[sph]

These days I use the search feature much more than commenting or reading posts. The frontpage is the usual recent news addiction treadmill, while for research into niche topics you can find a treasure trove of interesting comments in the archives.

Want more posts about Lisp, Smalltalk and reverse engineering, for example, rather than the usual front page drivel? Search for them.

On one hand I wish Algolia didn't give very old posts a lot of weight (it often prefers to show posts > 8+ years ago), on the other hand old content tends to be before the Eternal September of tech-adjacent people coming to this forum to discuss tech-adjacent light content, so it's actually a feature. The real value of HN is its archives IMO.

[satvikpendem]

I also made a bookmarklet to show me HN posts from random dates, it is quite interesting to see what was interesting to people a decade ago, for example. Lots of comments in HN's heyday were pretty eye opening as well.

    javascript:(function() {function randomDate(start, end) {var date = new Date(+start + Math.random() \* (end - start));var day = ("0" + date.getDate()).slice(-2);var month = ("0" + (date.getMonth() + 1)).slice(-2);var year = date.getFullYear();return year + '-' + month + '-' + day;}var startDate = new Date(2007, 9, 9);var endDate = new Date();var randomDateStr = randomDate(startDate, endDate);var newUrl = 'https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=' + randomDateStr;window.location.href = newUrl;})();

[dang]

Also recommended is https://news.ycombinator.com/front, which shows you the frontpage stories from any day—a little bit like archive.org would do, except that it's not a snapshot, but a composite of all the front pages from a 24 hour period.

For example, here's HN from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2023-07-02.

https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights is another good resource (and if anyone notices a great HN comment, past or present, they're welcome to nominate it for the highlights list! just email [e-mail]).

[satvikpendem]

Thanks Dan, that is in fact exactly what my bookmarklet does, it generates a random date (2012-01-02) and appends it to `https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=`. I think there should be a `random` link on the HN header links that does what I am currently doing, it would be useful to have it built-in.

[dang]

Ah sorry I missed that you were already pointing to those!

A 'random' link might be a good idea. For /highlights too.

[satvikpendem]

Yep it's fairly easy to make a bookmarklet for /front but for /highlights it seems to depend on the id of the comment as a cursor rather than the date, so it would be nice to have them both as links in the header bar.

[djeastm]

That's really neat. Thanks for providing it