Submissions have to be either new or interesting. There are a lot of submissions that aren't necessarily new, but still have interest for this community judging by the votes. An example that's on the frontpage right now is this: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051493" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051493</a> which is from 2007.<p>Personally I think the linked article is interesting because of some of the truths hiding between the lines such as this one: <i>"But the main reason that any programmer learning any new language thinks the new language is SO much better than the old one is because he’s a better programmer now! You look back at your old ugly PHP code, compared to your new beautiful Ruby code, and think, “God that PHP is ugly!” But don’t forget you wrote that PHP years ago and are unfairly discriminating against it now."</i>