Is that not OK?
I didn't notice the second conversation. If I had, I'd probably not have re-posted it so soon.
Edit: Actually, I can't find the 2015 conversation in the search.
To be precise, it's fine once more than a year has gone by since the last significant discussion. Otherwise we treat reposts as dupes: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. But if a story hasn't had significant discussion yet, and it's particularly good, reposts are ok. Allowing good stories to have multiple chances at getting attention is a way to mitigate the randomness of what gets seen on the /newest page.
It seems the couple of mods have the power to change the placement of stories at will too, not sure, moderation is opaque here.
Well, I mean. Obviously I noticed that the first posting of the story had a very high upvote count. But I was going to post it anyway by that point (I got the story from another article I read today on HN, discussed in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16243067, and thought it would definitely be interesting).
I can see that being an exploitable tactic (search for very old articles with high number of votes) but not "by hand"- one would have to scrape HN for that sort of thing to work.
I digress- I don't know how I'd prove my post was "innocent". I do try to maximise my karma so the high upvote count on the original story was definitely a motive. I try to use karma as a guide for what to post. Not that it's working :)
Why?