This 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.
Even 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 :)
Hacker 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.
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.
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.
I think that's not a great comparison. Hacker News is still essentially a niche site known to people who care about a specific set of fields relevant to startups. If you asked a random person on the street they probably wouldn't know about Y Combinator, much less Hacker News.
I'm not sure how to measure the actual level of recognition of a brand name, but I feel that Hacker News falls into the second or third tier of whatever that ranking is, whereas names like Facebook or Google form the top tier. That, combined with the relatively generic name, make me inclined to believe without further evidence that it's a coincidence - especially given the fact that the site is actually about news related to hacking, or hacker news.
A closer comparison I can think of is if I saw a watch company called "The International Watch Company". The real IWC is a luxury watch company, but the brand and its full name aren't known to many people. In that case too, my opinion is that the name is generic enough for it to feel like an honest coincidence.
In the "The International Watch Company" case, I'd expect a trademark search prior to naming the company. In the "The Hacker News" case, I'd expect at least a Google search to check for confusing/conflicting names in the same space.
In either of the above cases, a Google search turns up the conflicting name as the #1 organic hit, precluding my judgment of an honest coincidence, but I understand your position.
> 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/ 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.
And 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.
Yeah, when I was a college freshman in the 1970s, I got a printed directory of my classmates' names and photos which was informally called the "Face Book". By that time, it was already an old tradition.