I've had a few submissions lately go through that were duplicates. I used to never check HN before submitting because it caught all dupes and treated it as an upvote. I just submitted "Ewww, you use PHP?" after reading, only to be surprised to be the first to submit it, followed by surprised again to see the @newsyc100 tweeting it had > 100 upvotes already. Checked the front page, and sure enough there's the article I just submitted as new, submitted 5 hours ago.<p>Has anything changed or am I just happening upon a quirk in the system a lot more frequently?
I've always wished there were a way for articles to be manually "collected", so that when we can see two links are the same, we can flag them as such. I put this in the feature requests page at one point.<p>But for now, apparently only URLs that are absolutely the same (down to the last character) work this way. If someone submits the print version, or a blog talking about the story, or whatever, it becomes unique.