is is shady, and unprofessional behavior by anybody who wanted to be able to work as a well-regarded designer. Whoever did that work didn't have a lot of self respect as a designer - and, based on the professional designers that I know - probably didn't consider themselves to be first and foremost a designer. Probably an engineer who had to slap some UI elements onto their website. If all you are trying to do is bottom-feed and make $$$, (Think about how Zynga, or Samsung build many of their products) - then this is actually a pretty good approach - just copy what has worked for others.

Real world story - when Netscape finally gave up the ghost as a software company and Mike Homer came up on top, and convinced Jim Barkdsale that our future was as a "Portal" - Jim Barksdale, our Beloved and incredibly well regarded CEO, came out at an all hands, spelled it out to the company, and said "The competition is now the portals - and that's something that we can go out and copy." - he used that word, "copy".

Within a week, we had _entire walls_ covered with plotted printouts (remember those?) of Yahoo's Portal, and, underneath those plotted printouts - element by element replicas depicting Netscape.com. You could almost overlay them.

It was successful. Netscape sold for $4 Billion to AOL ($10 Billion on the last day of trading) - but I can guarantee you that none of those designers were particularly proud of the work they where doing, and hopefully didn't put it in their portfolio.
I tend to agree. We are ALL inspired by other people's work. If you say you are "completely original" then you are the scumbag and a blatant liar.

I think DHH should have just said that "I am sure it will be resolved and Curebit will do the right thing." instead. The whole situation is just lame.
Most companies handle this with a well architected wall of PR. DHH is managing to be direct while maintaining full integrity. I don't think it's embarrassing at all, it's quite an achievement, and it's hugely refreshing to see.

Curebit not only screwed up bad, but they kept digging deeper and deeper in their debate. I'm really glad they're being called for with directness and severity. You should be too.
This is a little beyond the pale and I fail to see why DHH should contact them discreetly. No, I don't like DHH's attitude sometimes but lifting code straight from someone's site is just so brain-dead it defies belief. The vast majority of developers would certainly have a look at other peoples' layouts but lifting code straight is just unreal.
I think what you are trying to do away with is something fundamental to DHH/37 Signals. They think they got to where they are because of who they are, and they've gone on to write several books and blog posts on the matter.

I am personally not a fan of their attitude, but there are a lot of people enabling them.
The best way to break a site is to have it come on the front page of Hacker News!
How old are you guys? Not making a judgement, genuinely just wondering.
Yeah, I was really just trying to confirm your message ;-) I probably subconsciously stole that term from when I read your book actually(!)
Frankly I think you could make an argument even Win3 wasn't all that much to write home about....

(I confess to still mild incredulity that MacOS beat AmigaOS so thoroughly in the market, being both more expensive and substantially less powerful in both hardware and software. If Commodore had done their jobs properly, we'd be saying Steve Who?)
I should add that in spite of what anyone's stance might be, we should still reduce our dependence on coal and fossil fuels for a number of reasons.
I like the generality of the defer/await concepts of TameJs (and by extension, iced coffee). But I was curious if these concepts could be used without code generation, as in Async.js. So I came up with Queue.js:

https://github.com/mbostock/queue

I haven't tried it in production code yet, but it looks like a convenient abstraction with tunable parallelism.
I'm sure all those 300-byte images have the 37signals servers at melting point.

I don't think this is the horse you want to ride.
I didn't said it was free in any sense.
I actually have two points about this.

First of all, I still remember reading articles from the 1970's from scientists who were convinced we were headed for another ice age. That's right, another ice age. The exact opposite of the what climate experts are telling us now - less than 40 years ago.

My other point is this - let's just assume all these scientists are right. Wouldn't it be better if we just did what they suggest and reduce our impact on the planet? If they're wrong, we help the planet. If they're right, we're still ok. I would prefer this outcome to not doing anything then finding out they're right and then we're really screwed.

For reference, here's the Time Magazine 1974 article about the coming Ice Age - http://bit.ly/zNZfI8