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Generally people submit links to past submissions that have comments that maybe of interest.

The reason people share links from the past isn't some passive aggressive "UGH reposts amirite?!" like what you appear to be doing -- it's because past discussion on a fun read has lots of fun morsels of comments, and it's fun to revisit them alongside today's discussion.

HN doesn't have a rule that there should only be one canonical submission for every individual link or topic. That you thought your comment would contribute anything leads me to believe that you aren't aware of that.

I am well aware of HN policy regarding reposts. I just found it amusing that this one has so many.

Maybe next time just link to the search query. Most people familiar with forums are well aware that some topics come up more often than others.

its pretty common for previous threads to be posted in the current thread

Check again. We tend to enumerate previous threads that got traction and have past discussion. It's nice to go back to read those.

But most of what this person linked had 0 to 1 comments and like 2 points. I mean, yes, I would expect an interesting story from 2002 to have at least 30 failed submissions on HN that never got traction over 18 years.

Yes, this story gets posted a lot, and many of us might know it, but at the same time, I like to think about the ones that didn't. They will learn something new today. XKCD said it better than I could: https://xkcd.com/1053/

Genuine perennial favs are worth repeating every so often --- a year or two's interval seems reasonable, and is vouched by HN.

A marker of aging for me was seeing, a decade or two after I'd first read them in the local paper as a callow youth, repeats of previous features, by topic if not the actual text. Eventually the thought occurred to me that perhaps the versions I'd remembered were themselves not original.

People tell, and repeat, and embellish, stories. Sometimes because the young'uns and whippersnappers and new arrivals haven't heard them yet. Sometimes because they're just damned good stories and we enjoy the retelling.

Yes, I’ll continue upvoting this classic when it pops up in the years ahead.

One of the most endearing xkcd strips. A bit lightbulb moment when I figured this out in my life.

I did. And it was not only informative but also hilarious.

Obvious feature request for HN: page that lists most reposted stories / links. :)

That would be the ‘past’ link, though it doesn’t turn anything up in this case as the title on this post is different. (The usual title is “The case of the 500-mile email,” but this copy is missing the subject line for some reason so the submitter used a representative phrase instead.)

Ha, I was just thinking if one wanted to farm karma they could just set up a cron to post this monthly. Seems to be a perennial favorite!

It's better to link to just the past submissions with interesting discussions. Those appear to be:

2008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123489

2008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385068

2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1293652

2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2701063

2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338708

2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14676835

I love that after all these years there are still people discovering this classic for the first time.

That's a great non-cynical non-humbuggy view to have

I see something like this and have to consciously think of https://xkcd.com/1053/

thanks, I was looking for this comic for some unrelated reason.