Are resubmissions allowed (or even encouraged) yet? For example, Mt. Gox posted an update 3 days ago, but it only got one upvote (mine was the second, and came three days late). It contained, among other things, news that the company had been turned over to someone else (a Provisional Administrator): https://www.mtgox.com/img/pdf/20140416_002_announce_en.pdf
I would say that's newsworthy and worth resubmitting once, but by the current rules I'd risk being banned.
One problem with allowing people to resubmit is that they'll probably resubmit too much. It will also push non-resubmitted stories out of the new queue faster. The first might be able to be solved by encouraging the community to be responsible; the second by increasing the number of items displayed on the /newest page from 30 to 120.
There is another way to solve new queue randomness: create a page where submissions come entirely from HN members that each user may select. For example, I'd be interested in tptacek's submissions, along with tokenadult, cperciva, yours, etc, so submissions from those members are what my page would show. Each user would be able to select their own list of users that they're interested in. But this might be a bad idea because it will make voting ring detection a lot harder.
Another idea is to create a page showing submissions from members that you yourself select. I'd be happy with that, but that's a bad idea because it would divide the community. Pg's short experiment with highlighting users with high average karma proved that this is a horrible situation.
How it works now is how it's worked for a long time. If a story hasn't had significant attention on HN, and it's genuinely interesting by HN standards, it's ok for people to repost it. That's why the duplicate detector is so porous. We want to give the best stories multiple cracks at the bat.
If a story has had a significant discussion within about a year, though, we'll kill reposts as dupes. Ditto if the story is off-topic.
The standards are more stringent about people reposting content that they're trying to promote. Deleting and reposting is particularly bad.
I know some people want precise rules, but we're not likely to go there. We want to encourage prudence, not gaming. But we will eventually expand the guidelines and the FAQ to explain more of this stuff. In the meantime, it's best to email hn@ycombinator.com.
As for your feature suggestions, my instinct is against relying on solutions that fragment the community. It's part of HN's DNA to have one community, one front page, one set of posts. The temptation is strong to let it burst at the seams, because there's so much. But I think we're better off finding ways to enhance quality within that constraint, rather than breaking it.
