Thanks for reposting this. The last link submitted by me only got 3 upvotes. Guess it sounded just too crazy to be true 2 days ago!

There's just a lot of randomness in what gets attention/traction off /newest. That's why HN doesn't try to prevent reposts of stories that haven't had significant attention yet.

It sucks when you're earlier and don't 'win', but it evens out in the long run if you post lots of good stories, since sometimes the lottery works in your favor. One of these years we'll get around to implementing karma-sharing to spread credit across multiple submitters.

What's the point of "winning" if everything is made up and the points don't matter? I get there's satisfaction in posting content that was useful, and HN isn't Fb/Twitter/Reddit and awash in ad $, but I feel fake internet points kinda manipulative since there's $ for the platform in your work.

One benefit of "winning" is that HN gives more agency (i.e., the ability to downvote) to accounts that have over a certain karmic threshold.

I "won" with a post. Don't think ive ever really exercised many of the features.

I’m not interesting in “winning” points but do hoped this important story gets revealed and discussed earlier in this community I enjoyed participating. Thanks for taking time explaining this and appreciate all the efforts you put into HN community.

> Hacker claims to have stolen 1 bln records of Chinese citizens from police

This title is not exactly correct, yes the data involves lots of police reports, but it may come from a thirdparty, as Chinese police would often outsource data analysis job