I think I get the core idea of this post, but the title and opening are kinda whiny and link baity, and that bugs me. Were there really lots of clones of hn-boo

I think I get the core idea of this post, but the title and opening are kinda whiny and link baity, and that bugs me. Were there really lots of clones of hn-bookes.com or were a lot of people just working on the same idea at the same time? The latter happens pretty frequently, it seems, in all human endeavors. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2249390 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2249390 I remember when hn-books.com launched, and I vaguely remember some of the clones. None of them are that great. They all suffer from the same issues I've had with other "organize your books" types of sites, with crappy UIs and generally poor categorization and filtering. (What's JQuery in Action doing in the FP section of hn-books? Where's Appel's compiler books in the compiler section, and why isn't Lisp in Small Pieces there? etc... the site that was announced in the Show HN post above suffers from the same issues) I point out these flaws not to pick on DanielBMarkham's work, because it's a decent site and I hope it's a success. But my point is, bring on the copycats! If no one "copied" anyone else we'd be stuck with an awful lot of shitty first attempts at things. I know this post was about these kinds of web businesses, but in general think where we'd be without copies. By all means, don't publish the recipe to your secret sauce, and don't do it while you're still brewing it. But don't get pissy about these supposed hordes of copycat programmers just waiting in the wings of HN.