Hacker News is no different from most of today's web in emphasizing what's new. When you're following a bunch of feeds, it's easy to forget that the web is the greatest library in the history of the world—and that a good library doesn't just have a rack of newspapers, it has a vast collection of books and archives: the stacks.
The "Hacker Classics" are the gems that occasionally surface on news.yc when a good patron goes diving into the stacks.
It includes all stories with more than 40 points whose title has a year in parens, like "(1990)", which is the HN convention for classic articles. The database starts at 1900 and goes to 2010. The stories are fetched using the Algolia HN search API and stored in a stories.json file next to the index page.
The page itself is built client-side at load time.
