Not necessarily of all time, but at the bottom of nearly every page is "Lists":

http://news.ycombinator.com/lists

That gives you:

    leaders         Users with most karma.
    best            Highest voted recent links.
    active          Most active current discussions.
    bestcomments    Highest voted recent comments.
    noobstories     Submissions from new accounts.
    noobcomments    Comments from new accounts.

You can ask for items with more than a certain number of points:

http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=400

You'll probably find that still only pulls things that are currently in cache.

I've seen lists... but unfortunately those only have "recent" posts.

To the best of my knowledge that's the best you can do. My understanding from snippets I've picked up here and there is that older items are on disk and not searched for these sorts of questions. To do so would be a significant increase on load on the server, I'd guess, especially if it became popular.

May not solve what you are asking, but you can check weekly and monthly newsletter or magazine. People are putting efforts to give you best. http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ http://hackermonthly.com/