| I experienced something similar to this a few weeks ago. Except there were no real copycats. A friend of mine and I had difficulty parsing the Who's Hiring thread for just intern posts in SF. So we wrote a beautified, searchable version of HN Who's Hiring (http://supzu.cc). We hacked on it for about 2 weeks between classes. During that time, someone wrote a beautified version of Who's Hiring with regex search. By the time we posted it, there were several comments on the thread to the effect of 'I was actually writing this'. A similar situation took place in the last few weeks with Bootstrap theme-ing websites. For each posted, there were a slew of 'No way! I've been working on this too - see here'. I don't necessarily think it's a matter of people copycating, per se. There is a certain amount of emulation that can be seen. Consider when Path created a unique menu that gained some attention on here. Within a week, numerous JS clones were released. A week later, CSS3 complete clones started rolling out. Overall, I think the story here is that you've got 100,000 users browsing HN. Many of whom have similar skillsets and 'scratch your own itch' engrained in their personalities. The result is often an almost autonomous convergence on a few good ideas. I think this can be attributed to a sort of pidgeon hole principle of code hungry hackers and a few obvious but good ideas. This practice itself isn't really new. If you look at mathematics alone, you'll find many things with multiple names or a concatenation of names. This is usually because n people happened to all be working on it at the same time without knowledge of each others advances. Sometimes ideas just seem to be 'in the air' at a given point in time. |
Yep. Multiple discovery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2011-kelly-what-tech-wants-c...