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Comment by ljf | Hacker News Reader

thanks hopefully this can stay near the top for a while. been getting a lot of off topic posts again recently; adverts, thinly veiled spam, repeat posts etc.

one thing i do wish hn had is a link/title checker to stop people all linking to same story hours or days apart.

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"one thing i do wish hn had is a link/title checker to stop people all linking to same story hours or days apart."

I don't. I think it is sometimes a symptom of a different problem. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1634847

I'm pretty sure if you try to submit the same link multiple times HN will show you the originally submitted story.

It doesn't always work though. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1632572 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1630579 were posted one day apart, with identical URLs.

Actually the link checker only checks vs. links that are currently loaded into memory.

links loaded into memory - how does that work? Can you please explain?

Anything that has been accessed within the past x amount of time and hasn't fallen out of cache yet. For more info, check http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc around lines 1485, 1550, 233.

That would probably work terrifically if there was an eviction algorithm other than crashing at least once per day. (If you try to comment and get "Unknown or expired link", it's because news.arc crashed between the page load and the POST)

I can confirm that this works if the URL is exactly identical - it happened to me and I was quite pleased.

Not only that, but if it does find a story to the same link, it will upvote it.

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