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Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

The duplicate link detector has a minimal ability to recognize duplicate links. The Hacker News community relies partly on the honor system to avoid excessive duplicate links. Some members point out duplicate submissions when they appear anyway. I'm not sure that this is a high enough priority for anyone on the HN programming team to devote a lot more effort to refining the duplicate submission detector.

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It can't be that hard to let a machine find out that these two links are basically the same. I'm not talking about programming a artificial general intelligence (AGI) solution here:

(a) http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/16/estimote-creator-talks-abou...

(b) http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/16/estimote-creator-talks-abou...

Nobody's saying it's impossible. The point is that news.arc is more or less just a little project that Paul Graham works on in his free time, and the amount of features that could be implemented vastly outstrips the supply of Paul Graham's free time, so not every possible feature is going to be implemented.

For all intents and purposes it's only PG. I occasionally change security and performance related things, but not features.

But why even implement a duplicate link checker without putting more effort into parsing the uri string for obvious gotchas like whether there's a trailing slash, or extraneous but meaningless query parameters?

Coding checks such as those are pretty tedious. It's not hard, and that's why it's not interesting.

Sure, but even with pet projects you can't expect everything to be fun. I'm just suggesting that if pg considers duplicate links a problem worth solving in his application, then the extra effort might be worth the tedium.

And if he doesn't, then he doesn't.

The fact that this question keeps coming up and it doesn't get changed indicates that it isn't a problem he cares about.

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