Colin, I find it amazing that you did not confess that you were one of the people who submitted a duplicate of this story, your duplicate being the most recent:
4167834: zmanji 105 days ago
4170972: VeXocide 104 days ago
4185226: moobirubi 101 days ago
4355548: ColinWright 63 days ago
Especially given your fight against duplicated stories:
"My intention in doing what I did was always to try to create value by reducing duplication (and thereby reducing wasted effort)"
I was going to reply privately, but could find no contact details. I see you espouse HN Notify, so I'm hoping you'll see this response.
My duplicate detector found the initial pair almost immediately. I did nothing, because there was no discussion, so I didn't know which one to point to. Then the third came. Still no discussion. I watched in considerable dismay as a submission that I thought was absolutely excellent, and deserving of significant discussion, sank without trace.
Was it just unlucky? Did no one read it? There were a few desultory upvotes - a few had read it. But was I so completely wrong about what HN would find interesting?
I couldn't believe it, so I submitted it again over a month later. Still no upvotes, still no discussion. It seemed I was wrong about the audience here.
And now I can see that I was right about HN being interested in deeply technical issues like this, and I'm happy. I'm less happy that a brilliant item like this took four submissions, sorry, five submissions before it got noticed.
That's why now I generally try to point out duplicates in two circumstances. One is when they come close together, and that's to help stop a split discussion. The other is when there was a significant discussion on an earlier occasion, and I want people to benefit from previous comments.
> But was I so completely wrong about what HN would find interesting?
I don't think so.
Whether a good submission gets noticed and upvoted early depends quite a bit on what time of day it is submitted. I have formed the opinion that 0700 eastern might be the best time, as the east coast sees it, UK sees it, and if something gets a few upvotes within a few minutes, it is likely to hit the front page, at which point it much more likely to be evaluated on its merits.
Keep in mind that upvotes come from two sources. First is if someone is viewing an HN page, perhaps /newest and likes the article, clicks uparrow. The other way is if another user submits the same link, it gets an automatic update. So if a popular twit is noticed and submitted, the chance of a handful of submissions in a few minutes is higher.
And I have a suspicion that if one were to tally the number of times the uparrow was hit on the front page as opposed to the /newest page, the front page would be vastly higher.
I realize that your comment was mainly rhetorical but...
I don't have a problem with duplicates. I think a lot of things are worth reading/seeing/doing multiple times. Moreover I do no think or expect anyone to be perfect.
I do have a problem with Colin's crusade against duplicates. I don't think it sets the right tone for HN and it is a disincentive for people to submit things. I would rather have people feel free/comfortable submitting things and then let the up voting system separate the chaff. If you go through Colin's comments you can see hundreds of discussion ending comments about duplicate stories. Given his distaste for duplicates I found it disingenuous that he would bring up the problem of duplicates given his was the third duplicate in the list.
If its a recent exact duplicate the submission is merely another upvote and which is a neat function of the system (this happened to me recently with a story I submitted about correlation/causation that you had already submitted) If its a duplicate and boring it will be flagged or at the very least not up voted. If its a duplicate and people find it interesting it will be up voted. If a duplicate is up voted that I have read before I can choose to ignore it or read the discussion to see if there are new opinions. Duplicates are not a problem for me, reducing the likelihood of people contributing to HN is a problem.
I do have a problem with Colin's crusade against duplicates.
You should re-read his comments about duplicates more carefully if you think he is on a crusade.
Here is an excerpt from his most recent comment:
Those who are interested in this subject and want to
discuss it, you may be interested in seeing the points -
good and bad - that have been made on previous occasions
that this has been submitted. Here are a few previous
discussion:
That doesn't look like a crusade against duplicates to me. It looks helpful and I'm glad it's there.
Comments
Isn't HN amazing? Here is the same article submitted on no less than four previous occasions:
* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4185226
* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4170972
* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4355548
* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4167834
Total upvotes: 29.
Total discussion: 0.
No wonder people try to game the system and find optimal times to submit things.
No wonder people think HN is broken.
Colin, I find it amazing that you did not confess that you were one of the people who submitted a duplicate of this story, your duplicate being the most recent:
4167834: zmanji 105 days ago
4170972: VeXocide 104 days ago
4185226: moobirubi 101 days ago
4355548: ColinWright 63 days ago
Especially given your fight against duplicated stories:
"My intention in doing what I did was always to try to create value by reducing duplication (and thereby reducing wasted effort)"
Glass houses?
I was going to reply privately, but could find no contact details. I see you espouse HN Notify, so I'm hoping you'll see this response.
My duplicate detector found the initial pair almost immediately. I did nothing, because there was no discussion, so I didn't know which one to point to. Then the third came. Still no discussion. I watched in considerable dismay as a submission that I thought was absolutely excellent, and deserving of significant discussion, sank without trace.
Was it just unlucky? Did no one read it? There were a few desultory upvotes - a few had read it. But was I so completely wrong about what HN would find interesting?
I couldn't believe it, so I submitted it again over a month later. Still no upvotes, still no discussion. It seemed I was wrong about the audience here.
And now I can see that I was right about HN being interested in deeply technical issues like this, and I'm happy. I'm less happy that a brilliant item like this took four submissions, sorry, five submissions before it got noticed.
That's why now I generally try to point out duplicates in two circumstances. One is when they come close together, and that's to help stop a split discussion. The other is when there was a significant discussion on an earlier occasion, and I want people to benefit from previous comments.
So no, I don't think it's a case of glass houses.
> But was I so completely wrong about what HN would find interesting?
I don't think so.
Whether a good submission gets noticed and upvoted early depends quite a bit on what time of day it is submitted. I have formed the opinion that 0700 eastern might be the best time, as the east coast sees it, UK sees it, and if something gets a few upvotes within a few minutes, it is likely to hit the front page, at which point it much more likely to be evaluated on its merits.
Keep in mind that upvotes come from two sources. First is if someone is viewing an HN page, perhaps /newest and likes the article, clicks uparrow. The other way is if another user submits the same link, it gets an automatic update. So if a popular twit is noticed and submitted, the chance of a handful of submissions in a few minutes is higher.
And I have a suspicion that if one were to tally the number of times the uparrow was hit on the front page as opposed to the /newest page, the front page would be vastly higher.
Who the hell cares, you two? We're talking about it now. The system worked fine for this story. Can we move on from this sideshow?
This whole story generated a pretty great thread; why look for reasons to have a problem with that?
I realize that your comment was mainly rhetorical but...
I don't have a problem with duplicates. I think a lot of things are worth reading/seeing/doing multiple times. Moreover I do no think or expect anyone to be perfect.
I do have a problem with Colin's crusade against duplicates. I don't think it sets the right tone for HN and it is a disincentive for people to submit things. I would rather have people feel free/comfortable submitting things and then let the up voting system separate the chaff. If you go through Colin's comments you can see hundreds of discussion ending comments about duplicate stories. Given his distaste for duplicates I found it disingenuous that he would bring up the problem of duplicates given his was the third duplicate in the list.
If its a recent exact duplicate the submission is merely another upvote and which is a neat function of the system (this happened to me recently with a story I submitted about correlation/causation that you had already submitted) If its a duplicate and boring it will be flagged or at the very least not up voted. If its a duplicate and people find it interesting it will be up voted. If a duplicate is up voted that I have read before I can choose to ignore it or read the discussion to see if there are new opinions. Duplicates are not a problem for me, reducing the likelihood of people contributing to HN is a problem.
I do have a problem with Colin's crusade against duplicates.
You should re-read his comments about duplicates more carefully if you think he is on a crusade.
Here is an excerpt from his most recent comment:
That doesn't look like a crusade against duplicates to me. It looks helpful and I'm glad it's there.Duplicate discussions is not the same as duplcate submissions.