More importantly, though, this submission has received significant attention on HN within the last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914045. That makes this post unequivocally a dupe.
It's obviously a good project and there are many people in the thread learning about it for the first time and finding it interesting, which is great. But 300 points 7 months ago is so obviously within the dupe window that I think justice has to trump mercy in this case, though our bias runs the other way.
The underlying problem is that so much good stuff streams through HN that nobody can see more than a fraction of it.
To me, it looks like a project worth believing in, despite what might be considered to be a substantial lack of glamour. Perhaps, one way of looking at it is that the author knew it was right and useful and pushed the rules...incidentally, the sort of rules where nobody is going to get hurt.
To put it another way, I suspect that submitting the same thing about once a month or so, is line noise when it comes to spamming Hacker News. And if the content were bad it probably would have been flagged to death at least once. It hasn't been, because it's good but unnoticed.
It could be it went rather unnoticed because each submission wasn't tweeted to a bunch of friends for upvotes, it never was submitted to product hunt, and the author doesn't search engine optimize on Medium.
And anyway, as this comment by me illustrates, meta discussion is often dull. Hence, generally discouraged by Hacker News Guidelines.
Absolutely. To quote a fictional Charles Manson quoting 1990s UPN, "If I haven't seen it, it's new to me!" I'm probably going to replace our existing drag/drop solution at work with Dragula since it is much superior, but if this wasn't posted today I would not have even thought to even look for it.
I wonder how it go submitted so many times in the last 6 months (clicking the "past" link by the link to the article makes it obvious). Isn't the duplicate detection supposed to stop that?
> Isn't the duplicate detection supposed to stop that?
This may be entirely made up, but I remember hearing that the duplication detection doesn't apply if a submission doesn't get a certain amount of attention. Looks like the only submission to get more than 3 points was 297 days ago.
You were wrong on the facts (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914045, though there were so many it's easy to miss the big one), but right on the policy: not only did you not make it up, it's in the FAQ! Linked at bottom of every page.
> but right on the policy: not only did you not make it up, it's in the FAQ! Linked at bottom of every page.
Haha, my bad! I actually did try to search around for it, but it didn't occur to me to check the FAQ. I even checked the github mirror of the code [0] (no idea how up-to-date it is), but I can't read Arc very well. It just goes to show you could probably plaster rules like that as a header over the entire website and people like myself would still look in the wrong place :P
I have read the FAQ before, so that's probably where I "heard it", but I didn't think to check it this time.
> you could probably plaster rules like that as a header over the entire website and people like myself would still look in the wrong place
That's very true. I even alluded to that in my comment but took it out as off-topic. It isn't you, though, it's everybody. Disseminating knowledge to the community is hard.
HN has traditionally been full of self-promotion, in both submitted links and especially in comments (e.g., lots of "disclosure, I made X" or "shameless plug, I made X" or ...). It's not necessarily a bad thing since the community ultimately has control over what gets seen on top. And additionally sometimes you are your only advertiser.
(In this very comments page, people are talking about their own code they wrote with links to it, etc.)
> HN has traditionally been full of self-promotion...
Yes, but there are rules, and we all should play by the same rules. HNs rules state that if your story got significant attention recently (this story was 1st six months ago) it'll be killed as dupe. But the user has been sending it w/o stop even after that...
>Are reposts ok?
If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok.
I have no earthly need for this whatsoever--is drag-and-drop ever needed for webapps?--but as an example of clever Javascript code, it's very cool. (Running Firefox beta on Android.)
Another way to look at it is a sign that HN doesn't always bubble quality to the top. HN might not actually care, casualties may be expected as the algorithm's goal is not "all quality rises" but rather "no cruft rises"
Which is fine, but a side effect is people resubmit often hoping one submission will catch.
More importantly, though, this submission has received significant attention on HN within the last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914045. That makes this post unequivocally a dupe.
It's obviously a good project and there are many people in the thread learning about it for the first time and finding it interesting, which is great. But 300 points 7 months ago is so obviously within the dupe window that I think justice has to trump mercy in this case, though our bias runs the other way.
The underlying problem is that so much good stuff streams through HN that nobody can see more than a fraction of it.