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This is a duplicate - it was posted a day ago here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1494732 which got fewer upvotes and no comments. This kind of thing actually discourages posts; the randomness of whether it will be noticed and of reinforcement (karma).

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Being the original submitter, I'm just glad to see it got the attention it deserves. :)

In this case the URLs differed by a trailing slash. Normally I do an auxiliary search to verify whether someone already submitted something, but I didn't have time yesterday.

I'm not sure I agree with the GP that the occasional duplicate is harmful. It may be that a small amount of randomness in these things contributes to the life of the site.

I don't really think occasional duplicates are harmful as such - it is the way many submissions are just never really noticed, like the original submission of this one, that I think tend to depress submitters.

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