I think the reason you get so many repeated posts from newbies, is that HN does not have a search feature. I think simplly adding a google search to HN would likely cut down on this issue.

SearchYC is often really slow, at least for me. The page loading times are on the order of tens of seconds. HN needs its own minimalist search engine designed to search for submissions.

I do find it very useful, though. I hope the guys behind it will get around to making it faster some time.

I'm working on a solution for this, but ultimately it comes down to hosting costs. SearchYC is currently hosted on a cheap-ish virtual server whose costs come out of my pocket each month. I can't justify spending more money on this project, given my personal financial constraints.

Traffic has been steadily increasing, and quite simply, the system can't handle the load at peak usage. I am, however, working to resolve some of these issues, but it may still be awhile before you see any improvements.

Indeed. Unfortunately, though I know about searchyc (because I've been around here forever), it's not very discoverable, so newbies haven't a chance. There is not, as far as I can tell, a single link to it in the HN menus.

Incidentally, Paul was working on search around this time last year. I wonder what happened to that.

Or google with site:news.ycombinator.com in the query.

Try clicking on the search icon at the bottom of the page next to the CO2Stats badge.

I did add something to the feature request page to this effect:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468256

Also, for what it's worth, I've been flagging most of these posts as they aren't intellectually stimulating and are almost as meta as this comment thread. :-) (Doesn't bother me in comments, but 4 out of 5 top stories being about Hacker News is dumb.)

Agreed. Please make a separate page for the 'Ask HN' posts and keep the main page just for relevant news stories. Right now too many 'Ask HN' posts keep popping up.