HN does not care about crediting the first submitter of a link. If you're in it for the karma, submitting links is a waste of time.

It arguably would be fairer, but solving that problem is trickier than it sounds, especially in HN's current system—where, for example, post rank decays rapidly with time.

It's largely random which version of a story ends up making the front page. We're working on that, but our driving concern is not who the submitter is, but improving the story quality of the front page. So for the foreseeable future, it will still be a lottery who gets the credit/karma for submitting a story. The best way to win the lottery is to enter it often with high-quality submissions.

The problem here is that the Ars article was better. It was better written and had additional information.

The original article was poorly written and harder to follow.

I would arguably say you made the front page worse by switching the link.

I'm surprised you would say that. The Ars piece consists nearly entirely of quotes from this one.

The current article may not be well-written, but its claim to primacy is obvious. I have a hard time justifying massively lifted content on the HN front page.

There's a difference between lifting content and journalism. :)

Ars practices journalism, which means they take a primary source and then enrich it with useful information while also making it easier to understand.

You're absolutely right in that many blogs simply regurgitate someone else's content, but Ars is not one of those sites.

If you want to be heavy handed in your moderation and become a content curator, you'll need to get better at distinguishing the two.

this is one of the reasons we shied away from heavy handed moderation at reddit -- it's just too difficult to do it well.

Also, primacy doesn't always mean it is better.

That is an... idiosyncratic... definition of "journalism".