It is, isn't it .. serves me right for breezing through that too quickly.

If there's something magical going on, the ordering would be the only real distinction possible.

Apparently the original (still the same?) dates back to the OG PG days:

Ask HN: who knows about this - "http://News.YCombinator.com/classic"? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1832884

  It's what the frontpage would look like if only the votes of users who joined in the first year counted. I made it to check if the site is declining. In practice it's usually just a slower-changing version of the frontpage.

  ~ pg