This essay was published like 17 minutes ago :)

I could have sworn I had read this post before, but googling doesn't show any strings from it showing up anywhere else.

It's always disconcerting to get slapped in the face with clear evidence of a memory error. Did I combine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9589223 and http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/12/22/kalzumeus-software-year-... somehow? Who knows.

You could predict many of these things described in this post from other Patrick's posts and comments.

Other "I sold my SaaS business" stories discussed on HN in the past could make Déjà vu impression too.

I had that same exact feeling! I scrolled to the bottom looking for a date somewhere to confirm (there was none), but then saw the reference to stockfighter and finally dawned on me it was likely a new post. Then I read it.

At first, it seemed familiar to me too, so I can see how you might've been confused. Also, Patrick intentionally omits the date from his blog entries which likely didn't help you.

Our heuristic for this is that if we're personally the first to add it to the Internet Archive, it's probably new.

Does everything that gets posted here get added to the Internet Archive? Or just stuff that hits the front page?

Either way, that's kind of awesome.

Not yet, but it's on our list! and an HN user who works for them has personally committed to budging me if I don't get it done in the next month or two.

The way it works right now is that we have a keyboard shortcut to open the archive.org page for a url posted to HN—kind of like the 'past' and 'web' links we display at the top of /item pages, except faster [1]—and we use that when trying to find the date of an article. Sometimes the archive doesn't have it yet, in which case we click the link to add it.

1. Actually a number of HN features have started as moderator keyboard shortcuts. It would be fun to release that software, but... time.