If you're arguing that translate.google.com posts should be treated the same way, I agree, and they mostly are. We don't see all of them, of course.
It's impossible to say whether the upvoters of this story were mostly German speakers, but that's plausible. HN is fortunate to have many German-speaking users.
There are exceptions to every rule, but I wouldn't say this post was exceptional. Fine as it is in its genre, it adds no major information about the story. And HN generally eschews political tracts, not because we disagree with them politically, but because they're not what the site is for.
Not all articles on the same story are strict replicas of one another, but once HN has a major thread on a story, we treat subsequent posts as dupes unless and until one adds significant new information. We figured this out after the Snowden/NSA deluge of 2013, when the frontpage was inundated with both kinds of story: ones that contained major new info, and ones that were simply piling on. There were an order of magnitude more of the latter.
Teasing the one class apart from the other does require judgment calls, but not wild ones, and in my view HN has benefited greatly from the distinction. It optimizes for the diversity of the frontpage while still allowing for ongoing stories. An example is the recent events at Reddit. I think HN got that roughly right: a fresh thread for each major new development, while treating the more ephemeral stories as dupes.
It's impossible to say whether the upvoters of this story were mostly German speakers, but that's plausible. HN is fortunate to have many German-speaking users.
There are exceptions to every rule, but I wouldn't say this post was exceptional. Fine as it is in its genre, it adds no major information about the story. And HN generally eschews political tracts, not because we disagree with them politically, but because they're not what the site is for.
Not all articles on the same story are strict replicas of one another, but once HN has a major thread on a story, we treat subsequent posts as dupes unless and until one adds significant new information. We figured this out after the Snowden/NSA deluge of 2013, when the frontpage was inundated with both kinds of story: ones that contained major new info, and ones that were simply piling on. There were an order of magnitude more of the latter.
Teasing the one class apart from the other does require judgment calls, but not wild ones, and in my view HN has benefited greatly from the distinction. It optimizes for the diversity of the frontpage while still allowing for ongoing stories. An example is the recent events at Reddit. I think HN got that roughly right: a fresh thread for each major new development, while treating the more ephemeral stories as dupes.