I know it looked like that, but it was weirder—a failure mode I ran into last night, and the process of correcting it was a rabbit hole that maybe would be interesting to share.

The article was posted 27 (!) times (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37364657 - in addition to any that may have been deleted) but they were killed because the domain was banned. Yikes! how could such a great site be banned? Well, before this article existed, there was only the author's page of Spurious Correlations, which is fun and clever but not quite suitable for HN, and it was posted so often (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37364947) that a mod must have banned it back when nothing else was coming in from that domain. Alas, when a ban like that fails, it can fail catastrophically, because the next thing to come in from that domain, after 85 Spurious Correlations, was this immediate classic.

I ran across all those [dead] submissions last night, realized this was an awesome article for HN and (duh) unbanned the domain. That left the problem of what to do with 27 past submissions - which should 'win'? Which user should get credit? (Eventually we want to build a karma-sharing system to solve this, but that's not done yet.)

When a good article has been submitted multiple times but not had attention yet, we often comb through the submission feeds of the accounts involved, looking for any other good-but-overlooked submissions that we might invite them to repost instead. (Edit: partly as consolation prizes, but mostly to feed more good stuff to HN readers.) That usually means looking at 2 or maybe 5 submission feeds (not 27)! but I spent about an hour last night looking through most of them and finding other articles to invite. For fun, here are the ones I found:

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37317859 (obviously)

Recursive Racks [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37360186 (now reposted)

Early performance results from the prototype CHERI ARM Morello microarchitecture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37082504

Show HN: Shaq, a CLI for Shazam - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37364124 (now reposted)

A GPT-4 capability forecasting challenge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37360251 (now reposted)

A plot to steal the secret Coke can-liner formula - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37376559 (edit: now reposted)

Lego 3-axis styrofoam cutter [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37375254 (edit: now reposted)

Webb Mirror (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33608752

Contexto: Guess a word based on its AI-sorted context - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33412895

The Craft of Experimental Physics (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37358468 (now reposted)

Some of those were quickly reposted (thanks all!). Invited reposts get put in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), meaning they get a random placement somewhat low on HN's front page. Most soon fall off, but the ones that spark readers' interest can go on to do well. You can see the list of invited reposts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/invited.

When deciding who to invite to repost the original thing (in this case, the bridge article), we go by a few heuristics. Earlier submitters are preferred to later ones. Submitters who have never had a story hit the frontpage are preferred to those who have; and those who haven't had a 'hit' for a long time (years, in some cases) are preferred to those who've have had one recently. Submitters who've posted less, or not for a long time, are preferred to HN titans (ColinWright, we love you but that's why https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37312700 'lost', despite being early). Accounts for which we have no email address necessarily 'lose', though I sometimes try to work around that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

Oh, and when one of the previous submitters is clearly the article's author, we usually don't invite them to do the repost. That way two people can have some dopamine instead of just one.

Sometimes I do this search recursively*: when in someone's past submission feed I run into an article so good I wonder who else has posted that, and which of them should 'win', so I look through all their histories for yet other articles that deserve reposting, hopefully without losing my place in the previous search. I can't handle a stack depth of more than 2 or 3 before my brain explodes and then I usually bail until next time. (* Depth-first or breadth-first? I've tried both ways to figure out which allows me to hold more state before capsizing, but I'm unsure. Both involve opening a lot of tabs, but in a different order, and both get unwieldy)

This is a great way to meander through the archives (the catacombs?) and find obscure, interesting things. It would be worth writing software to support it one of these years. HN is in a rare sweet spot where it makes sense for YC to fund it simply to be interesting (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), and obscure overlooked submissions are among the most interesting things on HN—so the archives should only grow in value and we can hopefully keep this going a long time.

I got tired partway through last night—a recursive search with 27 inputs is too much. I can't remember why graypegg 'won'—I think I just threw an exception. That left a bunch of submitters who didn't get a repost invite, but I've added these now:

Show HN: SkyFi – Command satellites on demand - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34468803

The Curious Case of Hybrids in Watchmaking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37368929 (edit: now reposted)

The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 miles in the city - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37119695

Home Assistant Door Chime via Sonos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24740283 (the only other submission by that account! luckily it was good)

The Hunt for the Giant Squid (2004) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37344191

If anyone else wants to dig for worthy ones, I'd love to see the links! People frequently email us asking for second chances for their own material. That's...ok I guess, but it doesn't make my eyes light up. Random finds for no other reason than just-because* are the real treasures here. (* which is also why the current article is an instant classic)