During my daily news consumption, I recently bumped into a cute story that seemed a bit familiar. The story was a suggestion to switch to an 18-cent coin.

I found it by way of Hacker News — for my money ($0), the best news aggregator for the tech set. The article was a fairly typical blog post: a summary of a longer paper, which simply ran the math and determined that the average number of coins one gets from a cash register is 4.7. But the addition of an 18-cent coin would drop that to 3.89.

I like this sort of thing. It’s quirky. It’s math. It speaks to the stupidity of pennies (and, increasingly, nickels). It makes me think about government inefficiencies and the very human affection for little hunks of metal that are actually inconvenient and clink in my pocket.

But I couldn’t get past the familiarity. I backed up and reread the article — a lot more slowly — and realized what was going on.

First, the story originally was written in 2003. This is a little odd for Hacker News, which usually is pretty current, but a story like this is sort of timeless and prone to random resurgence. Then I realized the reason for this particular resurgence: The byline was Roland Piquepaille, and you don’t forget a name like that.

For many years Roland was incredibly active on Slashdot, the news website I founded. His submissions often were like this 18-cent-coin piece: a little off the beaten path but interesting.

Why did I care? Roland died Jan. 6, 2009.

He died, but his work lives on. And apparently last week somebody searched online for something or other and landed on a story nearly a decade old, written by a man who has been dead for more than three years; that content hit the Internet again just as effectively as if it were written yesterday. A trivial but fun little story has a bit of immortality attached to it.

Roland took a lot of garbage from Slashdot readers over the years. A community has a nasty habit of being a little extra hostile toward anything extreme, and Roland often submitted stories on the fluffier end of the news spectrum.

I’d like to think he gets the posthumous last laugh. He found fun stuff that we enjoyed reading. I hope that the traces I leave behind after I’m gone are still good for the occasional laugh as well. I’ll never write the Great American Novel or direct an Oscar-winning film. The Internet, however, lets all of us live forever.

Rob Malda is chief strategist and editor at large for The Washington Post’s WaPo Labs team. This piece was posted on washingtonpost.com/innovations.