There&#x27;s a lot of randomness in what gets traction on HN, so sometimes a story needs to be posted a few times before it does. So we don&#x27;t consider reposts to be duplicates until the story has had significant attention on HN (see  
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsfaq.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsfaq.html</a>).<p>One downside is that the original submitter of a story doesn&#x27;t always end up with the karma for it.