Id say it means there needs to be another way to browse the site, where an old s...

dredmorbius · on July 15, 2022

You can ... kind of ... use Algolia in this way. It's pretty easy to search for the top submissions of the past day, week, month, or year:

Day: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=0&prefix=fals...

Week: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal...

Month: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...

Year: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...

I really wish there were an easier way to list top stories for a specific period --- month or year would be good. Algolia does have a date-range-picker, but like many, it's cumbersome. It also generates date specifiers based on Unix timestamps (seconds since 1970-1-1). So here's the Best of 2012:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1356912000&dateRange=custom&...

That is:

  https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1356912000&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1325376000&page=0&prefix=false&query=&sort=byPopularity&type=story

Where:

  dateEnd=1356912000
  dateStart=1325376000

I've suggested using a shell script to generate URLs of interest. This could also of course be done in JS or the programming tool of your choice:

  for i in {5..15..5} do
      echo "https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=$( date -d "$i years ago" +%Y-%m-%d )"
  done

(See earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28806795)

There's also the "past" link, which can be used to show any one day's top stories: https://news.ycombinator.com/front