Ask HN: How to avoid double-post in HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to avoid double-post in HN?

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Hey, guys. I was going to submit an article to HN. More often than not, the article has been posted already. Aside from clicking through all the New article pages, and manually trying to find key term. There must be a better way.

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There is a built-in duplicate detector, but it doesn't work very well. More and more the URL people end up with has loads of feedburner crap and other junk, and that breaks the URL dup detector.

I made this suggestion ages ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012215

The idea is to use just the first part of the URL, and then to use the extracted title. Seems much more reliable - I use it to auto-detect duplications. It annoys me to have the same item submitted over and again, mostly because it splits the discussion. For me, most of the value here on HN is in the comments - often the discussion has more value than the original submission.

It may split the discussion, but also creates new discussion. What we need is a way to repost links for those who haven't seen them before (potentially many people), while maintaining the old discussion and adding on to it.

Why not just search? http://searchyc.com/

Thanks! Not a bad solution, though not a perfect. I just search some of the newest HN entry. It seems to have a 2-3 hour lag to crawl and update to the latest post.

In many ways the submission process is the way to check. However there is the one extra step of inserting a title and possibly tweaking it.

I suggest you paste the URL with random text as a title. If it shows up as a unique new submission then update the title immediately with the original. If further tweaking to the title is in order then follow-up again.

But yeah, its a pain when it happens but its not very high up on my list of grievances.

Given the choice of eliminating problems on this side it would be getting people to put "Ask HN: " in front of questions.

Also, I believe if you submit the exact same link as something that is already posted it normally takes you to the article if it's up on HN already.

You would mostly run into a problem if you are submitting a blog post that is talking about something that is already on HN.

I've been wondering the same thing for some time. I've been wanting to make a bookmarklet that would take me to the HN discussion of a URL, yet there's no way to search for submissions by URL on HN or searchyc.com

Sob.

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