I feel like this problem is bigger than just Hacker News - with the plethora of different news/discussion sources,I often find that 'breaking news' gets old and stale within an hour of the event. Or, sometimes more damaging, I read an interesting comment, then can't remember where I read it (so I can properly cite another's analysis).
Sadly, I don't know there is a site specific solution. While a merge would theoretically be great, I think we would start to see super threads with several hundred comments (and associated repetition). The search feature would be interesting, though it would discourage extremely busy people from submitting (since you could theoretically have to read three or four articles to determine whether yours deserves to be a separate item).
Perhaps some sort of curated site that grabs content (complete with discussion) from around the web? Different take on a newspaper's editorial section...
Sadly, I don't know there is a site specific solution. While a merge would theoretically be great, I think we would start to see super threads with several hundred comments (and associated repetition). The search feature would be interesting, though it would discourage extremely busy people from submitting (since you could theoretically have to read three or four articles to determine whether yours deserves to be a separate item).
Perhaps some sort of curated site that grabs content (complete with discussion) from around the web? Different take on a newspaper's editorial section...