[raganwald]

It is truly unfortunate that this app so closely resembles Giles’ work. In hindsight, everything seems obvious: “Hacker News... As a Newspaper.” Yet nobody did it before Giles, and now somebody else has done it after Giles.

It reminds me of the talk about how obvious the iPhone UI is, such that Google wasn’t copying iPhone but just proceeding along “obvious” lines. Yet, it seems that they were busy proceeding along the obvious line of imitating Blackberry until the iPhone became a hit, then they were proceeding along the obvious line of imitating an iPhone.

The author of this work seems to be saying that he did this entirely independently. I am prepared to accept his word for that, which is why I use the word “unfortunate.” There are so many truly new and novel things to invent, it is a great shame that two smart people put work into inventing the same thing instead of giving birth to two different ideas.

[iamgoat]

Considering Hacker News is a developer heavy crowd, I'm surprised a second and third version hasn't come up. I've wanted to develop the same thing myself just to learn how to build an iPad app. And I'm sure my other ideas for creating different views of Hacker News are nothing special.

It's all about execution. I've seen the other one before and considering the basic style of it (newspaper page with multiple articles layout), it wasn't pretty enough to make me want to install. I really like the look of this app and look forward to trying it out.

Also, kudos for him getting the domain. I figured it would have been taken already.

[iamgilesbowkett]

I disagree, but I'm not going to dis anybody for being too generous, too trusting, or too fair, and I appreciate your attempt to smooth the waters.