The idea is hardly unique, what matters more is that you have to somehow agree to the choice of content presented by the author of the summary in question.
I'm doing one of these myself for a few months, over at http://f5n.org/stack/ (and it consists at least 50% of HN content, so I didn't post it here as of yet.)
As I've also written somewhere my inspirations were http://www.foldl.org/ and http://chneukirchen.org/trivium - because there's stuff I like to see, I couldn't care less for weekly JS and Ruby links, for example, however rich in quality they would be :)
But, no, I didn't really invent the idea and there's more than enough room for multiple players in this market. It's almost my full time job now so I have a strong interest in trying to be the best but there are lots of other frequent newsletters on similar topics that have been around 10+ years and have 100,000s of subscribers :-)
That said, I appreciate the show of support nonetheless - thanks!
...so I decided to create one to gather together the best, most detailed programming articles I could find, regardless of language or platform. I don't see how this could be called "cloning", though the format of a weekly newsletter is obviously nothing new.
I think it's a good idea (hence http://statuscode.org/) and think there's more than enough room for multiple projects in this space, I'd already found several before I started on the SC project a few months ago.
There are about 101 glossy celebrity magazines all competing with each other, 101 documentary TV channels, 101 radio stations.. I like to think that we're all just making the market bigger rather than dividing up some specific number of subscribers :-)
What matters is our individual take and individual editorial direction, and that's very hard to copy. Good luck!
Interesting, I had no idea that existed! Completely agreed on the different channels point -- it certainly seems like there's space for multiple players.
I have seen similar things play out in blogging, screencasts, and elsewhere. People are not doing X, then one person does X and does OK at it, but then more people turn up and the entire market blows up because the larger number of producers validates the idea in users' minds! :-)
(All of the interactive "code learning" sites are a current demonstration of this phenomenon.)
I'm doing one of these myself for a few months, over at http://f5n.org/stack/ (and it consists at least 50% of HN content, so I didn't post it here as of yet.)
As I've also written somewhere my inspirations were http://www.foldl.org/ and http://chneukirchen.org/trivium - because there's stuff I like to see, I couldn't care less for weekly JS and Ruby links, for example, however rich in quality they would be :)