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by emaro6 hours ago |
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upvoteby sillysaurusx5 hours ago|
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I spent about a year copying pg’s site: https://github.com/shawwn/pg

Result: https://shawwn.github.io/pg/

If you think it’s easy, it’s not. The closer you want it to be pixel perfect, the exponentially harder it is to get right.

https://www.paulgraham.com/copy.html

I’m very proud of it. I had to dig through decades-old viaweb templates to figure out which one he used.

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upvoteby parliament322 hours ago|
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Given the CLAUDE.md, you slopped it, so yes, it was easy. Don't take this as combative but.. if anyone has a right to be proud, it's Anthropic, you just paid them to make this for you.
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upvoteby jmercouris4 hours ago|
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Why did you do this?
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upvoteby sillysaurusx4 hours ago|
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It was fun, and I like a challenge. I enjoy Lisp, and I retracing pg’s steps was gratifying.

Today most things are complex, and they don’t last very long. I wanted to pick apart something that’s lasted since the birth of the internet. Viaweb was, after all, the first web application.

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upvoteby zimpenfish3 hours ago|
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> Viaweb was, after all, the first web application.

According to pg who is an unreliable narrator at the best of times.

I'd say Navisoft[0] might be a better candidate.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaviSoft

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upvoteby nusl5 hours ago|
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In the age on LLMs it's definitely way easier than what you did.
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upvoteby sillysaurusx5 hours ago|
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No, it’s not. I used LLMs. It was still hard as fuck, and LLMs can’t actually help you when you’re trying to reproduce someone’s graphical design (specifically the pg buttons).

If you think it’s easy, or even possible without investing months, I invite you to try.

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upvoteby libria5 hours ago|
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Ask yourself why you feel that way, though. If I pixel-by-pixel copy discrete ideas from 20 different sites to build my own, that seems different, legit. Zero new code by me, I just stitched it together.

As we reduce 20, somehow that legitimacy erodes and at 1 it's "disrespectful". Where along that line was it wrong?

The "problem" we perceive is not stealing, it's stealing from only 1 place.

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upvoteby kej3 hours ago|
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The sorites paradox says that removing a grain of sand from a heap doesn't stop it from being a heap, and yet we can do that until we are left with a single grain of sand which is clearly not a heap.

Likewise, taking elements from many influences and combining them involves a lot of creative choices about which pieces to take from which influence while copying one thing exactly involves no creative choices and is just reusing someone else's effort. It's the difference between baking someone a cake or getting one from the store.

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upvoteby iammjm3 hours ago|
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Clearly the act of combining various elements into a coherent whole is the added value here. Like musicians which take various samples and sounds and combine them into something novel and harmonic
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upvoteby carlosjobim5 hours ago|
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I thought the same at first, but they are copying somebody's old and retired design, ie the other company doesn't use that design anymore.
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