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Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

I submitted the same exact link 8 hours earlier. This HN behavior is very frustrating.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25285489

Yes, sorry—I know it's frustrating when a later submission 'wins'.

The reason we allow reposts of articles that haven't had significant attention yet is that it's largely random what happens to get noticed on /newest, and we want to allow good articles multiple rolls of the dice. The priority is on the article, not who submitted it. That does make it a bit of a lottery, and it's winner-take-all. There are definitely better solutions possible, and it's on my list to work on that someday. We'll expand how karma is reward for submitting an article (HN could use some karma inflation anyhow) and find some way of grouping related submissions together.

In the meantime, the lottery does at least even out in the long run if you keep posting good submissions.

Are people really harvesting links on /newest? You guys should know better of course, but I always thought what drove an article to the top was multiple people submitting the same link. That was my reasoning for a 24h window defining a submission.

As for karma inflation, it's an interesting concept, but I don't know if I'd like that :)

I don't know what you mean by harvesting links on /newest. Can you explain?

Sorry, I meant that I for one don’t go to /newest often.

And I didn’t imagine it was what drove most links to the top of the homepage. I always thought that many people submitting the same URLs was more influential.

To me, this is a community of people that want to share interesting topics and information, and contribute to that sharing and discussion. The greatest prize of all this is how much accurate and useful information we all get out of this. I've become a veritable encyclopedia, a proficient and effective software engineer, a resource on many topics for friends and family, and continue to be an enthusiast of computing software and hardware advances.

There's no denying the part of our brain that gets a kick out of the internet points which reflect peer approval and respect. However, I will continue to hope to value the greater good that this community creates for all of us over the individual recognition that gives me a much shorter term buzz.

Wholeheartedly agree and couldn’t have said it better myself.

Aside from the peer approval that you mentioned, I also enjoy the idea that I can somewhat steer the conversation and see what smart people have to say on the topics I’m most interested in.

Timing of HN submissions seems to matter a lot. And a little luck.

Is there a timing infographic? Or luck chart, for that matter?

I feel like you might be unclear on the definition of luck.

I think the trick is to post when west-coast America wakes up, more or less.

That's my impression too. The previous post currently says 11 hours ago, so by my count that's midnight NYC, 5am London. I know Australia exists, but overall that just gives it most the night to slide down the page before the majority wake up.

There should at least be a 24h window separating submissions of the same link.

Why? Is it more important for the "first person" to post it to get more internet points, or for more people to actually see the link?

Both can happen at the same time if submissions within a window of 24h count as points to the original one.

Try to submit this same link now and that's what will happen. This feature already exists, it's just that it seems too narrow of a window if it's only a few hours long.

Whenever I've tried to submit an already submitted link, it takes me to that discussion on HN, so I wonder what people do to circumvent this

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