This is in the FAQ. A story doesn't count as a duplicate unless it has had significant attention in the last year. Otherwise far too many good stories languish unnoticed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Yeah I've submitted a few articles only for them to fall off the 'new' section, then later that day almost identical URLs have reached the front page. With all these smart people about surely someone can write a de-dup detector for articles (and I don't mean URL comparison).

Dang said this is intentional, to allow stories which didn't receive much attention the first time another chance to be viewed. I, for one, appreciate this, since I did not see this article the first time around.

A lot of people don't like dupes because they feel that karma for posting a story should go to the first person to post it. To them, it seems unfair to post a story and get no karma points, and then someone else posts (reposts?) it a day later and gets hundreds of karma points.

Personally, my opinion is that since karma points are made up and worthless, it doesn't matter. Allowing dupes makes it more likely that cool stories will hit the front page, at the cost of annoying a few people. Seems like a good tradeoff to me.

People should be happy that an article they deem good made it, not that they got the karma for it because they were first. Being first is luck, not merit. Most importantly, the thing we want to "win" around here are good articles and discussions, not individuals. (Which is ironic, given it is a rather socialist attitude in a capitalist-dominated community culture.)

In any case, in the long run it all averages out. The likelihood that this works for you is just as high as it is against you.

You'd honestly be better to email [email protected] than post comments on this story.

There seems to be some sentiment that it is a good thing that duplicates are posted if they eventually gain attention. Perhaps it would assuage the irritation of the initial posters (which I have often felt) if the dup detector awarded karma points to both the duplicate that caught everyone's attention as well as the previous (recent-ish) duplicates.

Ah that's my bad, didn't catch those earlier posts