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Comment by KennyFromIT | Hacker News Reader

I'm interested to know what causes submissions like this - content that is years old and posted with no context - to hit the first page on a random day.

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Sometimes it's people who feel like posting oldies/perennials/classics, and sometimes it's people running across a thing for the first time.

We've had to learn not to crack down on these too heavily because there's always an up-and-coming cohort of new users who've never seen them before, and HN should be a place to run across them. Once a year seems to be an acceptable maximum rate (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

Thanks for the explanation.

Now for my next question: Out of all the other posts out there right now, how on Earth did my little inquiry catch your eyes? ;-)

Purest randomness.

Hey dang. I have a question too.

Does it really need a 2011 tag?

I thought only blog posts and news articles got year tags. 12FA is guidelines website that is mostly timeless.

What's the criteria for a year tag?

The year tag is also very useful for when you might have read it the first time, and want to know that it hasn't changed, or if you don't need/want to re-read it (while still participating in the discussion). It's also interesting to see how things have aged.

The year tags can and do go on anything, they're more for the readers than as some sort of commentary on the timeliness or lack thereof of the content. I think lots of people just find them handy to easily distinguish recent from not-so-recent stuff, as a very basic use case.

I’ve been curious what the oldest year tag applied on HN is.

Mine is this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22005431 (1539).

In this specific case: I stumbled upon Craig's tweet/poll yesterday https://twitter.com/craigkerstiens/status/151949609064658944...

  The killer feature of Heroku was/is:
  * git push heroku main
  * Review apps
  * Heroku postgres 
  * Add-ons

& this reply

https://twitter.com/srinathkrishna/status/151949673020236185...

  I'd say the 12factor manifesto was the biggest thing to come out of Heroku. There's a lot of wisdom in there.

Many of us recall with great fondness the first time we read about 12 factor apps. In particular, those of us that had been working on systems like this, but hadn’t codified it with explicit guidelines. It just made sense. The pleasantness of things just working consistently from scratch on a brand new server. Replacing the concept of pet servers with cattle. It’s all related.

I’m sure every time this makes the front page it reaches at least one fresh pair of eyes.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/

Is HN a search engine for xkcd?

Honestly people, do you have them indexed somewhere?

I'm amazed by your ability to find the appropriate xkcd whenever it's needed. Me, I'd have to spend at least half an hour on Google trying to find it, and then give up or see that someone else already posted it.

I love this community.

Some xkcd comics are classics - my gotos are the one about ISO dates (https://xkcd.com/1179/) and password strength (https://xkcd.com/936/). Both of these were found by search Google 'xkcd (dates|passwords)', and having them be the first result.

Explain XKCD is great if you know roughly what topic was covered by a comic, but can't quite find the URL. https://www.explainxkcd.com/

> Explain XKCD is great

Thanks for the tip, I added it to my favorites.

Could it be used to implement a Slack bot similar to /giphy?

That exists: https://relevant-xkcd.com/slack

It’s a kind of quirky humor that resonates well with a technical audience. I haven’t personally memorized any numbers, but I do know the “Ballmer peak” and “competing standards” XKCDs pop up a lot in casual conversations with my own peer groups.

I love those, but the only one I remember is https://xkcd.com/927/

It's always pleasant to see them pop up in conversations.

I can’t resist posting my favorite: https://xkcd.com/327/

You can find most iconic xkcd comics easily with Google. This one shows up with "xkcd new things" or "xkcd first time".

I suspect the links or references to xkcd follow a power law, where a few comics get linked to all the time.

Relatedly, I believe it's rare to see an xkcd linked to above 2000.

> Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/

I'm one of the 10.000 today with this comic (well, actually no because I'm European). I really love the concept behind: focus on how cool is to for someone to discover some great new thing they will enjoy instead of focusing on how they missed it all this time.

From a historical standpoint I would think it is interesting to someone who may have come into the profession in the last decade to know more about why the practises we today take for granted and as obvious came about.

The account “tosh” does this pretty regularly.

Yes, I've noticed this as well.

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