2) Look at comments to see what HN denizens have said. See post is a duplicate. Upvote comment noting that.

3) Think to myself, "I should've checked comments before upvoting post."

4) Think to myself, "Why is it incumbent upon me to do this? The site should do it for me."

5) Think to myself, "There is an interesting analog between a social news site and ebay. At any given moment, there is some market for a given story or item (respectively). The size of this market varies around some mean, through time. The traction that a particular story/auction receives is a function of the size of this market."

I have a friend who makes his living off ebay, and he likes the store a lot better. He says he's getting triple what he would for small-market, rarely purchased items than he would if he'd posted an auction for the same thing.

A store averages the size of the market through time. An auction samples the size of the market for a much shorter time, and so experiences more noise in market size.

A social news site has some algorithm to let stories with traction decay from the front page as a function of time. The faster this decay, the more approximately instantaneous the sampling is of the size of the market.

So went a semi-random, diverging-from-topic chain of thoughts during lunch break. Maybe others will be interested.

Also, there's arguably a market in titles - I know I've missed stories of interest to me, because I didn't recognize that aspect of them from a specific title.

4) [I believe] the site matches URLs, but doesn't catch non-significant differences, because it's difficult to tell what's significant. e.g. in this case, the previous submission's URL had an appended: ?tid=true

5) [I believe] there is a HN list with a slower decay, so it's averaged over a longer period of time (like Digg's "Top in ..." on the RHS): http://news.ycombinator.com/best but it's not very newsy, because it's averaged over a longer period of time.

With your friend, isn't the asking price also an input? The experience of getting more sales when you increase prices is not uncommon.

4) fair enough

"Lots of people (51 upvotes) didn't see the first one, so maybe it doesn't do any harm?"

- It harms the people who already read the story, and now have decreased signal:noise on their front page.

- It helps the people who missed it the first time around who find it interesting.

- It helps the people who already read the story, and who were interested in the HN discussion of the story (at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360412). These people now get an influx of new comments to think about.

The last point only works because the user community pointed out the duplicate, and collectively decided that on-topic discussion (as opposed to this meta-ish discussion) best belonged under the original posting.

Possible conclusion: dupes are okay (even net good) on a site with a principled user community. Probably net bad on a site with a more chaotic community.

Feature idea for social news sites: let (high karma?) users fuse dupes' discussion pages into one.

If dupes are allowed the karma whores will start reposting top stories all the time and many quality posters will just move on (again.) You have to reward quality and punish sloppiness. That's why I admire this site, flagged dupes or inappropriate submissions get deleted very quickly.

Now, seriously, my original title:

  The End of Wall Street (Liar's Poker author) (portfolio.com) 

  The End of Wall Street's Boom (portfolio.com) 

[Edit: Both are on the front page!]

Again, the original was in the front page with practically the same title. I don't think you did it intentionally, but you didn't do an obvious check, either.

Regarding the other post here, I was replying the "dupes are OK" (paraphrasing) suggestion, in the general case.

But watching:

  * the points of this submission (practically the same as the original),
  * the votes for the guys saying it is OK to have dupes,
  * only one vote for my suggestions,
  * and your reply here getting a vote right away,

My mistake, I suck, etc.

Looking at your profile seems you're doing fine...

Regarding "dupes are okay" -- I don't think they're necessarily okay for HN, I was thinking more hypothetically -- just noticing that they're not bad for everyone all the time.

I wouldn't have seen this article if someone hadn't resubmitted it. Their resubmission helps counteract the "small market" fluctuation you ran into.

I agree though that dupes might attract karma-maximizers, and this might not be desirable.

I leave it to the moderators/owners of this site to worry about. If I stop liking the site, I stop using it.

I don't think dupes are good, but we'll live.

I find it appalling most people here don't seem to see it, as it happens in most other user submitted link sites. Even Digg, usually mocked here, has quite strong software to mitigate this issue, and very often the comment discussions go quite hard on obvious dupes.

If you prefer instead to second guess me, like I care about points or something along the lines, fine.

Their first stop was a speech given by the C.E.O. of Option One, the mortgage originator owned by H&R Block. When the guy got to the part of his speech about Option One’s subprime-loan portfolio, he claimed to be expecting a modest default rate of 5 percent. Eisman raised his hand. Moses and Daniel sank into their chairs. “It wasn’t a Q&A,” says Moses. “The guy was giving a speech. He sees Steve’s hand and says, ‘Yes?’”

“Would you say that 5 percent is a probability or a possibility?” Eisman asked.

A probability, said the C.E.O., and he continued his speech.

Eisman had his hand up in the air again, waving it around. Oh, no, Moses thought. “The one thing Steve always says,” Daniel explains, “is you must assume they are lying to you. They will always lie to you.” Moses and Daniel both knew what Eisman thought of these subprime lenders but didn’t see the need for him to express it here in this manner. For Eisman wasn’t raising his hand to ask a question. He had his thumb and index finger in a big circle. He was using his fingers to speak on his behalf. Zero! they said.

“Yes?” the C.E.O. said, obviously irritated. “Is that another question?”

“No,” said Eisman. “It’s a zero. There is zero probability that your default rate will be 5 percent.” The losses on subprime loans would be much, much greater. Before the guy could reply, Eisman’s cell phone rang. Instead of shutting it off, Eisman reached into his pocket and answered it. “Excuse me,” he said, standing up. “But I need to take this call.” And with that, he walked out.

(I posted this in the other item first, but as this one is getting a lot of reads as well and the article is split up into 9 pages, I thought it was worth a repost.)

Now if someone (or some article) can explain what the deal is with the black hole that is AIG and why they are so special to get such huge transfusions of capital (and Lehman didn't), I would really appreciate it.

You don't think it's possible to create wealth? Or do you just mean that it is conserved within the finance industry?

So when I say "yet another site that doesn't correctly forward urls when surfing via iPhone" I am absolutely correct. Their site is broken and it should be fixed if they actually want people on mobile devices to browser their site.