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New ‘past’ link on HN front page
- eevilspock 8y agoCould an option be added to change the time granularity? e.g. by week, month and year?
- dang 8y agoGood idea. I'll add it to the list.
- hacym 8y agoCan’t stop it from happening but sad that most of the links are broken. Would be nice to go back on a link and actually read it.
- franky47 8y agoI like the "Time Machine" feature of going back 1 (to N) year(s) in the past, it brings a lot of insight as to how technologies and trends evolved (for those of us who have only recently joined Hacker News).
- natebleker 8y agoThis is one area when the functionally can really be improved over what reddit implements. Having a moving window of time to sort within is an amazingly useful feature for sorting out trends or lost articles. The expanded granularity would be very much appreciated.
- EamonnMR 8y agoAlso with Reddit being able to trace causality between memes and such would be interesting.
- z3 8y agoVery nice and useful. Well done guys!
- dang 8y agoNot new; just the link at the top is new. The hard part was what to call it. Since the point is to give people more to read, 'more' seemed right. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18512028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18512028 Edit: Oh, also: "more" fits with the "More" links you see at the bottom of the front page and other places, clicking which takes you back to previous posts. Edit 2: Ok, you guys have convinced me you don't like "more", so let's go with "past". That word is overloaded with 'past' links that point to HN searches, but perhaps those meanings are compatible.
- meesterdude 8y agoPast is better. Not great, but better than more. Thanks for listening!
- animex 8y agodéjà vu
- chmaynard 8y agoThanks! Just a reminder, don't forget to add a "hide" button under each post. Some of us use "hide" a lot. :)
- dang 8y agoOk, added.
- nmstoker 8y agoBTW: If there was something to reduce accidental hits on hide and flag, that would be great. On mobile touch screens, being right under the main links they can get hit a surprising number of times and then you've got to go fumble around to undo it. Maybe a "comfortable" setting a la Gmail?
- brazzledazzle 8y ago
- sjroot 8y agoIt would be cool to see links from previous days/months/years point to an archived version of the link (if possible). If you go back a substantial amount of time, you end up hitting a lot of broken links.
- bcjordan 8y agoCould be a quick Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey script hack to grab the date from the URL and links to the nearest Wayback Machine version using https://archive.org/help/wayback_api.php https://archive.org/help/wayback_api.php
- MilnerRoute 8y agoI like it. It seems to surface more unusually good stories -- but is that a problem? Won't the list end up dominated by a handful of winner-take-all stories, lingering throughout the entire day at the top of the list, rather than an ongoing series of slightly-less-popular stories popping in and out? If there's always going to be better stories with the "sorted by time spent" view, does that create a danger that everyone will just devote their attention to those few high-grade stories, and ignore all of the rest?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dang 8y agoIt's just a list of past front pages. Once each day is over, its front page never changes. Does that answer your question? (Well, it's not exactly a list of past front pages, because what appears on /front was never the actual front page at any point. Since that's always changing, we take a kind of average.)
- MilnerRoute 8y agoYeah, I was confused about how this works. But if the link appears at the bottom of the page, then this new page will be more of an afterthought (after reading the current front page and upvoting its stories at that moment in time).
- komali2 8y agoI don't understand what I'm looking at, other than the option to view the page as it appeared a day, month, or year back... or a day in the future somehow?
- throway88989898 8y agoNormal HN but time-bound: front page as it appeared on day x. Submissions ordered by time spent in the front page. I think the message on top takes too much space and would prefer something like <y <d <m (2019-02-22) d> m> y> or <<< << < (2019-02-22) > >> >>> or < < < (2019-02-22) > > > But that's just me.
- O_H_E 8y agoI like these first two suggestions
- valentinvieriu 8y agoI like to explore it more visually. https://hnews.xyz/ https://hnews.xyz/ Is that something you might consider adding in the future? ( I’m the author of https://hnews.xyz https://hnews.xyz )
- tedmiston 8y agoThe rendered screenshots are a super nice feature. I have a few dozen HN apps (yours included) saved in this Pinboard collection for those looking for more alternative clients. https://pinboard.in/u:tedmiston/t:hacker-news/ https://pinboard.in/u:tedmiston/t:hacker-news/
- miki123211 8y agoI wish there was a hn viewer integrated with Outline. something like, for each new article on front, check whether it can be outlined and, if it can, just display it without redirecting to the original site. That would protect against slashdotted sites, paywalls, annoying gdpr consent pop ups, sorry but we don't like europe pages, all kinds of tracking and js heavy websites (especially if you're on i.e. Lynx) etc. This could be done either by redirecting to the Outline website or using its API (see the network traffic for details on how it works). Also a HN that would be essentially a list of check boxes ordered by time and an "add selected to Pocket" button would be nice too.
- tedmiston 8y agoBoth of those ideas sound awesome. I am a heavy Instapaper user but really liking Outline / Hypothesis lately.
- miki123211 8y agoWhat's hypothesis? Tried searching for it on Google but couldn't find anything, as it's such a common word.
- 8y ago
- kgwxd 8y agoAny chance all the lists[1] will get their own RSS feeds? [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/lists https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
- tedmiston 8y agoKinda surprised someone hasn't built that already on top of the existing API.
- miki123211 8y agosee hnrss.org. I use it along with an iOS shortcut that retrieves the articles for me, concatenates to a big txt file, uploads to dropbox so that I can read later on whatever I want and automatically starts reading with the build-in tts.
- eterps 8y agoOnly now I realized that I use https://hckrnews.com https://hckrnews.com for so many years that I have come to think of it as the actual HN front page. It's hard to imagine something better.
- andirk 8y agoDo you mean that we're not all typings news.ycombinator.com ? That's kind of tripping me out. And where is this new 'more' button?
- TeMPOraL 8y agoAre you? I'm just typing new<ret>. Or not even that; HN is often just CTRL+SHIFT+T away...
- a-wu 8y agoFor me just typing "n" suffices for autocomplete....maybe I should pay more attention to my habits.
- Fnoord 8y agoI type hack or hacker or hacker n (depending on other history). URL bar does the rest.
- empyrical 8y agoI personally use http://hackerne.ws http://hackerne.ws
- wilkystyle 8y agoYes! I love https://hckrnews.com https://hckrnews.com, and the ability to come back later in the day and catch up on anything that was on the front page, and not worry about missing out. I also echo the sentiment of being used to that site as the HN homepage.
- yread 8y agoLately, I have a feeling that hckrnews surfaces the wrong type of posts - stuff that quickly reaches 3 points. But it's often flamebait, clickbait or some useless drama. I often go back to the home page to find posts that don't appear on hckrnews but are quite interesting in a niche or need to be fully digested to appreciate. That said I also love hckrnews for checking what's new after a longer time
- colvasaur 8y agoIs there a public API for this?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- throway88989898 8y agoother than https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API ?
- DiabloD3 8y agoIt'd be nice if the "title" field of the link submit form would have a tiny little bit of javascript to count how many characters are in the field.
- dbg31415 8y agoBy 2026 HN will discover never-ending scroll.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- zapzupnz 8y agoI hope not, that's a usability nightmare when you're trying to find something.
- wunderg 8y agoI like “more” on top, it does makes sense. The link on the bottom perhaps should be renamed to next to avoid confusion. Just my 2 cents!
- pmoriarty 8y agoHow many people actually look at the front page rather than just use the RSS feed? https://news.ycombinator.com/rss https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
- aboutruby 8y agoThey are also a lot of Twitter accounts that relay HN posts / comments.
- zapzupnz 8y agoAnd the /r/HackerNews subreddit for those who are reddit-inclined.
- forgotmypw 8y agoI largely browse using the front page. I am not looking to keep up with every article ever, I just look for a few interesting things to read, then close it and move on with my day. I also find the design and web layout to be very pleasing. My RSS reading habits never recovered from GR's demise... but maybe one of these days.
- pmoriarty 8y ago"I am not looking to keep up with every article ever" HN's RSS feed does not post every article ever, but just those that make it to the front page. It's an alternate way of accessing the same articles, but I find it much more powerful and useful than using a web browser for the following reasons: 1 - I have a local archive of the titles of and links to each article that does not depend on HN. So if HN ever goes away, I can still access them all. 2 - I don't need to click through and wait for multiple web pages to load to browse through my archives. 3 - Newsboat, the terminal-based RSS reader I use is far faster and more responsive than any web browser, on my old, slow laptop. 4 - Newsboat is also way more powerful and extensible in ways that a plain web page is not. I can easily do things like tagging and filtering, I can delete articles that I don't want to see while saving the ones I do without actually having to open up the destination web page, and a lot more. 5 - I can locally search through articles without telling any external search engine company what I'm searching for. This is a small but important way to practice defense-in-depth in the realm of privacy. At some point I'll probably try switching to reading RSS feeds from within Emacs, which should be even more flexible and powerful.
- badfrog 8y agoWhat's the difference between? https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/front https://news.ycombinator.com/front I didn't know the latter existed until right now.
- dang 8y agoThe first one is in the present and the second shows how it was in the past.
- NKosmatos 8y agoNice, but can we please have a dark theme for iPad?
- artursapek 8y agoAnd thus HN became a perfect museum of silicon valley trends, hypes, and deaths.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Waterluvian 8y agoI love that HN doesn't change for change's sake. One problem I have with tech orgs is that inevitably their designers will find work to do, necessary or not. So when things do change, I like that it's very methodical and usually quite minor.
- zeotroph 8y agoMethodical or just overly cautious? It took ages to get the `[-]`/collapse tree link, and the other IMO obvious QoL improvement -- a 'parent' link to a) get to the root node of a discussion tree that no longer interests the reader and then to b) use the mentioned '[-]' to collapse it all -- might take even longer.
- aboutruby 8y agoI'm curious what's the reasoning behind adding this link? To me it makes HN much easier to catch up. I see this as the "slow media" movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_media
- amelius 8y agoBy the way, I sometimes miss the "parent" link on comments.
- inopinatus 8y agoNot essential, but IWBNI date selection respected user timezone. It’s 23/2 here in the Pacific; seeing 21/2 as “yesterday” felt wrong.
- dang 8y agoI hear you, but proper timezone support is one of those things we've shied away from over the years. It's hard to get right and our dev resources are too limited. So mostly we just work with UTC. I'm sorry—I know it can create a bit of an outsider feeling, which is definitely not intended.
- m3kw9 8y agoThere is also a More in the bottom of the front page. This more and that more.
- civilian 8y agoAre you sure it's not "this more" and "self more" ?
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y agoThis is broken... when I put in tomorrow's date, it says it doesn't have that data....
- HelloFellowDevs 8y agoI'm actually really interested in this addition. I'm just going back to 'big' days, such as financial crash. When I started HS when I finished HS, when I started College. A few articles are interesting, it's definitely better than bumbling around Algolia. Edit: One great link is this one > Google Making Extraordinary Counteroffers To Stop Flow Of Employees To Facebook [1] [1](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1653702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1653702)
- polishTar 8y ago>>no reason their stock won’t hit $100 billion in total valuation over the next couple of years. >That's got to be a joke. Love it!
- bekishore 8y agoPlease consider a "first" and "latest" day in these options ... or let everyone go back years and find out the first day 2007-02-18
- dang 8y agoThe first day is actually https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09. In the first few months, there were quite a few days where nothing was posted (see the difference between https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61 and 62). If /front works for a day, but shows no stories, that means HN existed but there were no stories that day. The navigation links work until they point outside the ultimate beginning or end of the data, and then stop appearing. That was a bit tricky to get right as I recall.
- hombre_fatal 8y agoThis is great. I always wished I could see front pages from the past. The only downside is that getting bored of the current front page is sometimes the only reason I get off HN when I'm procrastinating and this makes it easier to prolong that. :)
- davidjnelson 8y agoThis is cool, thank you! Would “days” be a good name as it allows you to browse a set of days? It doesn’t seem like posts you’ve hidden from the front page are reflected here. I guess they don’t really need to be since this is more archival in nature.
- dang 8y agoHmm, maybe they should be. I'll make a note to look at that.
- skibz 8y agoI wrote a browser extension a while ago that adds more of these lesser known HN pages to the nav. I like having a way to get to all of them individually from the top of every page. https://github.com/skibz/hnlists https://github.com/skibz/hnlists
- the_duke 8y agoThe most important feature that HN would need in my opinion is a "top of last X" view, as Reddit introduced with the redesign. It's MUCH to easy to miss interesting stories if you don't check the site at least twice a day.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ggm 8y agoIsn't it confusing to have the word [more] twice on the front page, but doing different things depending on if its at the top or the bottom? I like the function, but some how "by date" feels more "more" than "more" does.
- forgotmypw 8y agoCool! I just found this feature yesterday or the day before, thanks to a post listing all the less documented HN features. Have you found the new placement to be affecting the site/database load at all?
- O_H_E 8y agoMay I ask you to link such thread. Am not able to find it on algolia
- forgotmypw 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 I searched Google for "site:news.ycombinator.com features" and limited the search to past week.
- Insanity 8y agoI like the feature but the name is not great :) As some others have suggested "Archive" or "History" sound better in my humble opinion.
- dangwu 8y agoAny plans to update the official Hacker News API? I’d love more features, such as ability to reply and upvote, but more importantly, the API currently requires using a really old version of Firebase SDK. The rest API is an alternative, but it doesn’t work well due to the design of the API needing a whole network call per post/comment.
- dang 8y agoWe're going to replace it with a new API that just gives a JSON version of any HN URL. Will that work?
- FiveSquared25 8y agoYes dang, thank you!
- dangwu 8y agoThat would be incredible. Please give substantial warning before taking down the Firebase API though!
- abbiya 8y agoMy hacker news spin https://8hrs.xyz https://8hrs.xyz does something similar to this newly added more btn. Why add this now ???
- rprameshwor 8y ago2007-02-18 seems to be the day it started. Out of curiosity : Under a particular day's story, why do we see stories from the next day too ? Eg : https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2018-02-21 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2018-02-21 This shows some post from 02-22 too.
- dang 8y agoThat does seem odd. I'll look into it. Edit: it's because the /front pages were dividing up days differently than the story timestamps, which use UTC. I've made everything use UTC now.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- J_cst 8y agoI feel that the top navigation "more" link could be renamed into "popular by date" or "yesterday's popular". Those labels appear more accurate to me and better convey the functionality of the current top "more" link. Moreover having two links with the same name on the same page which behave differently seems misleading.
- gnicholas 8y agoI'm curious how the algorithm works, as it doesn't seem to work as I'd expected. My first thought was to go back and look at the day I launched my startup with at Show HN [1], which got over 700 points and was at #1 from roughly noon to 2 AM the next day (PT). Sure enough, this post shows up in the #2 slot on the day I posted it (Sept 5, 2013) [2], but it doesn't show up at all on the following day [3]. This is strange because it was at #1 at the beginning of this day (assuming that's midnight PT) and was on the front page for much of that day. Even when you go hundreds of entries down into the Sept 6 page, it doesn't show up. Any idea how the algorithm works that it's generating these results? 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2013-09-05 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2013-09-05 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2013-09-06 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2013-09-06
- dang 8y agoWe only started logging the front page on 2014-11-11. For days before that, what you're seeing is the stories which were submitted on that day, ordered by vote score. (Not necessarily publicly visible points, though, because some votes get dropped for various reasons.) Since your story was submitted on Sept 5, 2013, that's the day it shows up. If you look at https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2014-11-11 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2014-11-11 vs. https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2014-11-10 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2014-11-10, you'll notice that the text description changes at the top.
- gnicholas 8y agoThanks, that makes sense!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- atoko 8y agoIt’s probably rendering what would be “front page” given the same data but with today’s engine. It would be interesting to see how everything is being cached for a particular day, though.
- aunty_helen 8y agoFeature request: Filtering out domains that you don't want to see on the home page
- tekkk 8y agoI think the UI is kinda awkward to use. If I want to input a specific date I have to manipulate the URL? Gets really annoying with mobile. Also it would be nice to somehow see the past dates somehow visualized. Maybe how much total activity there was per day, or what types of topics were discussed. Now I am just going blind without any sense of direction what lies ahead. It's very refreshing feature and all but I will probably only use it for past day's submissions since going farther fishing for interesting submissions is too laborious.
- gammateam 8y ago> But there's no way $150k is average for a mid-range developer. AHAHHA this is the same as people calling BS on today’s 300k+ annual compensation packages Its like aw you wanted a source? Congrats you missed the boat, have fun citing things in academia So good
- dang 8y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? We eventually ban accounts that keep doing this, and have had to ask you before. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19230951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19230951 and marked it off-topic.
- gammateam 8y agoYeaaaaah but it was on topic, in a chain of threads making fun how unsubstantive people’s skepticism was back in 2010 Your team tells me that upvotes/downvotes are noisy, but once you have downvotes it is unsubstantive and the account is rate limited Pick Your team also never explains how you mods interpret a guideline or substantiation, just unilaterally say it violates and pray for classical conditioning as if you want community standards to be decided by the community If you are judging this primarily by flags and downvotes, you arent noticing that a lot of the collective conscious is just incorrect. It isnt as open to ideas as you might think
- dang 8y agoI'm happy to explain how we interpret specific cases, but not as part of a litigious process in which explanation only leads to more objections. If you want a serious answer, you'll need to do more to establish good faith.
- gammateam 8y ago> If you want a serious answer, you'll need to do more to establish good faith. Such as Karma over 1,000? What do you mean I think I’m doing pretty good, but what do you have in mind
- rasikjain 8y agoInteresting!! Very first day of HN has 10 posts. https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-18 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-18
- mercer 8y agoIsn't this the first day? https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09
- rasikjain 8y agointeresting. I found this article about HN from Feb 2007 https://news.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html https://news.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html