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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 o
by satvikpendem 2y ago
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;})();
- djeastm 2y agoThat's really neat. Thanks for providing it
- dang 2y agoAlso recommended is https://news.ycombinator.com/front 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/front?day=2023-07-02. https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights 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 hn@ycombinator.com).
- satvikpendem 2y agoThanks 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= 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 2y agoAh sorry I missed that you were already pointing to those! A 'random' link might be a good idea. For /highlights too.
- satvikpendem 2y agoYep 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.