Sometimes. Or you may find that letting the news settle and digest for a week helps sort out what's more relevant.

As an interesting experiment, you can browse some websites in a similar fashion.

Searching HN for highest-rated items, limited to the past week or month, for example:

Top / past week: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal...

Top / past month: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...

(Arbitrary time periods can also be specified.)

You can also use the "Front" links to look back in time. I suggesty at least one year, and preferably 5 or 10.

5 years ago today: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2016-10-08

10 years ago today: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2011-10-08

15 years ago today: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-08

(Time didn't exist back then, you might want to content yourself with 14 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-10-08)

There's no way to automate skipping back 5/10/15 years on the site itself, but a simple shell script would do that:

  for i in {5..15..5} do
      echo "https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=$( date -d "$i years ago" +%Y-%m-%d )"
  done

Feed that to a browser or whatever, as you wish.

Reddit affords a similar capability by specifing a null search for "top" or "best" posts over a week, month, or year. Run that against a subreddit or user. Or a specific search term or URL for that matter.

I mean, the point of a newspaper is to learn what's going on. So, yeah, if you only read old newspapers you'll stop reading them. If you only get papers in a language you don't speak you'll also rapidly stop.

Heck, start watching your favorite late night shows on a one-week delay and you'll have the same thing happen.