Why? That would just result in this story, which I found interesting and a lot of other people seemingly also do, not getting picked up and placed on the front page.
The issue isn't duplicate URLs, the issue is that the submission system is broken. This is an example of that. When a story doesn't get a single upvote the first time it is submitted, but gets 50+ upvotes when it is submitted just two hours later, something is wrong with the system.
In good upvoting systems the "winners" should be decided by how interesting they are and not by the hour they was submitted or seemingly totally random factors. Creating a system like that is incredibly hard though.
Maybe. But really, people were just asleep and didn't feel like waking up to give their upvotes out. Most people who read HN were asleep three hours ago. It's Sunday morning, many HN readers are on the west coast of the US. For them, the previous submission was at 4am. Why are you surprised it didn't get many upvotes? Even for US East readers, it was 7am on Sunday.
Timing your submission for when most people are asleep and expecting upvotes is not going to work. If you want people to read it, submit when they're awake.
The system should account for this. This is the internet, people are always awake and using the site somewhere in the world. Maybe measuring page views and adapting the algorithm to give more weight to a vote at times when there are few people on the site would help.
The issue isn't duplicate URLs, the issue is that the submission system is broken. This is an example of that. When a story doesn't get a single upvote the first time it is submitted, but gets 50+ upvotes when it is submitted just two hours later, something is wrong with the system.
In good upvoting systems the "winners" should be decided by how interesting they are and not by the hour they was submitted or seemingly totally random factors. Creating a system like that is incredibly hard though.