Show HN: Visit the front page of Hacker News on a random day

by nickipedia • 2 years ago

267 78 2 years ago

Hi HN. I was surprised that there wasn't a feature here that lets you go back in time to the front page of Hacker News on a random day...so I made one. http://randomhackernews.com is a simple HTML page that navigates you to the front page of HN on a random day between today and February 19, 2007 (the oldest date I could find with content).

I made this for myself, but figured others may find some interest in it.

Brajeshwar2• 2 years ago

Feb 19, 2007 was indeed the day Hacker News came to be - https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-19

PhilipRoman• 2 years ago

Haha, the core of this website really hasn't changed, has it?

Why Startups Don't Condense in Europe
DabbleDB -- web-based DBMS coded in Smalltalk

dead comment: > Fedora is far better than ubuntu

sph2• 2 years ago

Dissing Ubuntu in 2007 is a bit prescient: it was one of the best distros around, and Fedora (Core) a buggy mess.

raphinou• 2 years ago

Wow, gave a strange feeling to see DabbleDB mentioned. I had launched a product in the same category. It didn't get traction, and I lost interest in it for some time, but I kept it running and it's still available and has just been rewritten in F#. My problem now is the same as nearly 20 years ago, find its niche. I'm thinking of making a Ask HN about that.

boringg• 2 years ago

Where there any success stories that came out of Stanford start up school? Or was the success Stanford monetizing the process?

Pathogen-David• 2 years ago

I counted 14 out of 30 links on the front page back then still work and appear to refer to the same article / something relevant to the original submission.

Link rot is always disappointing, but I actually expected it to be far worse for links from 17 years ago.

dang4• 2 years ago

It was running in stealth from https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09 thru https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-22, with a few gaps. Then https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-12-14 with one story: "Productivity Surges During Reddit Downtime" (not much has changed, as PhilipRoman said...)

And then https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-19, as you say, which was the public launch. Let me dig up the link...here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html

And then https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html 6 months later.

I posted links to Startup News pages the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39237746.

We should make the top left say "Startup News" for /front?day=2007-08-13 and earlier!

jimmytucson• 2 years ago

And here's the archive[0] of the top post[1] from the following day[2], "Why we made this site"

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20070222125635/http://ycombinato...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=189

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-20

sph2• 2 years ago

Please do not hijack the back button.

Your website should send a 307 Temporary Redirect to HN, so when I go back, I return to where I was, instead of being sent to another random day.

If it is done on the client, look into `window.location.replace`: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Location/re...

sneela2• 2 years ago

It's incredibly annoying when this isn't taken care of. Alt + Left Arrow becomes impossible to use and I have to resort to using my mouse.

Don't Microsoft's support pages [1] do this as well? I just checked with a random support page [2] and it looks like the middle redirection url is the same. Is that a different thing?

[1] support.microsoft.com

[2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/fix-file-explore...

(Firefox if that matters. Currently on Linux, has happened on Windows)

Edit: I just checked on Ungoogled Chromium and it looks like this (the microsoft support) isn't an issue. It's only on Firefox. That's bizarre.

hunter2_• 2 years ago

No issue on my end. Is it already fixed, or does Android Chrome just overcome poor implementations?

sneela2• 2 years ago

Looks like it's a firefox thing. I tested in Ungoogled Chromium and it works fine for me too.

garyfirestorm• 2 years ago

Can confirm this behavior on iPhone 15 pro max safari ios 17.3

elpocko• 2 years ago

Here's a bookmarklet that does the same thing:

    javascript:(()=>{d=new Date(1171843200000+Math.random()*(Date.now()-1171843200000));window.location.href=`https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=${d.getFullYear()}-${('0'+(d.getMonth()+1)).slice(-2)}-${('0'+d.getDay()).slice(-2)}`;})()

mousetree• 2 years ago

You can use this link[1] and include a random day, no?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2023-03-04

sujayk_332• 2 years ago

Please make it open in a new tab, that'll make more sense (I suppose).

It's not pleasing to go back to use it again.

jraph3• 2 years ago

Not usually a good idea to mess up with the default, and you can always middle-click or ctrl+click or cmd+click or long press. If you open in new tab by default you risk breaking user expectations, disorient them and you break users wanting to open in the same tab.

digging• 2 years ago

If you open in new tab by default you risk breaking user expectations, disorient them and you break users wanting to open in the same tab.

This feels backward to me. I don't do user research, but is that a real pain point? Just... close the old tab?

hk__2• 2 years ago

I was surprised that there wasn't a feature here that lets you go back in time to the front page of Hacker News on a random day

May I ask why were you surprised? Which other website has this feature?

pbhjpbhj• 2 years ago

This sort of thing is a feature I often feel is missing, sites have "last week", "last month", etc., and you can see what stories have been top. But you can't then go back to last month and see what the top 'stories' for the preceding month were.

odensc• 2 years ago

Not exactly the same, but in the same vein, Reddit has a "Random" button that takes you to a random subreddit. Google has "I'm Feeling Lucky" which gives you a random search. A "random" button seems like a relatively common little easter egg.

jraph3• 2 years ago

Surprised by the surprise too but why not, but to answer, xkcd.com has it.

ipaddr• 2 years ago

What a gem 2010 was.

nickipedia• 2 years ago

Thanks for the feedback everyone! I've updated the website to open HN in a new tab

sujayk_332• 2 years ago

I have one more suggestion, make that title more catchy, you can try such as

1. HN Lucky Dip

2. HN Roll

Does anybody want to give it a try?

dang4• 2 years ago

I'm happy to see people looking at /front?day=yyyy-mm-dd because it's a trove of great stories and threads. It's linked from "past" in the top bar, if anyone didn't know.

Please realize that it isn't an exact representation of the front page at any particular time. For that you'd want a point, not an interval, and certainly not a 24 hour interval, which is what /front?day=yyyy-mm-dd is showing.

What's it called when you make a single photograph by overexposing a series of time-lapsed frames into one? It's like that. I found it trickier than I expected to write the code to do this, but I think the result serves its purpose: to give people a way to find frontpage stories they may have missed.

We do this via a combination of votes and frontpage time, but only back to 2014-11-11 which is when we started logging the lists of stories on the front page. Those are the 'frames' in the above analogy. Before 2014-11-11, we only rank by votes because it's all the data we have.

If you want to look at actual snapshots from the past, archive.org has a lot of them, e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20160620131548/https://news.ycom.... Perhaps OP could add random links to those as well!

jychang• 2 years ago

What's it called when you make a single photograph by overexposing a series of time-lapsed frames into one?

Long exposure

codetrotter2• 2 years ago

But not quite that either right?

That’s what you have if you mechanically keep the shutter open for a prolonged time, exposing either film or a sensor to light.

But from what dang was saying, he seemed to describe emulating that effect in software on discretely captured frames.

Sounds almost closer to onion skinning, and in particular the part of this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_skinning where they say:

This effect can also be used to create motion blurs, as seen in The Matrix when characters dodge bullets.

azhenley• 2 years ago

It is called stacking.

mwilliamson• 2 years ago

My favourite date is Erlang Day, after a request from pg to have more technical content: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11

dang4• 2 years ago

There was an Erlang Day sequel later that summer: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-08-20, which I remember because I unintentionally started it and pg got mad at me.

IIRC, the front page before that was filled with stories about _why (they're split between https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-08-19 and https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-08-20 now), and people were complaining about that. I happened to have an Erlang article I'd already been meaning to post, so I posted it and it triggered a deluge, followed by complaints:

Ask NH: How annoying is Erlang day? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=776789 - Aug 2009 (0 comments)

Ask HN: Why is all the news about Erlang today? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=776622 - Aug 2009 (4 comments)

Are we celebrating Erlang's birthday or just that Erlang hackers cracked HN? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=776519 - Aug 2009 (4 comments)

Poll: What do you think of Erlang on Hacker News? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=776427 - Aug 2009 (3 comments)

Enough Erlang - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=776316 - Aug 2009 (9 comments)

Purge Complete: No more Erlang, _why, or Zed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=776196 - Aug 2009 (25 comments)

I hate the Erlang days around here..... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=776116 - Aug 2009 (9 comments)

Ask HN: Are we intentionally voting on Erlang articles? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=776047 - Aug 2009 (6 comments)

... followed by pg, after a long day at Demo Day, manually killing all those threads at dinner using his iPhone. Nobody knew about that latter bit.

Ask HN: How did the Erlang articles disappear on HN yesterday? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=778319 - Aug 2009 (11 comments)

I always wondered why I couldn't find any trace of this in the archives, as I distinctly remember the scolding I got! I've gone and unkilled them now, which should restore roughly what it looked like.

gala8y• 2 years ago

That's too funny.

Unfortunately, jumping across timelines reminds us of digital decay, a very real thing, when you try to visit some old stuff.

moffkalast• 2 years ago

Whoever figured that caching will save HN's perpetually melting server is about to have a heart attack.

dang4• 2 years ago

I was worried about that too, but it seems to be holding up ok!

ks2048• 2 years ago

Nice work. Slightly related question: say one hasn't visited HN in a few weeks and wants to see something like the top N posts of a given week. Does this exist?

CrypticShift• 2 years ago

You can use a custom range on hn.algolia.com [1].

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1707004800&dateRange=custom&...

alentred• 2 years ago

As an alternative, you may subscribe to the Hacker Newsletter: https://hackernewsletter.com/?ref=find-your-newsletter

BlueTemplar2• 2 years ago

There used to be

http://n-gate.com/

( :p, but also RIP TT )

Brajeshwar2• 2 years ago

Not exactly that way, that I know but the Top Links should do enough justice for that https://news.ycombinator.com/best

pazimzadeh2• 2 years ago

10-06-2011 was different

perilunar• 2 years ago

10 June or October 6?

mkl• 2 years ago

I think they mean Steve Jobs's death, October 6: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2011-10-06

mustak_im• 2 years ago

Nice! slightly related: If you'd like to see a screenshot taken of the pages on that day, then use the extension:

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-previe...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/hacker-news-p...

App: https://spa.hackernews.xyz/

sureglymop• 2 years ago

Just yesterday I realized that post and comment ids are incremental and went back to look at the first year of posts!

pimlottc• 2 years ago

It would be great if HN automatically added a "wayback machine" link for articles over, say, one year ago.

abnercoimbre• 2 years ago

I also see value here for anyone looking to boost their credibility if needed.

"Yes Jim, my project did in fact hit the front page - take a look."

keithalewis• 2 years ago

Oh yeah? Well I was Time magazine Person of the Year in 2006!

cocoflunchy• 2 years ago

Funny article (in retrospect) from 2010-09-23 (https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2010-09-23): Facebook is not worth $33B https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33...

emp_• 2 years ago

Spotty memory but the two posts that made me check HN daily were:

- How do you store data to last more than 50 years (diamonds and titanium were mentioned)

- The announcement that bitcoin reached 1 USD, a great party story (TL;DR I tried buying 100, had issues w/ payment, got pissed, bought 200 instead, lost wallet a few months later, would have sold it super early tho)

ketanmaheshwari• 2 years ago

I created one too a while ago: https://github.com/ketancmaheshwari/randhn

Liftyee• 2 years ago

Clicked all the links on today's front page? Just go here for more.

robrenaud• 2 years ago

I wonder if this would make a fun game, like geoguessr. You see the HN page from a random day, perhaps with some date scraping to remove super obvious clues, and you have to pick the year/month.

BlueTemplar2• 2 years ago

Man saves wife’s sight by 3D printing her brain tumor

[US president] calls for municipal broadband

A Quick Comparison of [...] vs. Rust

Show HN: I built an iOS remake of that old [...] game [...]

[...] Tops [...] as World’s #1 [...] Platform

Student [...] AI [Competition] [Year]

Bitcoin crashes over [X]% in 24 hours, under $[Y]

Frameworks are for hacks, libraries for seeds

(Of course for some of the above it would likely be trivial if you just copy-paste them in a search engine...)

tamimio• 2 years ago

Youtube remains unprofitable 3 years after Google acquisition (dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com)

2009/July

wkjagt• 2 years ago

First thing I did was relive a moment almost 10 years ago when I had a Show HN on the front page :-)

geniium• 2 years ago

Really cool to jump in the past.

Thanks for making that!

firebaze• 2 years ago

How does this belong on HN frontpage? This is not just trivial, as another commenter 6 hours ago (!) posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39262873

It's not hacker, it's not news, it's not innovative, it's simply boring, and would be cool if a 10 year old did this. Sorry for this rant, but I'm reading on and off HN over ~10 years and contributing under various user names, and I read comments like mine over and over again, and each time agreeing more.

Maybe everyone who definitely will downvote my post should read the first guideline "What to submit":

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

A random() over the time HN exists, with a link to the generated date, which doesn't even handle back correctly is not something good hackers find interesting.

On the other hand, there are still lots of on-topic, curiosity inducing topics around here. Just getting scarcer every year. Oh my. Good night :)

ToValueFunfetti• 2 years ago

What is interesting here is not the effort that went into the thing (although I am now planning a rewrite in Rust ;), but the output. Assuming it is true that HN standards for 'interesting' are falling, as you say, clicking on the link will tend to present you with a more interesting edition. Assuming it's not, it's still fascinating to look into a time capsule like this.

nwhnwh• 2 years ago

Lovely

bspammer• 2 years ago

I found this thread from 2008 about Meta's $4b(!!) valuation entertaining :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=266755

jmckib• 2 years ago

This is great, and I wish it existed for Reddit too (or maybe it does already?). There’s so much good content that’s a bit hard to find now, plus it would be very interesting to see what people were talking about at a specific point in time.

breakfastduck• 2 years ago

Amazing way to browse the site, well done

mattigames2• 2 years ago

Random day is a bit overkill in my opinion, in the sense that there are too many days to explore, I would be more interested in random week, as in the most upvoted that week, as url that could be something like /front?week=34&year=2024

arcticbull2• 2 years ago

If you'd prefer some additional constraint, consider that today is a random day and you can simply go to the front page :) this reduces the number of days to explore to just one.

mattigames2• 2 years ago

...another nice feature would be to be able to hide the comments by some users.

urbandw311er• 2 years ago

Cool - nice idea. Can I make a feature request? Automatically offer an alternate fetch of a post’s target URL from the Internet archive.

The first post I found (from 2012) was supposed to be the letter that Apple published on its website apologising for how terrible the new Apple maps app was after its divorce from Google. But Apple has removed that from their website now, so it was just a 404 - an auto fetch from the Internet archive would have been very handy.

vanattab• 2 years ago

Hmmm... I looked through the Oct 7, 8, 9th 2023 top stories as a community we apparently missed the entire Gaza conflict.

Astraco2• 2 years ago

And we are missing Toby Keith death today.

doodlesdev• 2 years ago

Link rot makes reading some of the older things a bit sad. The website brought me to a HN front page in 2011, but from the five URLs I tried, I managed to read absolutely none of them. Although I must admit, the quality of that front page was pretty awesome (Google's Dash language, #newtwitter, Google's Oracle case, Windows 8 boot times, CoffeeScript and a lot more).

If anyone is interested in any of these: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2011-09-09

It's fascinating, too, to see some predicted solutions to problems discussed at the time that came true but were different from what was expected. For instance, we finally got an alternative to JavaScript in the browser recently, but it's not CLR, JVM, or NaCL like many imagined; instead, we got WebAssembly, which is pretty good but has basically failed as a true alternative to JavaScript for now.

wscourge• 2 years ago

I went there once and found something useful. Kudos.

nraford• 2 years ago

This makes me wonder, has anyone scraped all of HN's archive and done any LLM thematic, textual or other kind of content analysis?

Seems like it would be such a useful data source for the rise and fall of various tech trends, industry sentiments, and so on.

The pulse of the Valley, even...

JustAndy• 2 years ago

This makes me wonder how much storage is needed for all the posts/comments on HN, since everything is "just" text?

Astraco2• 2 years ago

This is great. But is so depressing opening a link and finding a 404 page or the site gone.

Show HN: Visit the front page of Hacker News on a random day

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