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Discussed at the time (in 2016, not the 14th century): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12405810
Hey dang, thanks for pointing that out.

I'll take the opportunity for two quick comments:

1) When posting a link, it would be useful if HN would tell me that it has already been posted - besides what already happens when someone posted it recently.

2) Is there a guideline on how frequently can something be posted and discussed, and what's an "appropriate" time to wait before reposting something that has already been discussed in the past?

Thanks!

Yes, it's in the FAQ:

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Thanks!

The problem though is that if I post frequently, it would be very useful to know that what I am posting is a repost. Do you think this is a feature that could be implemented?

If the URL is the same, no new submission is created, but you're redirected to the former submission (and that gets an upvote, I think).

Every now and then you also get "This story has been previously submitted". No idea when exactly, but it seems to be a newer development.

This is not foolproof, of course, many articles are reachable from many URLs, especially if some social media tracking thing is embedded.

I would add that nowadays a number of URL's have some parts "variable" at the end and so searching for "your" URL might not give results (but a previous submission with the same "main" URL but a different suffix does exist nonetheless).
A good idea is to search for the URL before submitting, BUT see below.
We could match on exact URL but that would only catch some of the reposts. After that, it gets hard very quickly. It's best to got to HN search and plug in some keywords to see if the topic has had major attention before. You can use "comments>N" to get threads that had at least N comments, and similarly "points>N".
> You can use "comments>N" to get threads that had at least N comments, and similarly "points>N".

This is super useful. Thanks!

I never really appreciated the repost police who consists of people apparently monitoring the feeds 24/7. If something is reposted and reaches the top it just means that enough people didnt see it the first time around.
> Aristotle had suggested his students keep scrolls of notes from their studies, organized by subject, so that they could return at will to any topic’s “place.” Renaissance-era teachers resurfaced this idea, and by the 17th century, students at Oxford were required to keep “commonplace books,” organized notebooks stuffed with useful texts from elsewhere.

I do organize by topic/title with Bear App, previously I was using simplenote, both use plain text, but Bear has markdown and it is beautifully implemented.

Just to give an example, I have a "page" with a "Postgres" title filled code snippets, URLS, articles, hyperlinks to other "pages" and my own notes. From time to time I came back to these notes, to add or read content.