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Please note that "The Hacker News" is a separate site unrelated to "Hacker News".
by japaget 8y ago
Please note that "The Hacker News" is a separate site unrelated to "Hacker News".
- sokoloff 8y agoThis name confusion seems intentional and makes me default to unsympathetic, even though I suspect PayPal’s issue is not related to a name confusion root cause.
- gymshoes 8y agoIt probably is. A few months ago I was making a news ticker with headlines sourced from hnrss. I had used 'security' as a keyword and posts with score above 100. I was looking for other sources that provide security news and stumbled upon this one too. What I saw was all posts looked quite similar to the rss filter from hnrss, except all articles were re-written in a slightly different way. It was all just redundant news from the hnrss feed and other popular security bloggers.
- ThrowMeDown01 8y ago> This name confusion seems intentional Do you have proof, or do you just happen to feel this way without actually knowing any background story? If you make such an accusation you should state your reasons, preferably observable facts. Both "hacker" and "news" are generic terms after all. In addition, even if they did mimic the name, I would not see a problem. It's very descriptive, unlike a completely made-up word that someone spent a lot of effort on to establish as a brand.
- qha 8y ago"Washington" and "Post" are also generic terms.
- ThrowMeDown01 8y agoA concrete location is something very specific, and the number of newspapers per town is very small.
- akvadrako 8y agoThere are multiple places called Washington and post can mean "mail delivery" or "sign post" or "work assignments".
- ThrowMeDown01 8y agoYou are grasping for straws in a truly disgusting but not even entertaining way.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sokoloff 8y agoThis site, with the name "Hacker News", was already popular and predates the other site by several years. If I launched a new site called "TheFacebook.com" tomorrow, what proof would you need that I was, at a minimum, knowingly causing confusion?
- O1111OOO 8y ago> This site, with the name "Hacker News", was already popular You mean, with the name "ycombinator", right? I remember accessing this site a few times in the (distant) past and was a little confused as to what it was and what it was "selling" (based on the actual frontpage). I'd check out https://ycombinator.com/ https://ycombinator.com/ and assumed the news subdomain was a forum or some '1337' thing. I say this as a slashdotter, digger, redditor (and others) - all of whom have and always had brand naming. I'd say that over the last couple of years, HN has crossed a bridge into the mass market. Before then... it was niche.
- qha 8y agoThe original name and domain of Facebook is TheFacebook.com :P
- sokoloff 8y agoI know; that's part of the point. ;)
- ninguem2 8y agoI expect Zuckerberg owns the domain name and would land on you with an army of lawyers.
- snazz 8y agoAnd it redirects there today, so you’d have to buy it back from Facebook for an exorbitant sum of money to do anything with it, then promptly get sued.
- ThrowMeDown01 8y agoThe term "Facebook" is not nearly as generic as "hackernews".
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- FrankDixon 8y agoWell, THN is actually about hacking. So if the name is confusing on anyones part, I would more likely be HN.
- chongli 8y agoHacker News is about hacking too, in the original sense of the word. It's a gathering place for people to indulge in curiosity with fellow curious people.
- DonHopkins 8y agoAs much as we discuss Uber and self driving cars and the gig econony, it's also about hacking in the sense of driving taxis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_taxicab_operation#In_working-class_neighborhoods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_taxicab_operation#In_w... https://smallbusiness.co.uk/hack-cabs-organic-car-service-2539537/ https://smallbusiness.co.uk/hack-cabs-organic-car-service-25...
- madrafi 8y agoHackernews is more of an echo chamber than a gathering of curious and etcetera people.
- TomMarius 8y agoDefine hacking
- LaGrange 8y agoDoing a job incompetently.
- user5994461 8y agoHacking: cut with rough or heavy blows. "I watched them hack the branches" First definition given by google. That was easy.
- zrobotics 8y ago
- vishnu_ks 8y agoEven though the website seems to have a history of plagiarism I don't think they named the website after HN. By going through their about us section it looks like they started the website in 2010 as a cybersecurity and hacking news platform. The Hacker News is kind of a no-brainer name for this kind of website. Also THN seems to be an Indian website. I think HN was not at all popular outside the Silicon Valley in 2010. So no reason for them to name the website after HN that had an extremely small and passionate userbase. There is a good chance that they may not have even known about HN when they started THN. The name defintely has confused a lot of people though. Even Elon Musk seems to be following THN over HN in Twitter :)
- throwawaywhynot 8y agoYeah, even now HN isn't a well known website in jhalwa
- TomVDB 8y agoThe name clash is less problematic than the alleged history of plagiarism.
- twayback 8y agoThe name is where the fraud began for this website.
- ccnafr 8y agoThey intentionally named their site that way to capitalize on Google search result traffic. If you read their articles, you realize they can barely put together two English sentences with proper grammar and structure. Furthermore, most of their articles are stolen from other sites. I've seen journalists from Motherboard, The Register, and Bleeping Computer accuse them of blatantly copying articles, and when I checked out the articles, they were right. I have zero problems with this. Couldn't have happened to a bunch of bigger assholes. And I'm not the only one who noticed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18783710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18783710
- SilasX 8y agoSo ... PayPal made the right call.
- 1001101 8y agoCutting a business off from the financial system seems like a fairly harsh punishment for plagiarism, especially when there are other routes for a remedy. We may never know if that was the reason, though, so it's hard to measure whether justice was done or not.
- judge2020 8y agoI suspect that one of the sites they plagiarized which accept PP donations/subscriptions asked PP to take them off or risk the large news company switching to another payment processor.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoWell, there's plagiarism and then there's impersonating a well-known (admittedly in niche circles) brand to make money. I think they made a good call here.
- slang800 8y agoSo, rather than using our existing copyright / trademark system to handle cases of brand impersonation or stealing content, we're just going to rely on payment processor companies to punish people? That sounds like a really bad idea.