Interesting idea. I was trying to think how you'd implement this. "Rerun" would be a nice signal for repeat content, but there's also value in trying to understand of what it's a repeat and group those items together -- for example, the way Goog does story collections on Google News.
Yes I wondered if you could make a rerun bot to complement this feature: it would match text in submissions and tineye images to come up with a % likelihood of duplicate content.
Ill add to this the idea that HN needs to be taken to another level. Its becoming the victim of its own success. Theres becoming more and more comments and more and more posts and you have to spend hours trying to parse through it all. With the comments when you have a thread with alot of comments its so difficult to follow them that it reminds me of debugging code. It all just becomes noise.
Whats frustrating is this is becoming a goto place for hackers and whatnot and yet its becoming more and more difficult to use by the day. In part because of what you are mentioning. Good threads get lost in noise. I sometimes click through to see whats on page 5 or 10 but it becomes dizzying after a while to do that.
I really hope PG who apparnetly is the only one running this eventually does built it into something more useable. For the time being he doesnt really seem to care as it was supposed to be just an experiment for testing a new programming language i think.
