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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

This is ancient (Last-Modified: Mon, 21 Nov 2005), everyone knows this already, why was it posted suddenly?

Once again, please stop assuming that 'old news' isn't still 'news' to someone. If you were a teenager in 2005, and have since published papers during your continued education, then this news is highly relevant and worthwhile to the discussion of copyright of said works.

Not everyone is old and weary. There are plenty of students in the world who need to learn about these things, and every year a new wave comes. So, that is why re-hashing 'old news' is very important in our tech world today.

By the "old news is still news to someone" logic, the same 2500 stories could circulate through the HN front page over and over again forever.

They could, but I doubt it would go on forever. Maybe 10 years, sure. But guess what: we are a species of constant change in generation. Todays 12 year olds will, in 5 years time, pretty much want to hear todays important tech news, too ..

How are you determining the date?

The page itself has no date which I think is unhelpful and I was going to ask if anyone knew when this was posted.

It's in the HTTP headers. Some browsers (such as Firefox) show it in a "page info" dialog.

All browsers except Chrome, in my experience.

  # curl -I http://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Server: publicfile
  Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2011 05:52:17 GMT
  Last-Modified: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 04:40:39 GMT
  Content-Type: text/html
  Transfer-Encoding: chunked

I certainly wasn't aware of it. On what grounds do you assert that "everyone" knows it?

Age of information is not a reliable predictor of its spread.

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