I think it's particularly useful nowadays considering how slow and sluggish HN has been (at least for me). Plus there are some real gems that pop up every time you refresh.

As he says:

The other day I "ran out" of stuff to read on Hacker News. I had looked at everything that interested me, and had even checked out page 2 (I was getting desperate). I realized that there were thousands of great HN threads that I hadn't seen because I hadn't been paying attention to the site when they were ranking. So I pulled together a little db of the top 10,000 HN threads (loosely defined; a thread with >1 points, 1> comments, and some web link rank). I put these into a random shuffle so that reload would give me 30 fresh threads that I (probably) hadn't seen before. I'm pretty happy with this. Lets me scratch my HN itch when I've exhausted the main page, and it's often interesting to see the old material again.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2226914