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Show HN: Hacker News Classics
- tmaly 9y agoVery cool! how will you maintain it?
- jsomers 9y agoOccasionally you see articles on HN with a date in the title, like “(1998)” — and over the years I’ve noticed that these tend to be some of the best posts. It makes sense: on a site devoted to news, an article posted so long after it was published has to be especially good. So I hacked together this page, which links to every HN post with a date in its title earning more than 40 votes. It’s sorted in chronological order to encourage wandering.
- degenerate 9y agoFor links that are now defunct/gone (such as #2 on the chronological list), can you pull the web archive at the closest date to the submission? (dead) http://yorktownhistory.org/homepages/1900_predictions.htm http://yorktownhistory.org/homepages/1900_predictions.htm ===> https://web.archive.org/web/20100108205037/http://yorktownhistory.org/homepages/1900_predictions.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20100108205037/http://yorktownhi... (archive from 6 days later) I don't think this can be done programmatically though... thanks for putting this together. I enjoy the old posts a lot, too.
- Momquist 9y agoThe url can be found via the archive's API, and you can specify a timestamp. http://archive.org/wayback/available?url=http://yorktownhistory.org/homepages/1900_predictions.htm×tamp=20010203 http://archive.org/wayback/available?url=http://yorktownhist... It returns a json with, notably, the closest archived page given the timestamp. https://archive.org/help/wayback_api.php https://archive.org/help/wayback_api.php
- degenerate 9y agoThat's way more fantastic than I thought their API would be! Thanks. Hope OP sees it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- madethemcry 9y agoI also stumbled upon this too. The article was archived, I wonder why it's not redirecting. Now I'm finally enjoying this post too. http://yorktownhistory.org/wp-content/archives/homepages/1900_predictions.htm http://yorktownhistory.org/wp-content/archives/homepages/190...
- mannykannot 9y agoFWIW, #4 "Two 4000 ft plumb bobs hung down a mine shaft, with baffling results (1901)" can be found at http://www.lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/hollow/tamarack.htm http://www.lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/hollow/tamarack.htm
- steviecleveland 9y agoVery cool! Reminds me of the Ezra Pound quote, "Literature is news that stays news." Ezra was a... complicated man, but he had keen insights.
- duxup 9y agoIt helps that for us readers we've got a lot of time after they were published to to evaluate those articles with. I probabbly wouldn't understand most of them nearly as well if they weren't proven out by recent history ;)
- fhrow4484 9y agoReally cool! Out of the 2k+ posts you list, some people are good at finding good quality classics! The top 10 here combined accounts for more than 10% of all the posts: USER POSTS COUNT Tomte 66 luu 42 tosh 33 ColinWright 27 adamnemecek 26 vezzy-fnord 26 brudgers 25 pmoriarty 24 networked 23 shawndumas 22
- Tomte 9y agoUnfortunately, I have so far failed to get a (1538) submission to stick. Well, let's try again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16444460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16444460
- O_H_E 9y agoI think it does not stick, because I don't understand anything from the title
- Double_a_92 9y agoWell at least you know that it's by Andreas.
- O_H_E 9y agoLOOOOOOOL :D
- hashbig 9y agoLooking at the source code, it only considers titles from 1900 to 2010 as classics.
- bberrry 9y agoTomte is Swedish for "Santa", which seems fitting.
- erikb 9y ago
- superasn 9y agoYou are absolutely right, some articles are indeed timeless yet it's quite easy to miss them. This is a very good idea. A personal favorite of mine that gets posted here often is the Golden Rules for Making Money By P.T. Barnum (1880).
- slaman 9y agoLink for those who are interested: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm
- derefr 9y agoThis is a clever and simple way to dredge up some great posts. I wonder if you could ensure fewer false negatives (i.e. find even more great stuff) by doing the opposite: attempting to filter out every post whose link is to a page that came into existence within a month of the post's submission date. This would likely require scraping the source links (unless you can get that from the https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news dataset or somesuch), but it might be worth it anyway. It'd literally be "Hacker News, minus anything that looks like News."
- jeffreylo 9y agohi james, i miss you
- mito88 9y agomerci, mr. j.
- gus_massa 9y agoI'd prefer to sort them by points. By age is interesting, by the way. Do you do some deduplication. Some classics are resubmitted a few times successfully. Perhaps add a third sort criteria, that is sorted by the number of big reposts.
- bringtheaction 9y agoProblem with by points is that over time as more people come to HN the number of points are worth less, unless HN does like Reddit does and weighs them but even then such a system tends to change over time and so it’s still not comparable. For example say that several years ago a post might hit front page and 500 people would vote on it. If 300 people voted up and 200 down then it gets 100 points. Fast forward and now there are more people on the site. That means greater confidence in the percentage but because only points and not percentage of up/down is revealed, a post with similar percentage up- vs downvotes appears to be better. 600 up and 400 down is still 60% up vs 40% down but it results in 200 points total. Like I said though maybe HN does account for this and 100 points today means the same percentage of people upvoted it, I don’t know.
- ZenoArrow 9y agoYou can't downvote posts on HN, you can flag them but you can't downvote them. On HN, downvoting is only possible on comments.
- bringtheaction 9y agoYou are right I forgot that, heh. Anyway, the problem remains that over time there will be more people to upvote so a post is likely to get more points if it was posted in the future than in the past.
- fghtr 9y agoNot really. Just tried to upvote an old post from 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243417 As a result, its score did not increase, although upvoting "worked".
- nugi 9y agoWow, this is great. Were there no pre 1900 refrences or is that just were you chose to start?
- jsomers 9y agoI started it somewhat arbitrarily in 1900.
- _lce0 9y agoahh was about to publish something in BC just to see what happens ;)
- Cyphase 9y agoThe Wheel: A More Efficient Method for the Production of Round Ceramic Wares (3500 B.C.)
- Cyphase 9y agoBut more seriously, I remembered the complaint tablet to Ea-nasir[1], which was on HN a few months ago[2]. Written in 1750 BCE. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15669759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15669759
- gus_massa 9y agoI count two in (1899) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2426655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2426655 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14833793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14833793
- dang 9y agoYou can also to go https://news.ycombinator.com/front https://news.ycombinator.com/front to bounce around how HN's front page looked on past days, like https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2016-06-20 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2016-06-20. Or click on the date in an account's profile to see what HN looked like on its birthday.
- jacquesm 9y agoCool, would it be possible to put two dynamic links 'yesterday' and 'two days ago' in the footer? I would really use those.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoNote that https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-18 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-18 doesn't let you navigate backwards, but https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09 is the first day. Out of curiosity, for the date rendering, did you xdef racket's date libraries or implement your own date algorithms in arc? I guess you could've also shelled out to `date -r <timestamp>` which would get the feature done in about ten seconds.
- dang 9y ago> 2007-02-18 doesn't let you navigate backwards Yes, and we specifically left it as an exercise for the pokey reader to figure out why. Arc does its own date stuff. We extended it a bit to be able to print things like "x months ago". Edit: and "Feb 31, 2017".
- pmoriarty 9y agoAny way this could be done without requiring javascript? For security, ad-blocking, and privacy reasons I have javascript blocked in my browser, and really don't like to turn it on except for sites like my bank.
- gabriel34 9y agoYou could render the http://jsomers.net/hn/stories.json http://jsomers.net/hn/stories.json some other way, or examine the javascript yourself, as it is not obfuscated or anything
- Jeaye 9y agoThis is a totally reasonable request and I was looking to say much the same thing. Anything resembling HN, or in the spirit of HN, shouldn't require JS to view, I think.
- aplorbust 9y ago"Any way this could be done without requiring Javascript?" Could be done many ways. Lets imagine you like text, you dont mind reading something somewhat structured and regular like json and you dont need all the html, css, etc. tags and window dressing. 5-minute quick and dirty solution 1. curl -4o 1.htm http://jsomers.net/hn/stories.json http://jsomers.net/hn/stories.json tr , '\12' < 1.htm \ |exec sed ' 1i\ <pre> /./{ /{\"/,/}/!d; } /\"url\":[^{]/{s/\"url\":/&<\/pre><a href=/;s/$/>[FETCH]<\/a><pre>/;}; /\"objectID\":/{s//&<\/pre><a href=https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=/;s/$/>[FETCH COMMENTS]<\/a><pre>/;s/\"//3;s/\"//3;}; s/{\"created_at\":/\ \ &/g; /}}}/s/$/\ \ -----------------/g; $a\ <\/pre> ' > 2.htm 2. Navigate to file:///2.htm
- shullbitt0r 9y agoFor security, noise blocking, and public unreasonableness I have only HN allowed in my browser, that is, if a site doesn't work without js, there's a high chance I don't want to read it. My bank page luckily doesn't need js either, to function.
- CGamesPlay 9y agoSince the first post is 1900 and it appears to be sorted by date, I wanted to verify: there were no posts from the 1800s worth showing?
- lucideer 9y ago- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10374436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10374436 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11320169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11320169 probably more
- zaroth 9y agoSo in case I’m not spending enough time on the front page of this HN, good to know there’s a nearly infinite depth to plumb. And now I’m reading Arnold Bennett’s ‘How to Live on 24 Hours a Day’ originally published in 1908. Good to know tongue-in-cheek self-help books will never go out of style! [1] - http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2274/2274-h/2274-h.htm http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2274/2274-h/2274-h.htm
- formalsystem 9y agoI actually enjoyed reading this today. One highlight was the below on "reading the news every morning" " The idea of devoting to them thirty or forty consecutive minutes of wonderful solitude (for nowhere can one more perfectly immerse one's self in one's self than in a compartment full of silent, withdrawn, smoking males) is to me repugnant "
- swyx 9y agoah i was thinking of making something like this but never did anything. i would have called it Hacker Olds :) well done!
- bringtheaction 9y agoThis is pretty nice. I also think a browse by year feature would be neat. By that I mean in the same fashion as OP, so I could for example look at posts that had (2011) in the title by going to 2011, etc.
- jurnalanas 9y agowow, this is really interesting.. and I just reliazed one of the reason why classic writings are special -- especially for another writing material purpose is because it has passed the the test of time..
- katee 9y agotest
- CookieMon 9y agoIt may need some broken link tools. I clicked on the 4th link and the site no longer exists, Wayback Machine has it though - https://web.archive.org/web/20170606131659/http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/hollow/tamarack.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20170606131659/http://www.lhup.e... Perhaps Hacker Classics could automatically ensure all remaining live links get archived?
- elboru 9y ago"it's easy to forget that the web is the greatest library in the history of the world" Until someone stops paying the host server or the domain expires and then those books just disappear.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago> Perhaps Hacker Classics could automatically ensure all remaining live links get archived? Done. I'm going to run through every URL ever cited on HN at some point when time permits.
- jerkstate 9y agoSuggested title: Hacker Olds
- scotty79 9y agoPaywall on article from 1930. That's a sad state of affairs.
- kristofferR 9y agoI found this page of undocumented HN tips [1], finds Hacker News Classic [2] and the top post there was Hacker News Classics [3]. [1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/classic https://news.ycombinator.com/classic [3] http://jsomers.net/hn/ http://jsomers.net/hn/ Quite a cool coincidence!
- baddox 9y agoThis is very cool! Based on the title “HN Classics,” I thought it might be an implementation of another idea I’ve had. I had this idea to search for stand-out articles that get reposted every so often and always get a lot of good attention and discussion: so-called classics of HN. I think that data could be very interesting, and would also serve as a sort of “hall of fame” of articles the HN community loves (moreso than just a list of the most upvoted articles of all time). Of course, you could also figure out the optimal duration between successive posts, and figure out when to repost yourself, if anyone wants a karma-grab. ;)
- blauditore 9y agoI thought reposts (and therefore scattered discussions) were discouraged on HN.
- baddox 9y agoFrom what I’ve seen, it’s perfectly acceptable for older articles that are reposted after a considerable amount of time. The best example I can find on short notice is this hexagonal grids article: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Hexagonal%20Grids&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Hexagonal%20Grids&sort=byDate&... You could likely find more by searching HN comments for the phrase “previous discussion,” because people tend to post links to the previous HN submissions. It doesn’t bother me, since there are likely always new HN readers who haven’t seen great “classic” articles. The HN FAQ says: > If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- hvd 9y agothis is fantastic. Great snapshot of the past. Thank you jsomers for sharing this.
- gt_ 9y agoNice to see E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops there near the top of the list when clicking the link. Thanks for sharing.
- bordercases 9y agoInteresting how as we approach from 1903 to 2010 we ultimately go from more general and deep to more specialized and disconnected.
- murukesh_s 9y agoThanks for this. Can't upvote this enough. Still going through lots of gems that I would never have read without this. p.s thanks for ruining lot of my work hours. but thanks!
- vamshidhar490 9y agohacker news is awsome
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- aswerty 9y agoWith regards to Classics, the "You're probably using the wrong dictionary" blog post at http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary was probably the most interesting pieces I've read on HN.
- lvoudour 9y agoWow that was a great read, thanks!
- wila 9y agoVery nice indeed. Immediately ran downstairs to verify a Websters encyclopedia dictionary I bought in the UK around 1997 only to find it wasn't the version with all the prose. It's still a very nice illustrated (and heavy!) dictionary, but not quite like what jsomers describes. So downloaded the version he offers for download and am now installing the dictionary using the steps he provides. Thank You, really looking forward to using it. edit: and his install steps still work, using it in the dictionary app right now. Super!
- newbear 9y agoI wish I had a good word to describe my gratitude for this post! I've though reverse dictionary could work but doesn't. Another dictionary I would love to have access to is one where you can find words in other languages that don't exist in yours.
- mosselman 9y agoInteresting how both now and 'then' Tesla is still in the top stories.
- boffinism 9y agoHmmm... lovely idea, but in practice what I'm getting is a bunch of 404s. The internet is a library with a bunch of books missing...
- lamby 9y agoAnyone fancy putting all of these into a Kindle/PDF? :)
- captn3m0 9y agoWeekend project challenge! I do lots of scrape-to-ebook projects, so this is fun for me. Check back a few hours later.
- hownottowrite 9y agoI'm not sure how I feel about having three items on this list (including the current #1). I might need to take my buggy out for a long trot to contemplate.
- tambourine_man 9y agoNice. You could say they are… evergreen (title bar color)
- bartl 9y agoSecond link is dead. So is the fourth.
- zestyping 9y agoWhy the cutoff at 2012? (line 71 of index.html) > if (data.hasOwnProperty(yr) && parseInt(yr) < 2012)
- zestyping 9y agoThere's something odd about the file checked in to Github; it's cut off on line 50: https://github.com/jsomers/hacker-classics/blob/master/index.html https://github.com/jsomers/hacker-classics/blob/master/index...
- mud_dauber 9y agoThis is glorious. Thank you.
- lostlogin 9y agoThere are some great comment threads there that had me itching to chime in, 5 years too late. What an excellent project.
- obbobo 9y agoIt's fascinating to dig into HN literature from 1900!
- lozzo 9y agothis is really brilliant. But is there a reason you sort the list from the oldest to the newest ? I think it would make sense to have it the other way around. best