(Thank you for turning your comments in a more civil direction. That's rare enough that it cheers us up every time we see it.)
You make a fair point about duplicates. There used to be a second-hand clothes store in my home town called "New to You". Similarly, if you haven't seen a story, it isn't a dupe.
The problem is that the HN front page only has 30 slots. Those slots are the scarcest resource on the site. Since we have no way of knowing what you've seen, we have to target overall coverage.
We don't treat stories as dupes just because they've been posted already; they have to have had significant discussion. But I get that you're talking about precisely those stories. I do think we have more work to do here.
You make a fair point about duplicates. There used to be a second-hand clothes store in my home town called "New to You". Similarly, if you haven't seen a story, it isn't a dupe.
The problem is that the HN front page only has 30 slots. Those slots are the scarcest resource on the site. Since we have no way of knowing what you've seen, we have to target overall coverage.
We don't treat stories as dupes just because they've been posted already; they have to have had significant discussion. But I get that you're talking about precisely those stories. I do think we have more work to do here.
In the meantime, one thing thing you can do is look at https://news.ycombinator.com/active and https://news.ycombinator.com/best for major discussions you missed.