

Ask HN: How to avoid double-post in HN? - mindblink

Hey, guys.  I was going to submit an article to HN.  More often than not, the article has been posted already. Aside from clicking through all the New article pages, and manually trying to find key term.  There must be a better way.
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RiderOfGiraffes
There is a built-in duplicate detector, but it doesn't work very well. More
and more the URL people end up with has loads of feedburner crap and other
junk, and that breaks the URL dup detector.

I made this suggestion ages ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012215>

The idea is to use just the first part of the URL, and then to use the
extracted title. Seems much more reliable - I use it to auto-detect
duplications. It annoys me to have the same item submitted over and again,
mostly because it splits the discussion. For me, most of the value here on HN
is in the comments - often the discussion has more value than the original
submission.

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binomial
It may split the discussion, but also creates new discussion. What we need is
a way to repost links for those who haven't seen them before (potentially many
people), while maintaining the old discussion and adding on to it.

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michael_dorfman
Why not just search? <http://searchyc.com/>

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mindblink
Thanks! Not a bad solution, though not a perfect. I just search some of the
newest HN entry. It seems to have a 2-3 hour lag to crawl and update to the
latest post.

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donohoe
In many ways the submission process is the way to check. However there is the
one extra step of inserting a title and possibly tweaking it.

I suggest you paste the URL with random text as a title. If it shows up as a
unique new submission then update the title immediately with the original. If
further tweaking to the title is in order then follow-up again.

But yeah, its a pain when it happens but its not very high up on my list of
grievances.

Given the choice of eliminating problems on this side it would be getting
people to put "Ask HN: " in front of questions.

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danishkhan
Also, I believe if you submit the exact same link as something that is already
posted it normally takes you to the article if it's up on HN already.

You would mostly run into a problem if you are submitting a blog post that is
talking about something that is already on HN.

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photon_off
I've been wondering the same thing for some time. I've been wanting to make a
bookmarklet that would take me to the HN discussion of a URL, yet there's no
way to search for submissions by URL on HN or searchyc.com

Sob.

