Arecibo Observatory Telescope Collapses, Ending an Era of World-Class Research | Hacker News Reader

Arecibo Observatory Telescope Collapses, Ending an Era of World-Class Research

npr.org

130 pointsIMAYousaf5 comments

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25264555.

I'd politely disagree. While the main content is much the same, the article I linked was quite a bit more substantial than what Space.com had.

Certainly we prefer the best article on a story to be the linked URL, but whether two threads are dupes is a separate issue: it depends on whether they're discussing the same story, which was the case here.

I've added the NPR article to the list at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25269374. In the future we want to create a better way to group related URLs into the same submission, so hopefully someday there will be a better answer.

It seems more appropriate to chain articles not from the first discussion but the more active discussion. That thread was very active and growing but in removing that from visibility as a “dupe” it kills off most discussion by relegating the content back to the second page.

That would contradict the intention of marking threads [dupe] in the first place. The story already had major attention, significant front page time, and hundreds of comments. Having a second major discussion about the same story soon afterward is just what the [dupe] system is trying to prevent. Otherwise the front page would consist mostly of the same hot stories, repeated over and over. HN users definitely don't want this, and such repetition is inconsistent with the mandate of the site: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

It's true of course that for users who didn't see the first thread, the second is not a duplicate at all. But we don't have a good way to know who's who, so we have to rely on a global approach, hopefully one which is simple and easily explicable. (This is in the FAQ under "reposts": https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

In the end, there's nobody who sees all the threads on HN, or even all the major ones. Everyone misses tons of interesting material, but what it is varies for each person. This is a discoverability problem. Hopefully we can get better at solving it, but the solution is not to allow duplicates of major discussion, because that would just crowd out fresher interesting material.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com