Hacker News Reader

Comment by doki_pen | Hacker News Reader

In theory, that shouldn't happen. HN should detect duplicates and just add an upvote to the existing submission when it is resubmitted.

View on HN

In practice, it happens quite a lot. The duplicate detector is easily fooled, and often the same underlying "story" is reported in a bunch of places.

Getting traction on an HN submission is very random. Unless it's about discrimination in tech work, at which point it will be flagged off the front page almost immediately.

Also, duplicates are only detected for (I think) 8 hours. After that you can resubmit.

The duplicate detector is a bit odd. Not sure what its rules are, but it doesn't always seem to work. One example (only noticed this because I wrote the linked blog post.)

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8860103 : http://reactionwheel.net/2015/01/80s-vc.html
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8908463 : http://reactionwheel.net/2015/01/80s-vc.html?newpost
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8927285 : http://reactionwheel.net/2015/01/80s-vc.html
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9129911 : http://reactionwheel.net/2015/01/80s-vc.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com