I believe your understanding is right, recently being a month, provided it's the exact same URL. Popular news are usually submitted from different sources so th

I believe your understanding is right, recently being a month, provided it's the exact same URL. Popular news are usually submitted from different sources so there are actual duplicates. I agree that it's certainly not easy to automate the classification. The Coding Horror example is a very good one. Jeff write very atemporal stories, I'm pretty sure that happens intentionally. It's not unusual to see one of his posts from several years ago pop in the front page every now and then. Same with Joel's. It may be inspired by a recent event, but the lesson is meant to stand. I think a good heuristic would be: given a random, highly voted story from the archives, would it get upvoted if reposted today?