We (or at least I) miss your long insightful rants :-)
(Also, any one comment could fall through the cracks; the best comments can sometimes, by pure chance, fail to catch initial attention and fall out of view, without it necessarily reflecting anything but who was awake and browsing then—there's definitely a "rich get richer" effect in any system that promotes highly ranked content. For example, it would be interesting to know what times of day these two comments were posted.)
"Aaah, feels like a good time for me to recycle an oldie but goodie from #245 here: ...."
If I was listening to the radio and I heard Milli Vanilli say something about dusting off a blast from the past my reaction would probably be to change the channel, not turn up the volume.
Indeed, what I take you to be saying is was what I meant; not necessarily that HN now has less taste for long-form comments, but rather that people are less likely to read, and therefore to upvote, a comment that is prefaced with a statement that it is a duplicate.
(I agree that what you have highlighted is an important sense in which the comments are not identical.)