Can I search HN, sort by date and hide all the hits which have never been shown in the top 30? Occasionally I want to find something I've seen among the titles on the HN index page some months ago.
In the case of HN, I assume that being once in top 30 would add a minimum number to the vote count. So a simpler query would be "sort by date and hide all the hits which have below 100 votes".
The real "have never been shown in the top 30" would need an actual event tag added to each post when they reach top 30. Then Algolia can search that I guess. Hidden tag search is a common practice.
You can only sort by popularity, which maps to 'score' in the data structure that the API sorts. You can see that here: https://github.com/HackerNews/API
The highest position on front page is not, AFAICT stored in any way and is not searchable.
The real "have never been shown in the top 30" would need an actual event tag added to each post when they reach top 30. Then Algolia can search that I guess. Hidden tag search is a common practice.