Because the work was written by Fang Lizhi, and was just posted a few days ago. Books are still referred to by their publish date even if they're published posthumously. Why should web articles not be attributed the same way?
Yah, I had to read elsewhere to figure out what happened. It's basically an account of what his actions were that led to his exile. A lot of the After has been written about elsewhere, except the parts related to the central government's behind the scenes actions.
After that evening, the hubbub died down. In the coming months, he talked politics with some students, some of whom eventually became leaders of the Tienanmen Square protests. He was never a planner, never a protester, nada. However, when he saw that the Chinese Government started cracking down hard, he realized he was going to be scapegoated for his essays a few months prior, and went into the US embassy. He had been declared the most wanted person even though he had little to do with the actual protests.
I noticed the same thing with gwern posts. I assume what happens is HNers see a random article on the front page, like it, and start browsing the sites archives for other interesting articles. Then they submit them to HN and the process repeats itself.
I’ve noticed it becomes relatively easy to anticipate which articles will reach the front page once I’ve started reading the trending sites. However, I wonder whether there’s any way to anticipate which sites will begin to trend on the front page. My first instinct is that it’s just a matter of circumstance, of one person sharing one article from a non-trending site that trends on the front page. In practice, however, it’s hard for me to believe that such a small event could decide whether or not a story gets covered by a more mainstream site after a journalist finds it—I’ve been seeing quite a few references to Hacker News articles as of late in mainstream news articles. It could be that Hacker News really is the initial component in starting news trends.
Gwern was for a while submitting one article to HN every week and most of them seemed to make the front page. Maybe that's what you're recalling? It was some time ago, though.
Dr. Fang was revered by some for his achievements, but no doubt his departure to an "enemy" country at the time would absolutely make him a public enemy...
Archive.is: https://archive.is/sgTgG
Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:t4otc2...