Ask HN: How many times will the shoelace story be submitted? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How many times will the shoelace story be submitted?

3 pointsColinWright4 comments

Over the past day or so I've seen this story submitted many, many times. Mods - I know that some great stories slip through the net, so you now allow resubmission under some limited circumstances, but please can we have some way of correlating associated stories?

There are several other examples of this as well. I know that automatically identifying related stories is hard, but your audience can do it if you provide them with a simple interface.

This is a great story, but maybe we don't need 10 (and counting) submissions.

View on HN

For reference:

    Shoe-string theory: Science shows why shoelaces come untied
    http://exactlyscience.com/archives/11980.html
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14093739
    2017-04-12 Comments: 0, points: 1


    The physics of shoelaces becoming untied
    https://phys.org/news/2017-04-shoe-string-theory-science-shoelaces-untied.html
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14094032
    2017-04-12 Comments: 0, points: 13


    Shoe-string theory: Science shows why shoelaces come untied
    http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/04/11/shoe-string-theory-science-shows-why-shoelaces-come-untied/
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14095839
    2017-04-12 Comments: 0, points: 1


    Mystery of why shoelaces come undone unravelled by science
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-39573642
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14098725
    2017-04-12 Comments: 0, points: 1


    The roles of impact and inertia in the failure of a shoelace knot
    http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/473/2200/20160770
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14100199
    2017-04-12 Comments: 0, points: 2


    The Knotty Science of Shoelaces
    https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/shortcuts/2017/apr/12/string-theory-the-knotty-science-of-shoelaces
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14102323
    2017-04-12 Comments: 0, points: 1


    Why do shoelaces untie themselves? This team may have the answer
    http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/why-do-shoelaces-untie-themselves-team-may-have-answer
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14102780
    2017-04-12 Comments: 0, points: 2


    How shoelaces come undone
    http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21720610-three-californian-engineers-have-found-out-answer-knotty-problem-how
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14104866
    2017-04-13 Comments: 0, points: 1


    Unraveling Why Shoelace Knots Fail
    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unraveling-why-shoelace-knots-fail1/
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14105410
    2017-04-13 Comments: 0, points: 1


    Unravelling why shoelace knots fail
    https://www.nature.com/news/unravelling-why-shoelace-knots-fail-1.21815
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14105461
    2017-04-13 Comments: 0, points: 1

Curious which one you think is the best of breed.

You must be new here!

If [like I do], you browse HN by the "new" section, you'll see this time after time after time after time...

I don't know what's to be done about it. HN don't seem to care and it seems like a huge number of visitors to the site just can't be bothered spending a few seconds to check whether or not a story has already been submitted, before adding their own noise to the signal.

From the website management point of view one difficulty is that; on the intarwebs in general, the vast majority of these stories originate from a single news agency or press release and are then mirrored across countless other 'news' sites. So, in effect the problem increases exponentially: one story source is republished across 20 different websites and then each of those 20 website articles is submitted to HN by 20 different people.

> You must be new here!

I'm trying to work out if you're being serious.

    user:    ColinWright
    created: 2676 days ago
    karma:   83694

From https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders we have:

    1.	tptacek
    2.	jacquesm
    3.	patio11
    4.	ColinWright
    5.	danso

So no, I'm not new here.

And yes, I'm aware of the problems you cite, and I'm explicitly suggesting a measure that could be taken to help fix what I see, and you acknowledge, is an irritation.

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