Seriously? You consider 4 years to be "old"?

Something that Wirth or Hoare wrote in 1970 deserves to be labeled old (and that's only because computing is such a new field - in quite a few other fields, that would be relatively recent). An article from 2006 is hardly old, and I think it still reflects the current state of the programming world.

It doesn't matter whether 2006 is old or not for an article on programming, I just like to know the context of things. Just like when I watch a movie I like to know what year it was made, who was the director and who wrote the script.

EDIT: sorry, this came across terribly entitled. To put it differently, I think it helps to know the context of things, and the year something was made is part of the context. If the article submitter had linked to the actual article instead of the print version, the sidebar would have given the date. Alternatively, the submitter could have simply added the year into the title. Both wouldn't have cost anything and would have added a bit more context to the submission.

It would be considered old if it was an article in today's New York Times that was originally published three months ago.

This site is called Hacker News and a lot of the submissions here are in fact new or at least news-y.

I welcome older articles here but it would be better if they were marked so.

Seriously. 4 years is old if it is something that has made the rounds a few times.