Calling out to HN mods, HNMods, @HN or @dang simply won't work and they (dang & co) simply don't read every comment or submission and frequently remark that they don't have @modname alerts.

Although you might get lucky.

Your best bet, for any issue, is to simply email direct hn@ycombinator.com from your associated user email account - these all get read and largely replied | attended to.

As defrost wrote, it's best to email us about matters like this if you want to be sure we see them in a timely manner.

We've taken the [dupe] tag off your post and put it on todsacerdoti's instead. That said, they did submit the article to HN first, and by default the first to submit a URL will be the one that gets the points, unless we intervene, so the best way to prevent this is to submit your post to HN as soon as you publish it.

There have been a couple of discussions complaining about todsacerdoti's activities. We haven't seen a reason to ban them, on the basis that if we did that, articles that they would have posted may not get posted by anyone, and that would be a net loss for HN. At the same time, we don't love that they take karma and posting kudos away from other people who have a greater claim to it, which certainly applies to the author of the original article. So we'll need to think more about how to handle this.

I understand that what todsacerdoti does is scrape Lobsters for popular posts and autoposts them to HN. Which raises the question of why your posts are being submitted to Lobsters before HN :) But maybe that's not all they're doing. I don't know details, just going on what others have written in comments here.

If you (or anyone) ever feels like they've been sniped by todsacerdoti, you can email us and we'll consider making your post the primary submission for that article. And we'll keep thinking and talking more about how to handle high-volume auto-submitters like this, as we can see that there are downsides to their activities – and annoyance to other community members is a significant downside.