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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

Adding a ?a=1 to get around HN's dupe detector is unwise.

EDIT: Per dang's response below, this is OK since there has not been significant discussion on it previously.

Thanks for watching out for story quality on HN! In this case, though, the submission is fine.

A small number of reposts is ok if a story hasn't had significant attention within the last year or so. Otherwise, what reaches the front page is too affected by randomness and churn. We want the best stories on the front page, not just the luckiest ones. So good stories need multiple cracks at the bat. Especially the Show HNs—a new feature for which is coming soon, by the way.

It might be a good idea to clarify HN's submission policies toward duplicate submissions, especially if new Show HN functionality is being implemented. (e.g. I've seen a rise in submissions recently which bootstrap the "Show HN" prefix for visibility when it definitely isn't warranted.)

Yes. We're deliberately being slow about changing the site guidelines or the FAQ, though we will eventually. Moderation comments in the threads are sort of the laboratory for that.

When we release the Show HN feature (soon!) it will come with some guidelines about what is and isn't a Show HN.

Could be useful to use a public ?showhn=N param, so that the info of how many times one has posted is publicly available?

Empirically, it doesn't seem to work very well to try for that level of precision.

Understand it should not be common practice. But that post was 138 days ago and we've made massive improvements to our app in the meantime. No one saw our last post (it has one point). We've changed our entire pitch even. Does that mean we just give up on getting to the front page with one failed posting attempt 5 months ago? Is there a better alternative? I apologize if people still think this is an abuse.

Seems like HN's "dup detector" should only check posts in the last month or so? I have the same thing, I release new features on my site and have to direct them to different pages when I want to announce. I guess I should start to keep some sort of blog section on my site to announce updates. But still, fixing the dup detector would be cool too.

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