Hacker news needs a better system

No, it doesn't.

This is impacting news for our industry. Also, it's NH's way of saying goodbye. Please, don't try to ruin this. Don't worry, it will all go away in a few hours.

Just go out and take a walk if this affects you negatively.

I understand that the two websites appeal to different audiences, but it intrigues me as to how Reddit is able to mitigate topic spamming without some sort of topic merge functionality.

Seems to be working fine to me.

I don't really care about this. The Steve Jobs news is big anyway.

If something needs to be changed to the system it's to fix the annoyingly short "session expiration".

It's easy to fix, just add a "jailbait" submission page.

In all seriousness though, I don't really view it as a problem per se. Reddit has a couple million viewers a day, isn't entirely tech-related, and has downvotes for submissions. HN just appeals to a different niche audience, and there's a glut of submissions about this singular, rather large bit of news.

In your example HN has 23 links visible on the page (without scrolling), while Reddit has 10 links. Greater quantity of information over visual aesthetic appeals to the hacker market.

HN is much more tech focused and each of the front page articles has high votes, not sure how PG would "fix" that.

But I've created a filtered feed for the next few days:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/hacker-news-filtered

(it removes "steve" "jobs" and "apple" and will be deleted after the weekend)