This is so cool. I clicked random month a few times and found the Dropbox launch:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863</a><p>A killer feature would be to change submitted links to wayback links for the submitted date. I'd love to see a bit of what the commenters are talking about.
Is more granularity possible? There was a moment on 10/05/2011 where the entire front page was Steve Jobs.<p><a href="http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2011-10-05" rel="nofollow">http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2011-10-05</a>
I'm sure there's another site that does this that was a show HN last year. It allowed hourly selection too...<p>Edit: found it, <a href="http://hnhistory.net" rel="nofollow">http://hnhistory.net</a>
Poking around on here reminded me that nickb used to be everywhere and then disappeared. It also reminded me that almost everyday we see well thought out predictions on here that are almost all going to be wrong.
Amazing! It was cool to see the day my company was acquired:
<a href="http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2011-4-25" rel="nofollow">http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2011-4-25</a><p>Just pinged Dan and Scott to find out the day HN started. I believe it would have been called Startup News then.
Filtered by <i>Year</i>, than <i>First</i>. How nostalgic seeing news like Google buying YouTube or blog posts about MySpace.<p>Kudos for the <i>dead simple</i> interface.
Amazing.<p>I love the Steve Jobs PDF (from flyingyeti).<p>Is there a place where we can find all the HN stuff?
Does someone collect them?<p>I'm also curious about nickb. He is mentionned regularly.
From April 10, 2012. Story titled - Instagram is "worth" more than the New York Times<p>Comment - "Would you rather own one of the most established news institutions in the modern world or a 2 year old photo sharing startup? How is this even a question?!"<p>That's one of those questions where that looks a lot different at different times. :-)
Missed opportunity at the Wayhack Machine, but interesting still.<p>What would be very interesting would be to take snapshots by time so you can see the flow of a story throughout the day.
It seems there are now several sites that provide this highly desirable service. Good!<p>(Shameless plug: Here's the one I made a few years ago:)
<a href="http://hhn.domador.net/" rel="nofollow">http://hhn.domador.net/</a>
It's worth nothing that according to the source code, this uses the Algolia HN API and not the official HN API, which is a smart move because the official API still doesn't have bulk requests.<p>As a slightly off-topic aside, I have a GitHub repo showing how to download all Hacker News stories and comments using the Algolia API: <a href="https://github.com/minimaxir/get-all-hacker-news-submissions-comments" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/minimaxir/get-all-hacker-news-submissions...</a>
This is like RewindHN.com (created by user <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kami8845" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kami8845</a>) before it bit the dust.<p>It's open source: <a href="https://github.com/doda/rewindhn" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/doda/rewindhn</a>
Why I love this: there have been a handful times where I vaguely remember a recent post from HN that I want to revisit but I don't remember enough of the exact title to find it by the Algolia search or Google, and can't find it by simply going through the pages (perhaps due to the sorting algorithm).
This is very cool. I could lose a lot of time just casually browsing the random day link.<p>One problem I ran into, is the "More" link at the bottom of any past date, links you back to the present date and shows you the next page of results for today instead of the next page of results for the past date in question.
I hit this one on a random click:<p>You're just the founder<p><a href="http://steveblank.com/2010/05/20/you%E2%80%99re-just-the-founder/" rel="nofollow">http://steveblank.com/2010/05/20/you%E2%80%99re-just-the-fou...</a><p>It should be unlucky for the VC who is in SB's curse list :)
Nice! The Silk Road raid comments make fascinating reading, in retrospect - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6482992" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6482992</a><p>Also, I found this gem on a comment page regarding Julian Assange seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy:<p><i>I really don't think that the Metropolitan Police is going to put officers outside the Ecuador Assembly 24/7 just in case Julian Assange leaves. It just doesn't sound like a good use of the officers' time.</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4134362" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4134362</a><p>That was 1095 days ago.
Amazing. I found the perfect article from 5 years ago thanking PG for making HN so great.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398250" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398250</a>
One important question: does it make a single snapshot at a certain moment during the day, or does it take multiple snapshots during a day, and combine the most highly rated articles into an ordered list?
Cool!<p>Techmeme has this built-in (<a href="http://www.techmeme.com/110619/h1320" rel="nofollow">http://www.techmeme.com/110619/h1320</a>), would be fun to run them side-by-side!
I made something like this a while ago, and it didn't get nearly as much attention... What made this a "success" on hn compared to mine? <a href="http://hnhistory.net" rel="nofollow">http://hnhistory.net</a>
Also on GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/SCastaneda/hnhistory" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/SCastaneda/hnhistory</a>
This is great. It seems that the comment counts are off though: go to [0] and look at the top story. It shows 18 comments but [1] only has 15.<p>[0]: <a href="http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2006-10-9" rel="nofollow">http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2006-10-9</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1</a>
Really loving this. I hit random and saw an Ask YC thread for Duck Duck Go, my search engine of choice.
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315142" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315142</a>
I'd suggest changing the orange colour. Not because I care in the slightest about the YC trademark, but it's still nice to get a positive indication of which site I'm looking at.<p>For example, most of the Yotsuba archivers seem to follow this convention.
Not quite a featureset like Wayback Machine...in that going to a certain day will show you top stories ranked by cumulative votes since submission...rather than the algorithmic position, and number of votes received from that day...but that's presumably not available via the API.<p>But even as just a list-by-day, it's a lot of fun to browse, especially going back many years [1]. What did you use to build it?<p>[1] HN's first day, <a href="http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2006-10-9" rel="nofollow">http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2006-10-9</a><p>1. Y Combinator (ycombinator.com)
61 points by pg 3175 days ago | 18 comments<p>2. A Student's Guide to Startups (paulgraham.com)
16 points by phyllis 3175 days ago | 1 comment<p>3. Feld: Question Regarding NDAs (feld.com)
11 points by pg 3175 days ago | 1 comment<p>4. LikeBetter featured by BBC (bbc.co.uk)
10 points by frobnicate 3175 days ago | 0 comments<p>5. MySpace: Not a purely viral start (startup-review.com)
9 points by starklysnarky 3175 days ago | 1 comment<p>6. Salaries at VC-backed companies (blogs.com)
8 points by pg 3175 days ago | 3 comments<p>7. Google, YouTube acquisition announcement could come tonight (techcrunch.com)
7 points by perler 3175 days ago | 1 comment<p>8. Woz Interview: the early days of Apple (foundersatwork.com)
7 points by phyllis 3175 days ago | 1 comment<p>9. Best IRR ever? YouTube 1.65B... (techcrunch.com)
6 points by sama 3175 days ago | 3 comments<p>10. NYC Developer Dilemma (blogs.com)
5 points by onebeerdave 3175 days ago | 1 comment<p>11. A Story About Not Going IPO During The Bubble (usatoday.com)
5 points by starklysnarky 3175 days ago | 1 comment<p>12. The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn (paulgraham.com)
5 points by phyllis 3175 days ago | 1 comment<p>13. Wired: The Desktop is Dead (wired.com)
5 points by farmer 3175 days ago | 1 comment<p>14. Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute (useit.com)
5 points by frobnicate 3175 days ago | 1 comment<p>15. Sevin Rosen Unfunds - why? (gigaom.com)
5 points by phyllis 3175 days ago | 0 comments<p>16. Business Intelligence the Inkling Way: cool prediction markets software (360techblog.com)
4 points by perler 3175 days ago | 1 comment<p>17. Small is Beautiful: Building a Successful Company with Less Capital (zdnet.com)
4 points by pg 3175 days ago | 1 comment<p>18. weekendr: social network for the weekend (weekendr.com)
4 points by askjigga 3175 days ago | 0 comments<p>19. Voddler Raises $2.2M For Virtual Cable TV (thealarmclock.com)
3 points by farmer 3175 days ago | 1 comment<p>20. PhotoShow: Broadcast Photos to Cable TV (techcrunch.com)
3 points by frobnicate 3175 days ago | 1 comment<p>21. Will Silicon Light Illuminate the Future? (technologyreview.com)
2 points by pg 3175 days ago | 1 comment
Looks like the trolling started right from day 1.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Arrington" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Arrington</a>
"Mobile is a dud" <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4855" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4855</a><p>Read the first comment.<p>Boy have times changed.