I din't know what value it actually has, but it potentially:
1. Is exposed to people who weren't reading HN the first two times around. If HN is growing, that's a fairly safe bet. These people benefit from discussing the idea and working things out for themselves instead of simply readingwhat has been said before, for the same reason that to learn math you do math, you don't just read about math.
2. Might be relevant to things that didn't exist the first two times around. Maybe someone will comment about how this depiction relates to jresig's attempt to teach programming with JavaScript at the Khan Academy, or some such.
Both of these potential values have a common proposition: That while the post hasn't changed since 1996, the world has changed since 1996.
