I agree that there are useful classics, but they are not news. There are also 100s (if not 1000s) of great old books that most hackers would be interested in reading, but I don't think links should be submitted to them individually. Perhaps a new aggregate list of links would be news since it is new. Maybe a Hacker News wiki is a better place for such classics.

A searchable news timeline with the highlights would be handy; zoomed out, only the top stories would show, which makes navigation much more feasible (unlike Slashdot's "Older Stuff") -- kind of like the human history timelines we see from time to time, with "fire", "stone tools", and "landing on Moon" as major points, while zooming in a teensy bit more would get you LOLcats.

This could be subdivided by category so the above ACM article would show up if you were looking at the top Programming articles, in the 1995 part of the timeline. Lisp would show up at the end of the 50s. Kind of puts things in perspective.

Under Start-Ups, "Apple Goes Public" in 1980; Netscape in 1995; Google in 2004. Pets.Com on the zoom-in.