Ask HN: Why so many dupes of the article “Oracle finally targets Java non-payers”

1 points by jamescostian 9y ago ↗ HN

If you look at submissions from theregister.co.uk (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=theregister.co.uk) you'll notice an article has been posted not one, not two, but five times in the past ~48 hours, and by real accounts that have existed for much longer than 48 hours. Maybe I'm just too new to HN, but I don't think I've ever seen something reposted this many times and with such frequency.

Any ideas why there are so many reposts?

1 comment

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DrScump 9y ago ↗

The mt= parameter in their URLs, when used, defeats the automatic dupe-checking, and posters who post dupes don't look first (or do so knowingly). For such people, HN appears to be a write-only interface.

Sites like signalvnoise, medium, etc. add artificial tracking fragment identifiers (everything from the final hashtag on); one motivation for this is to defeat dupe detection (it's easy to code to catch that, but it hasn't been done thus far).