Seriously, who goes to a news website to read old stories? I've read this at least twice before. Why do people upvote this garbage?

An attempt at an earnest reply-- I've been reading HN for about a year (this is my first comment). Speaking as someone trying to tackle the impossibly massive field of "doing things on computers" by myself, I deeply appreciate that this isn't simply a "news website," and that the community raises issues that didn't just pop up in the last couple weeks. I've learned so much from articles that have been posted before that I never would have discovered otherwise, and I'm always a little bit disappointed when I see replies like this one. I understand concern about rapid reposts, but this was posted two years ago and then one year ago. The vitriol is completely unwarranted. Not all of us are seasoned veterans with knowledge going back decades or years or even months, no matter how much we probably wish that wasn't the case!

Even if it is not news for you, it's still news for other people. News is a function of novelty, not of date of occurrence.