That usually means the community isn't interested. Just because you believe it should be on the front page is not a justification for posting duplicates :)
When I became public as moderator I heard from a lot of users (e.g. [1]) that the biggest problem with HN was high-quality stories not making it to the front page. At first I was skeptical. I was looking at /newest a lot as a moderator and hadn't been noticing much good stuff on the cutting room floor. But the users saying this were good, observant HNers, and I kept hearing it, and it got me worried. So I started looking at /newest more systematically, and then I was shocked. Not only were many high-quality stories being overlooked, probably most of the finest submissions—the out-of-the-way, intellectually interesting, totally unexpected submissions that make for the best of HN—were getting ignored. I'm still not sure how I could have missed that; I must have been looking at /newest at least as much as anybody.
Since last summer, we've put a lot of effort into addressing this. One simple thing we did was clarify that a few reposts are ok if a story hasn't had significant attention yet [2]. That's why it's ok that nkurz reposted this one.
ScottBurson hit the nail on the head, I think: giving good stories multiple cracks at the bat is one way to counteract the randomness of what gets traction here. Sometimes people abuse it, e.g. by reposting things that don't belong on HN or by being overly promotional, but those are fairly easy problems to solve and their cost is much smaller than the benefit of having more substantive stories—especially those out-of-the-way gems—on the front page.
The above isn't an opinion about the current article, which I haven't read, but it's clear that nkurz reposted it for the right reason, which is that he thinks it's intellectually interesting and well-written. That's the kind of thing we want users to do.
If it is intended that duplicates be allowed, then perhaps the discussion threads for such duplicates should be merged together, rather than getting such posters in the habit of not honoring original titles.
Beyond that, I'm not sure I get your point. It's definitely intended that reposts be allowed if (and only if) a story hasn't had attention in about a year. You have to change the URL slightly to make the repost work, and that's by design. Merging threads doesn't solve the problem we're talking about here, where the previous post didn't get much attention, since you'd be merging into a dead thread. The problem merging solves is the opposite one, when you have several active threads on the same story, and we do merge threads when we see that.
Better dupe detection is on our list to work on, but it's a harder problem than it sounds and I don't know when we'll get to it.
There's so much submission to the queue that if you show everything to everyone, good quality posts simply slide off the page too quickly to be reviewed.
An alternative would be to set some sort of threshold below which submissions aren't seen by all site visitors, but are instead revealed to only a subset. That subset increases as votes come in. You're basically increasing the probability that any one story will be seen by someone. Set levels such that a submission is on the "New" page for some suitable period of time (an hour, six hours, twelve, 24, whatever seems pragmatically reasonable), during which someone ought to see it.
Alternatively: eliminate the "New" page entirely and populate the front page directly with distinguished new submissions, again though, each presented to only a subset of visitors.
You're right, I didn't realize that this was now part of the FAQ. Thanks for the clarification!
I think it is, actually. I've seen stories take three or four tries to hit the front page -- at which point they get quite a lot of attention; there's no doubt they were HN material.
I think all frequent HN readers should contribute some time curating new stories -- don't spend all your time on the front page. If more people did this, maybe good stories wouldn't need multiple postings so often -- making the front page would be less accidental.
I might do this if there were separate buttons for "upvote" and "save". As it is, I don't want to pollute my saved page with excess bulk.
It would be nice to be able to forget saved comments too.
Each story on New already has 4 or 5 links, depending on how you count. What's one more?
The path to perdition.
Of course it also means another database table, or equivalent, in the back end.
Edit: I have an idea. We could add a 'save' link, but only at the top of a story or comment's individual /item page. To save a story or comment, you'd click on its timestamp to go to its individual page, then click 'save'. This is exactly how comment flagging works now. It would add no complexity to story pages and very little to thread pages.
I use bookmarks for frequently visited sites, and a few select references. Using them for content management... really doesn't work particularly well.
Instead I actually download and save stuff I realliy want (and am actively looking for better tools to manage and organize that, though Zotero and Calibre are a start). I'd been using Readability somewhat, but it gets really inconvenient after a few hundred items (I've got 1000+ now).
At least with site-specific curation you've got stuff saved in some sort of context, though, frankly, that doesn't much work either.
It's a long-standing frustration of mine. Though it was actually kind of refreshing to read Vannevar Bush's Memex document a few days back which basically expressed the same concern from 1945.
It's really unfortunate they're not seperate - just now I "saved" a comment I KNOW I'll want to refer to later...went to my "saved" comments page and it's FULL (of everything I've ever upvoted obviously - I just now clued in that that's how you "save" a comment, although I already knew for articles).
Maybe, could also be because the newest stack is broken. Submissions are furiously added, yet few stories are selected off the stack, leaving new submissions to drop off and disappear. Good on you @nkurz for re-posting.
No it doesn't. Stories rarely stay on the front page for more than 24 hours. This means that it's very easy to miss great articles if you don't visit HN for a day or two.
Also, there should be a distinction between "I'm flagging because this content does not belong or is spam" versus "I'm flagging because this is the 8th copy of it in the 50 most recent postings."