FWIW dupes could be detected, would be a nice HN feature in fact, grouping similar news. Not free, ok, but doable.
Also, you'd have to look at article content, not URLs, and saving web content in a form suitable for processing is a big undertaking in its own right. I know because we once tried.
I don't mean to discourage anyone from working on this! all the necessary data is public and if someone figured it out, we'd be interested. I'm too busy posting "would you mind reviewing the site guidelines" to tackle it myself.