5 ms·

History of Hacker News Search from 2007 to 2024

120 points by skeptrune 2y ago

cactusplant7374 2y ago
When is the launch?
- skeptrune 2y ago
  Not sure yet! Fingers crossed it'll be this week or next.
  - cactusplant7374 2y ago
    Cool!
swyx 2y ago
i want to publicly thank Algolia for providing an excellent HN search for so long. i was on a call with Linus Lee and we both were referencing something on HN and i started pulling it up and he said "i know exactly what website you're on" without seeing my screen and it was of course the Algolia HN search. unbelievable mind sync. Idk if it can be replaced (i guess i could do with semantic search + content crawling to start?), but even if it is replaced, Algolia will always have a special place in my heart for doing such a great job for free. thank you whoever worked on it (Algolians - is there a behind the scenes writeup somewhere?)
- squeaky-clean 2y ago
  It is free, but Algolia is a YCombinator backed company (YC W14) so for them it's probably very useful as a sort of low-stakes phase-1-prod environment. Basically a win-win-win.
- davisr 2y ago
  Now, if only it could be used without necessitating JavaScript...
  - MrVandemar 2y ago
    Yeah, I always have to turn it on to search for something. It's a pain. It's friction. Javascript is not required for search. It has never been required for search. Google. Yahoo. Alta Vista. They worked fine without it back in the day.
    - rudasn 2y ago
      Google still works without javascript.
- dankwizard 2y ago
  Referencing something on HN and then being amazed youre both thinking about the HN search engine... Unbelievable mind sync.
spasibot 2y ago
I wonder if they'll let us search flagged and dead posts and comments. I remember reading some insightful exchanges back in the day that got flagged because of being a controversial topic that other users didn't like. No way to find them now, even knowing some keywords and approximate month and year.
- yorwba 2y ago
  They're using the firebase API, https://github.com/devflowinc/trieve-hn-discovery/tree/main/hackernews-ingest https://github.com/devflowinc/trieve-hn-discovery/tree/main/... so no showdead, I think.
- greenchair 2y ago
  contributes to the echo chamber
- dang 2y ago
  We had to exclude [dead] and eventually even just [flagged] posts from the public API because many third-party clients and sites were displaying them as if they were regular posts. For the ever-fragile HN ecosystem, that is catastrophic. We would get angry emails saying "how can your expletive site possibly condone such expletive expletive comments as <link>" ... and then it would turn out that <link> was a post by some account that had been banned for years. It's fine if users turn 'showdead' on in their profile to read everything—just please remember that by doing that, you're subscribing to various bottoms of various barrels. But it's definitely not ok when people browse HN with some app we have nothing to do with, run into horrible things, understandably are outraged and then forever have their view of HN imprinted. IMO this issue is existential for HN. We've spent years and so much energy trying to find a balance between internet openness and human decency, a task which oscillates between barely-possible and simply-doomed, so the idea that anybody anywhere sees anything labeled "Hacker News" that pours all the toxic waste back into the commons is physically painful to me. Much as I dislike the idea of restricting anyone's curiosity about the entire corpus of what gets posted, I don't see what choice we have.
  - spasibot 2y ago
olalonde 2y ago
I was looking at Algolia's website recently and it seems they really went all in with the "AI" marketing/SEO.
- swyx 2y ago
  "we put the AI in AIgolia"
re 2y ago
I'm a little confused by the context and comments here. Is Trieve associated with HN at all or is this an independent/third-party offering? Is the Algolia search going anywhere? Will the search field on HN still take me to Algolia search or is that changing?
- dang 2y ago
  It's independent/thirdparty, not officially associated with HN, though Trieve is YC-funded (https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trieve https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trieve) and in that sense there's an affiliation. There's no current plan to change HN Search though I wouldn't rule it out. PG often used to integrate recent YC startups into HN in various ways (search as detailed by the OP, but also an SSO startup at one point, a carbon-reduction startup, I forget what else) as a way of giving them a boost and I could imagine us doing that again. (side note: I guess the mental model in my head is that earlier-stage startups are more closely bonded to YC and that as they succeed and expand, there's certainly still a friendly connection but the attachment becomes a bit weaker. For startups that have been around 10+ years, for example, I'm not sure it still makes sense to have frontpage job ads on HN.) The change I'd really like to make to HN Search is to bring the front-end part of it into the HN codebase so the search results can be 'real' HN pages*. It's never been a priority to implement that though, and the Algolia system has been fabulous for a long time. * Funnily enough, I made almost the same point using my pre-dang account back when Algolia was just getting started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7126635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7126635. Credit to pvg, who misses nothing, for spotting this. The reply was from Algolia cofounder ndessaigne who is now a group partner at YC! He was good on his word, btw.
  - neom 2y ago
    It's YC-aside, anyway. Just from a general founder perspective: there comes a point where repeatability far outpaces any growth hacks you put in place perviously. In that vain, I think it shows exceedingly good sportsmanship towards founders to switch someone who has long established repeatable business to someone who has just found it. If you give someone a chance right as they hit escape velocity PMF, I suspect you provide a considerable tailwind, certainly a very kind thing to do for any founder if you're able.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Related: Vote on Algolia vs. Trieve HN Dataset Blind Search Relevance Poll? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41172033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41172033
NKosmatos 2y ago
Can we get an option to search for users/usernames? Or even better, searching for users based on their karma? ;-)
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  User-specific search is possible in Algolia using "by:<username> <query>". So "by:dredmorbius privacy" will find my posts or comments on privacy.
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  There's also the Leaders list which shows the 100 highest-karma members: <https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders> That's ... pretty constant over time, more so amongst the highest-ranked members than, say, positions 75--100. Whaly did an analysis of the most-active HN participants in 2022, looking at 2021 data. That's also fairly constant. <https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-2021 https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-...> Discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778994>
  - NKosmatos 2y ago
    I know, I’ve seen them both :-) As you correctly mentioned, the top100 rarely changes and thus has limited practical usage. I’d like to see something more dynamic and relevant for us plebeians, i.e. being able to sort all users by karma, comments, submissions, creation date.
    - dredmorbius 2y ago
      Among other information from Whaly: there are roughly 150k active HN members per year. The 10k list gets you by far the overwhelming lion's share of activity (it's already highly concentrated in the top-100 list). I don't know that there's a comprehensive member list available overall, and the lack of some sequential userIDNumber identifier means that the space isn't readily searchable. I suspect Whaly's approach of snarfing all activity via the API is probably the most comprehensive. A new search tool might be able to do that (and tie in other metrics such as posts and karma) as well. There's the additional issue that overall karma is not a particularly useful measure. It's possible to achieve a high karma simply through excessive activity (my own account is a case in point). There are domain experts such as Alan Kay (@alankay) who have decidedly pedestrian karma (4,566), but that over 1 story (1,400 votes) and 110 additional comments, or about 29 votes/comment. That's well above my own average, which is about 1-2 votes per comment (2,087 stories, 28,107 comments). Karma/posts / karma/comments might be slightly more informative, but can also be skewed by submitting a highly-popular story. The larger problem is that truth, expertise, and credibility aren't popularity contests. There's the author's expertise suggestion by tillulen which I really like, though suspect is still not especially viable: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41231865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41231865> A further problem with expertise is that it is highly domain-specific. The fallacy / error of ascribing general expertise to one who's shown mastery in one specific area is a grave one. Particularly when that one specific area is earning money / winning a lottery.
dredmorbius 2y ago
There are a few capabiliti es lacking from Algolia which I'd really like to see in a replacement: - Negative search / exclusion: the ability to exclude terms from a search, as in "procfs -linux", which would look for any references to "procfs" which did not also reference "linux". Edit: This exists, see dang's reply below. - Replies to a specific user, e.g., "by:dredmorbius inreplyto:skeptrune <search terms>". I'm often looking for a specific context of my own previous comments. - An improved date-bounding interface. If there's one thing that frustrates me about Algolia's interface, it's the GUI (and syntax) for defining dates. It's cumbersome, and at least on my browser, the dates are generally hard to read or invisible. Going back years is especially cumbersome. I'll add: Algolia has been massively useful, and the fact that I can search HN, especially for my own content, has been a huge part of the value of the site, and is worlds ahead of other online platforms. (Mastodon / the Fediverse is catching up here, Diaspora*'s lack of search was among my main frustrations with the site and explains my absence there after more than a decade of participation.)
- dang 2y ago
  Algolia does do search term exclusion. Compare https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=procfs%20linux&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=procfs%20-linux&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... On the second point - HN has an undocumented endpoint https://news.ycombinator.com/replies?id=skeptrune&by=dredmorbius https://news.ycombinator.com/replies?id=skeptrune&by=dredmor... but that doesn't give you search of course.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    whoah
    - spasibot 2y ago
      Just guessed another two undocumented endpoints "deadcomments" and "deadstories", these take you to a special admin login page if you're logged out, or say "Unknown." if logged in: https://news.ycombinator.com/deadcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/deadcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/deadstories https://news.ycombinator.com/deadstories And the endpoint "flagged", which is empty for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged But if you add a username, e.g. "?id=dang", it says "Can't display that." instead: https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged?id=dang Interesting to stumble upon these even if they do nothing for a non-admin user!
simonw 2y ago
On the topic of Hacker News search… a useful trick that not enough people know is that you can take the ID of a story and use search to return all comments ordered by most recent first - great for keeping up with what’s new in a specific conversation. Eg for this thread the most recent comments can be found here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=story%3A41228935&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I built an Observable notebook to save me from having to manually construct those searches here: https://observablehq.com/@simonw/hacker-news-homepage https://observablehq.com/@simonw/hacker-news-homepage
- pogue 2y ago
  HN could really use some client software. If nothing else for choosing how to read thread replies (ie: most recent, most upvoted/popular, most downvoted, by replies from the OP, etc) + a more advanced built in search.
  - skeptrune 2y ago
    > more advanced built-in search Do you have any specific feature requests? I would love more suggestions and ideas!
    - aaron695 2y ago
      hn.algolia.com can't do "or" so just the normal stuff for search would be a good start. https://hn.algolia.com/help https://hn.algolia.com/help The date chooser on hn.algolia.com is also broken but a very handy setting. And I just saw why search always brings up wrong stuff "typo-tolerance" is default on - https://hn.algolia.com/settings https://hn.algolia.com/settings I have been to the settings, but it's a good example of why defaults matter and on-screen really helps people. And extra crazy with "typo-tolerance" ON, "optimized" and "optimised" are very different results. Which is technically true, that is not a typo, that's grammatical. Filter by author is important as people use that to search their own stuff.
    - niutech 2y ago
skeptrune 2y ago
Updated the blog at the link to include PG's HN post and the archive-available ycombinator.com post documenting the Octopart/ThriftDB search launch. Commit here - https://github.com/devflowinc/trieve-website/commit/ab563475230ce1b2bc20aca9d896bcab81111c78 https://github.com/devflowinc/trieve-website/commit/ab563475... Links: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2619736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2619736 - https://web.archive.org/web/20110618105517/http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110618105517/http://ycombinato...
krackers 2y ago
One thing I'd like is ability to search your (or others') favorites.
- skeptrune 2y ago
  That's a really cool idea and also likely doable. Probably won't ship it before we release, but will add it to our backlog.
andirk 2y ago
The more features, the lamer the product. Keep HN clean!
- niutech 2y ago
  I disagree. The more features the more useful the search engine. It doesn't make HN dirty, search engine is a separate project.
wisemang 2y ago
Putting this here with zero expectations but kinda hopeful there’s a workaround. I like to keep my hands on my keyboard and I can `command-L` `hn` `return` my way to Algolia quickly from an open browser. But why oh why doesn’t the search input have focus by default. And since it doesn’t why can’t I type `/` to get focus on the search input. I guess by now the three tab presses should be muscle memory for that but I’m so annoyed by that fact I refuse to internalize it. Apologies for the random rant
- walterbell 2y ago
  Create a greasemonkey/userscript for existing browser extension? Possibly useful example: https://github.com/imdj/HNRelevant https://github.com/imdj/HNRelevant
- niutech 2y ago
  In Firefox, just add a bookmark for https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byPopularity&type=all&query=%s https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so..., edit it and add a keyword like "hn". Then type in the address bar: "hn whatever" and it will show you SERP for whatever. Another way is to add the OpenSearch engine (https://mycroftproject.com/install.html?id=84751&basename=hackernews_search&icontype=gif&name=Hacker+News+Search+%28via+hn.algolia.com%29 https://mycroftproject.com/install.html?id=84751&basename=ha...) to Firefox and assign a shortcut key to it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/assign-shortcuts-search-engines https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/assign-shortcuts-search...
downrightmike 2y ago
There's a search feature?
niutech 2y ago
What I am missing from Algolia's Hacker News Search is the "OR" (alternative) operator, so that I can search for e.g. "WebKit OR Gecko OR Blink" in a single query. I hope Trieve will have such functionality!

120 points by skeptrune 2y ago

cactusplant7374 2y ago

When is the launch?

skeptrune 2y ago
Not sure yet! Fingers crossed it'll be this week or next.
- cactusplant7374 2y ago
  Cool!

swyx 2y ago

i want to publicly thank Algolia for providing an excellent HN search for so long. i was on a call with Linus Lee and we both were referencing something on HN and i started pulling it up and he said "i know exactly what website you're on" without seeing my screen and it was of course the Algolia HN search. unbelievable mind sync. Idk if it can be replaced (i guess i could do with semantic search + content crawling to start?), but even if it is replaced, Algolia will always have a special place in my heart for doing such a great job for free. thank you whoever worked on it (Algolians - is there a behind the scenes writeup somewhere?)

squeaky-clean 2y ago
It is free, but Algolia is a YCombinator backed company (YC W14) so for them it's probably very useful as a sort of low-stakes phase-1-prod environment. Basically a win-win-win.
davisr 2y ago
Now, if only it could be used without necessitating JavaScript...
- MrVandemar 2y ago
  Yeah, I always have to turn it on to search for something. It's a pain. It's friction. Javascript is not required for search. It has never been required for search. Google. Yahoo. Alta Vista. They worked fine without it back in the day.
  - rudasn 2y ago
    Google still works without javascript.
dankwizard 2y ago
Referencing something on HN and then being amazed youre both thinking about the HN search engine... Unbelievable mind sync.

spasibot 2y ago

I wonder if they'll let us search flagged and dead posts and comments. I remember reading some insightful exchanges back in the day that got flagged because of being a controversial topic that other users didn't like. No way to find them now, even knowing some keywords and approximate month and year.

yorwba 2y ago
They're using the firebase API, https://github.com/devflowinc/trieve-hn-discovery/tree/main/hackernews-ingest https://github.com/devflowinc/trieve-hn-discovery/tree/main/... so no showdead, I think.
greenchair 2y ago
contributes to the echo chamber
dang 2y ago
We had to exclude [dead] and eventually even just [flagged] posts from the public API because many third-party clients and sites were displaying them as if they were regular posts. For the ever-fragile HN ecosystem, that is catastrophic. We would get angry emails saying "how can your expletive site possibly condone such expletive expletive comments as <link>" ... and then it would turn out that <link> was a post by some account that had been banned for years. It's fine if users turn 'showdead' on in their profile to read everything—just please remember that by doing that, you're subscribing to various bottoms of various barrels. But it's definitely not ok when people browse HN with some app we have nothing to do with, run into horrible things, understandably are outraged and then forever have their view of HN imprinted. IMO this issue is existential for HN. We've spent years and so much energy trying to find a balance between internet openness and human decency, a task which oscillates between barely-possible and simply-doomed, so the idea that anybody anywhere sees anything labeled "Hacker News" that pours all the toxic waste back into the commons is physically painful to me. Much as I dislike the idea of restricting anyone's curiosity about the entire corpus of what gets posted, I don't see what choice we have.
- spasibot 2y ago

olalonde 2y ago

I was looking at Algolia's website recently and it seems they really went all in with the "AI" marketing/SEO.

swyx 2y ago
"we put the AI in AIgolia"

re 2y ago

I'm a little confused by the context and comments here. Is Trieve associated with HN at all or is this an independent/third-party offering? Is the Algolia search going anywhere? Will the search field on HN still take me to Algolia search or is that changing?

dang 2y ago
It's independent/thirdparty, not officially associated with HN, though Trieve is YC-funded (https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trieve https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trieve) and in that sense there's an affiliation. There's no current plan to change HN Search though I wouldn't rule it out. PG often used to integrate recent YC startups into HN in various ways (search as detailed by the OP, but also an SSO startup at one point, a carbon-reduction startup, I forget what else) as a way of giving them a boost and I could imagine us doing that again. (side note: I guess the mental model in my head is that earlier-stage startups are more closely bonded to YC and that as they succeed and expand, there's certainly still a friendly connection but the attachment becomes a bit weaker. For startups that have been around 10+ years, for example, I'm not sure it still makes sense to have frontpage job ads on HN.) The change I'd really like to make to HN Search is to bring the front-end part of it into the HN codebase so the search results can be 'real' HN pages*. It's never been a priority to implement that though, and the Algolia system has been fabulous for a long time. * Funnily enough, I made almost the same point using my pre-dang account back when Algolia was just getting started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7126635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7126635. Credit to pvg, who misses nothing, for spotting this. The reply was from Algolia cofounder ndessaigne who is now a group partner at YC! He was good on his word, btw.
- neom 2y ago
  It's YC-aside, anyway. Just from a general founder perspective: there comes a point where repeatability far outpaces any growth hacks you put in place perviously. In that vain, I think it shows exceedingly good sportsmanship towards founders to switch someone who has long established repeatable business to someone who has just found it. If you give someone a chance right as they hit escape velocity PMF, I suspect you provide a considerable tailwind, certainly a very kind thing to do for any founder if you're able.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Related: Vote on Algolia vs. Trieve HN Dataset Blind Search Relevance Poll? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41172033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41172033

NKosmatos 2y ago

Can we get an option to search for users/usernames? Or even better, searching for users based on their karma? ;-)

dredmorbius 2y ago
User-specific search is possible in Algolia using "by:<username> <query>". So "by:dredmorbius privacy" will find my posts or comments on privacy.
dredmorbius 2y ago
There's also the Leaders list which shows the 100 highest-karma members: <https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders> That's ... pretty constant over time, more so amongst the highest-ranked members than, say, positions 75--100. Whaly did an analysis of the most-active HN participants in 2022, looking at 2021 data. That's also fairly constant. <https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-2021 https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-...> Discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778994>
- NKosmatos 2y ago
  I know, I’ve seen them both :-) As you correctly mentioned, the top100 rarely changes and thus has limited practical usage. I’d like to see something more dynamic and relevant for us plebeians, i.e. being able to sort all users by karma, comments, submissions, creation date.
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    Among other information from Whaly: there are roughly 150k active HN members per year. The 10k list gets you by far the overwhelming lion's share of activity (it's already highly concentrated in the top-100 list). I don't know that there's a comprehensive member list available overall, and the lack of some sequential userIDNumber identifier means that the space isn't readily searchable. I suspect Whaly's approach of snarfing all activity via the API is probably the most comprehensive. A new search tool might be able to do that (and tie in other metrics such as posts and karma) as well. There's the additional issue that overall karma is not a particularly useful measure. It's possible to achieve a high karma simply through excessive activity (my own account is a case in point). There are domain experts such as Alan Kay (@alankay) who have decidedly pedestrian karma (4,566), but that over 1 story (1,400 votes) and 110 additional comments, or about 29 votes/comment. That's well above my own average, which is about 1-2 votes per comment (2,087 stories, 28,107 comments). Karma/posts / karma/comments might be slightly more informative, but can also be skewed by submitting a highly-popular story. The larger problem is that truth, expertise, and credibility aren't popularity contests. There's the author's expertise suggestion by tillulen which I really like, though suspect is still not especially viable: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41231865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41231865> A further problem with expertise is that it is highly domain-specific. The fallacy / error of ascribing general expertise to one who's shown mastery in one specific area is a grave one. Particularly when that one specific area is earning money / winning a lottery.

dredmorbius 2y ago

There are a few capabiliti es lacking from Algolia which I'd really like to see in a replacement: - Negative search / exclusion: the ability to exclude terms from a search, as in "procfs -linux", which would look for any references to "procfs" which did not also reference "linux". Edit: This exists, see dang's reply below. - Replies to a specific user, e.g., "by:dredmorbius inreplyto:skeptrune <search terms>". I'm often looking for a specific context of my own previous comments. - An improved date-bounding interface. If there's one thing that frustrates me about Algolia's interface, it's the GUI (and syntax) for defining dates. It's cumbersome, and at least on my browser, the dates are generally hard to read or invisible. Going back years is especially cumbersome. I'll add: Algolia has been massively useful, and the fact that I can search HN, especially for my own content, has been a huge part of the value of the site, and is worlds ahead of other online platforms. (Mastodon / the Fediverse is catching up here, Diaspora*'s lack of search was among my main frustrations with the site and explains my absence there after more than a decade of participation.)

dang 2y ago
Algolia does do search term exclusion. Compare https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=procfs%20linux&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=procfs%20-linux&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... On the second point - HN has an undocumented endpoint https://news.ycombinator.com/replies?id=skeptrune&by=dredmorbius https://news.ycombinator.com/replies?id=skeptrune&by=dredmor... but that doesn't give you search of course.
- tptacek 2y ago
  whoah
  - spasibot 2y ago
    Just guessed another two undocumented endpoints "deadcomments" and "deadstories", these take you to a special admin login page if you're logged out, or say "Unknown." if logged in: https://news.ycombinator.com/deadcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/deadcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/deadstories https://news.ycombinator.com/deadstories And the endpoint "flagged", which is empty for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged But if you add a username, e.g. "?id=dang", it says "Can't display that." instead: https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged?id=dang Interesting to stumble upon these even if they do nothing for a non-admin user!

simonw 2y ago

On the topic of Hacker News search… a useful trick that not enough people know is that you can take the ID of a story and use search to return all comments ordered by most recent first - great for keeping up with what’s new in a specific conversation. Eg for this thread the most recent comments can be found here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=story%3A41228935&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I built an Observable notebook to save me from having to manually construct those searches here: https://observablehq.com/@simonw/hacker-news-homepage https://observablehq.com/@simonw/hacker-news-homepage

pogue 2y ago
HN could really use some client software. If nothing else for choosing how to read thread replies (ie: most recent, most upvoted/popular, most downvoted, by replies from the OP, etc) + a more advanced built in search.
- skeptrune 2y ago
  > more advanced built-in search Do you have any specific feature requests? I would love more suggestions and ideas!
  - aaron695 2y ago
    hn.algolia.com can't do "or" so just the normal stuff for search would be a good start. https://hn.algolia.com/help https://hn.algolia.com/help The date chooser on hn.algolia.com is also broken but a very handy setting. And I just saw why search always brings up wrong stuff "typo-tolerance" is default on - https://hn.algolia.com/settings https://hn.algolia.com/settings I have been to the settings, but it's a good example of why defaults matter and on-screen really helps people. And extra crazy with "typo-tolerance" ON, "optimized" and "optimised" are very different results. Which is technically true, that is not a typo, that's grammatical. Filter by author is important as people use that to search their own stuff.
  - niutech 2y ago

skeptrune 2y ago

Updated the blog at the link to include PG's HN post and the archive-available ycombinator.com post documenting the Octopart/ThriftDB search launch. Commit here - https://github.com/devflowinc/trieve-website/commit/ab563475230ce1b2bc20aca9d896bcab81111c78 https://github.com/devflowinc/trieve-website/commit/ab563475... Links: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2619736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2619736 - https://web.archive.org/web/20110618105517/http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110618105517/http://ycombinato...

krackers 2y ago

One thing I'd like is ability to search your (or others') favorites.

skeptrune 2y ago
That's a really cool idea and also likely doable. Probably won't ship it before we release, but will add it to our backlog.

andirk 2y ago

The more features, the lamer the product. Keep HN clean!

niutech 2y ago
I disagree. The more features the more useful the search engine. It doesn't make HN dirty, search engine is a separate project.

wisemang 2y ago

Putting this here with zero expectations but kinda hopeful there’s a workaround. I like to keep my hands on my keyboard and I can `command-L` `hn` `return` my way to Algolia quickly from an open browser. But why oh why doesn’t the search input have focus by default. And since it doesn’t why can’t I type `/` to get focus on the search input. I guess by now the three tab presses should be muscle memory for that but I’m so annoyed by that fact I refuse to internalize it. Apologies for the random rant

walterbell 2y ago
Create a greasemonkey/userscript for existing browser extension? Possibly useful example: https://github.com/imdj/HNRelevant https://github.com/imdj/HNRelevant
niutech 2y ago
In Firefox, just add a bookmark for https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byPopularity&type=all&query=%s https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so..., edit it and add a keyword like "hn". Then type in the address bar: "hn whatever" and it will show you SERP for whatever. Another way is to add the OpenSearch engine (https://mycroftproject.com/install.html?id=84751&basename=hackernews_search&icontype=gif&name=Hacker+News+Search+%28via+hn.algolia.com%29 https://mycroftproject.com/install.html?id=84751&basename=ha...) to Firefox and assign a shortcut key to it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/assign-shortcuts-search-engines https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/assign-shortcuts-search...

downrightmike 2y ago

There's a search feature?

niutech 2y ago

What I am missing from Algolia's Hacker News Search is the "OR" (alternative) operator, so that I can search for e.g. "WebKit OR Gecko OR Blink" in a single query. I hope Trieve will have such functionality!