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.

The popularity is not the most important factor in a brand trial, it's the domain.

There can't be two companies with the same name in the same niche, which is what is happening here.

This is not a brand trial, this is a discussion about the name being or not intentional.

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.

> If you asked a random person on the street they probably wouldn't know about Y Combinator, much less Hacker News.

On Castro Street in Mountain View they would.

Besides, we aren’t talking about random people, we are talking about the audience for The Hacker News.

How about "The Reddit" then?

Or if that spelling is too specific, "The Read It"

> 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.

The original name and domain of Facebook is TheFacebook.com :P

I know; that's part of the point. ;)

I expect Zuckerberg owns the domain name and would land on you with an army of lawyers.

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.

The term "Facebook" is not nearly as generic as "hackernews".

Really? It's literally a generic term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book

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.