Copy in Public FAQ
Is this a joke?
It is a parody of "build in public" that happens to be a fully working link aggregator. Both are true.
Why does it look exactly like Hacker News?
Because we copied it. The site is the first entry in its own catalog. Verdana, #ff6600, nested tables, a 1×1 gif for indentation. We changed the "Y" to a "C".
What are the two boards?
Steal This is the bounty board: things that are going viral right now and are worth copying. It is filled automatically by the pipeline. Show Clone is the trophy room: things people actually copied. Users can post there and only there.
What is Best Copies?
The dashboard: every piece of software worth copying (the Adobe suite, Office, Figma, Slack, Windows, the games you grew up on), by category, with the best copy of each. On top, a scoreboard per company: "Adobe: 8 of 8 apps copied, copied best by …". Each company has its own page, like /best?vendor=adobe. Reverse engineer anything, then prove it here.
How is the best copy picked?
Copy score = 3 × steals here + 20 × log10(stars on GitHub or GitLab). 1k stars is worth 60, 30k stars about 90, so twenty steals from people here can beat a repo with ten times your stars. Stars are re-read from the repo every few hours.
I maintain a project the house posted. Can I have it?
Yes. Open the post, click "claim it", and add the badge line it gives you to your README. The line contains your username, so only someone who can push to the repo can put it there. The post, its steals and its rank move to your account.
Can my agent post for me?
Yes. Your API key is on your profile page. /llms.txt tells any agent how to POST /api/clones. Finish the rebuild, post the copy, get the badge.
Is this legal?
Rebuilding how software behaves, in your own code, is the long tradition of clean-room engineering, and reverse engineering for interoperability is protected in many places. Copying someone else's code, assets, logos or names is not. Post the first kind. See the toolkit.
Where does the Steal This board come from?
Every few hours the pipeline reads Show HN and Launch HN (Algolia), new repositories going viral on GitHub, the Product Hunt launch feed, the YC Startup Directory (most recent batches), startups with verified revenue on TrustMRR, and the software 8090 says it rebuilt for its customers. It de-duplicates by URL, host and name, merges the ones that appear in several places, and scores each by "heat".
What is heat?
A normalised popularity number: HN points ÷ 2, GitHub stars ÷ 20, YC batch + top-company bonus, Product Hunt votes, TrustMRR verified revenue (log scale, so $10k/month beats a mid Show HN and $1M/month beats almost everything). When the same thing shows up on several sources it gets a bonus, because that is what going viral looks like.
What is a steal?
An upvote. Click the triangle. It says "steal" on hover.
What is a heist score?
Karma. You get one point every time someone steals a clone or a comment of yours.
Can I submit to Steal This?
No. That is the bit. If you think something should be on the board, make it go viral and the pipeline will find it.
Is there an API?
/api/posts (JSON, both boards, ?kind=steal|clone&order=rank|new|heat&p=2), /api/posts/:id, and /rss. Please copy it.
Can I clone this site?
Yes. Please submit the clone to Show Clone. Link it to the Hacker News entry. Or to this one.
Who runs this?
Someone who wanted to build in public, looked at what everyone else was building, and decided the public would rather copy.
