We can't even request features anymore. The topic linked on the bottom, which was treated specially and kept open for replies, suffers the same problem.

EDIT: the whole problem is gone as I finish posting. HN is back to its former shape. I should <strike> my comment.

As I understand it, HN was the subject of a web crawl that was sufficiently agressive that it was effectively a DOS. As a result, access to older items was limited to try to limit the damage.