Reading this old story again it's interesting to recontextualize it into 2011. Would this have still happened they same way today, when tools are cheap (or free!) and online distribution gives everyone a large enough audience? (Obviously the PPC being a prototype and not available commercially throws a wrench in my hypothesis but bear with me)

This story is, in one sense, the antidote to the "Don't Call Yourself a Programmer" article. These guys were programmers. They programmed because they liked to program, not to add business value.

And a Google Tech Talk about the same: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7497796873809571567

A quick search on HN revealed this very page has been posted 5 times before.

All the recent discussion about improving the "quality" of the HN front page seems more relevant with so many repeat-posts popping up quite often.

However HN gets new visitors all the time, something old could be new to me, and something old to me could be new to you.

So, would it be okay to keep re-posting (high quality) stuff because it is new to me? btw, the most recent post of the Graphing Calculator Story was 4 weeks ago.

NB: My comment was not about the quality of this particular post. The story is inspiring, of course.

I wonder what the rationale is behind letting the same link be resubmitted (especially after it's been frontpaged once)

If you submit a repeat URL it normally upvotes the first submission and redirects you their. This only happens for about a week though.

Chalk it up to another thing that could be improved but won't because news.arc is designed more for elegance and showing off arc.