The "past" link is a nice feature, but what I'd really like to see is a way of weeding out duplicate stories before they're posted. For example, today there were 9 similar stories posted (so far) about Facebook's new "dislike" button[1], causing none of them to receive a significant numbers of upvotes. Could we have a feature in the "submit" dialog that displays similar stories in the last 24 hours and then asks the…
When a story gets posted in many versions, most are knockoffs. If a knockoff has made it to HN first, I wouldn't want someone to hesitate to post a more solid article. I'm also not sure how to define "similar stories". Your link picks out the word "dislike" to search for, but that essentially encodes the answer to the hard part in the question. I do agree that it would be good to weed out variants of the same story (…
Point is, the first story on topic X has a random element. killing all other stories leads to monoculture.
legitimate issue is having 5 / 30 front page stories be topic X drowns out other discussion. solution is to have the bibliography become deeper...rather than spam the front page with the bilbiolgraphy-type stories.