
Show HN: Wayback HN, a cross between the Wayback Machine and Hacker News - dubin
http://www.waybackhn.com
======
rkuykendall-com
This is so cool. I clicked random month a few times and found the Dropbox
launch:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

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.

~~~
mkaziz
Oh wow, the cynical comments are just too much. That certainly gave me some
perspective!

~~~
gphilip
What cynical comments? I read most (or all) of them as positive and
encouraging.

~~~
mkaziz
First paragraph on the top comment is very representative: "The only problem
is that you have to install something. See, it's not the same as USB drive.
Most corporate laptops are locked and you can't install anything on them.
That's gonna be the problem. Also, another point where your USB comparison
fails is that USB works in places where you don't have internet access. "

~~~
r0naa
All I see is one person expressing their reservations, which I think is quite
legitimate given the novelty that Drew's YC app was at the time. Either way
how is that a bad thing? Feedback is crucial at such an early stage.

Maybe I read this wrong or are you the one being cynical here? :)

------
libria
Is more granularity possible? There was a moment on 10/05/2011 where the
entire front page was Steve Jobs.

[http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2011-10-05](http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2011-10-05)

~~~
s-phi-nl
I have a screenshot of that which I could upload to Dropbox if anyone wants.

~~~
justplay
yes, share it.

~~~
flyingyeti
I saved a PDF, though it doesn't have the right colors:

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2273870/Steve%20Jobs%20R...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2273870/Steve%20Jobs%20RIP%20Hacker%20News.pdf)

~~~
ahmetmsft
Links don't work on this.

------
brador
I'm sure there's another site that does this that was a show HN last year. It
allowed hourly selection too...

Edit: found it, [http://hnhistory.net](http://hnhistory.net)

~~~
LVB
That one only goes back a little more than a year. It also doesn't show
vote/comment counts, something I quite like about this one.

~~~
brador
I agree. If the new one adds hourly it's the clear winner.

------
thedaveoflife
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.

~~~
Houshalter
He created an AGI slack group a year or two ago and was active on it. Then he
just disappeared. No one has been able to contact him. We've always wondered
what happened to him.

~~~
vmorgulis
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nickb](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nickb)

------
kevin
Amazing! It was cool to see the day my company was acquired:
[http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2011-4-25](http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2011-4-25)

Just pinged Dan and Scott to find out the day HN started. I believe it would
have been called Startup News then.

~~~
kevin
Just told me the first item submitted was Mon Oct 09 2006.
[http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2006-10-09](http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2006-10-09)

~~~
kevin
Scott tells me that the launch date is Feb 19, 2007. Which is when its
announced it on Reddit.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/15gkq/startup_ne...](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/15gkq/startup_news_ycombinator_enters_the_social_news/)

Here's what it looked like (maybe) then.
[http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2007-02-19](http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2007-02-19)

~~~
vruiz
You can tell that there was some initial launch on 2006-10-09[1] then declines
until there are almost no submissions during the following months until it
starts to be active again on 2007-02-18[2]

[1][http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2006-10-09](http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2006-10-09)

[2][http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2007-02-18](http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2007-02-18)

------
talles
Filtered by _Year_ , than _First_. How nostalgic seeing news like Google
buying YouTube or blog posts about MySpace.

Kudos for the _dead simple_ interface.

------
vmorgulis
Amazing.

I love the Steve Jobs PDF (from flyingyeti).

Is there a place where we can find all the HN stuff? Does someone collect
them?

I'm also curious about nickb. He is mentionned regularly.

~~~
vmorgulis
I start collecting all these links (about tools and history of hn).

It's available here: [https://github.com/vmorgulys/around-
hn/blob/master/readme.md](https://github.com/vmorgulys/around-
hn/blob/master/readme.md)

I wonder if it's not possible to keep some of the best tools alive somewhere
in a VM or just in a scraped HTML version...

------
waterlesscloud
From April 10, 2012. Story titled - Instagram is "worth" more than the New
York Times

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?!"

That's one of those questions where that looks a lot different at different
times. :-)

------
nkozyra
Missed opportunity at the Wayhack Machine, but interesting still.

What would be very interesting would be to take snapshots by time so you can
see the flow of a story throughout the day.

------
domador
It seems there are now several sites that provide this highly desirable
service. Good!

(Shameless plug: Here's the one I made a few years ago:)
[http://hhn.domador.net/](http://hhn.domador.net/)

------
vishnuks
[https://hn.algolia.com](https://hn.algolia.com) have the same functionality.

~~~
getdavidhiggins
For a more real time experience, I made this bookmarklet:

[http://blog.higg.im/2015/06/20/open-all-secure-https-
hackern...](http://blog.higg.im/2015/06/20/open-all-secure-https-hackernew-
links-in-one-fell-swoop/)

------
minimaxir
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.

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:
[https://github.com/minimaxir/get-all-hacker-news-
submissions...](https://github.com/minimaxir/get-all-hacker-news-submissions-
comments)

------
brymaster
This is like RewindHN.com (created by user
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kami8845](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kami8845))
before it bit the dust.

It's open source:
[https://github.com/doda/rewindhn](https://github.com/doda/rewindhn)

------
bsilvereagle
It would be really useful if the links were replaced with archive.org links
from the same year. A lot of links are now dead.

------
dbbolton
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).

~~~
premachb
Pocket ([https://getpocket.com/](https://getpocket.com/)) is great for that.
If I see a great article that I don't have time to read now I usually just
pocket it.

------
adventured
This is very cool. I could lose a lot of time just casually browsing the
random day link.

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.

~~~
dubin
Thanks for checking it out! For the time being I've turned off the more button

------
robot
I hit this one on a random click:

You're just the founder

[http://steveblank.com/2010/05/20/you%E2%80%99re-just-the-
fou...](http://steveblank.com/2010/05/20/you%E2%80%99re-just-the-founder/)

It should be unlucky for the VC who is in SB's curse list :)

------
jmkni
Nice! The Silk Road raid comments make fascinating reading, in retrospect -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6482992](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6482992)

Also, I found this gem on a comment page regarding Julian Assange seeking
asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy:

 _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._ \-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4134362](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4134362)

That was 1095 days ago.

------
DeBraid
Amazing. I found the perfect article from 5 years ago thanking PG for making
HN so great.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398250](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398250)

------
amelius
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?

~~~
minimaxir
The code simply asks the Algolia API "Give me the Top 30 Stories from 12AM to
11:59PM of the specified day."

[https://github.com/jondubin/Wayback-
HN/blob/master/app/utils...](https://github.com/jondubin/Wayback-
HN/blob/master/app/utils.py#L86)

------
mmahemoff
Cool!

Techmeme has this built-in
([http://www.techmeme.com/110619/h1320](http://www.techmeme.com/110619/h1320)),
would be fun to run them side-by-side!

------
samjc
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?
[http://hnhistory.net](http://hnhistory.net) Also on GitHub:
[https://github.com/SCastaneda/hnhistory](https://github.com/SCastaneda/hnhistory)

------
throwaway41597
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.

[0]:
[http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2006-10-9](http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2006-10-9)

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

~~~
dubin
I think part of the discrepancy is comments that are marked dead, which might
be getting counted by the API.

~~~
throwaway41597
I believe there is more to it:

[http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2009-9](http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2009-9)
shows 14 comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818157](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818157)
has 87.

------
sprokolopolis
Really loving this. I hit random and saw an Ask YC thread for Duck Duck Go, my
search engine of choice.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315142](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315142)

------
shiggerino
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.

For example, most of the Yotsuba archivers seem to follow this convention.

------
danso
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.

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?

[1] HN's first day,
[http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2006-10-9](http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2006-10-9)

1\. Y Combinator (ycombinator.com) 61 points by pg 3175 days ago | 18 comments

2\. A Student's Guide to Startups (paulgraham.com) 16 points by phyllis 3175
days ago | 1 comment

3\. Feld: Question Regarding NDAs (feld.com) 11 points by pg 3175 days ago | 1
comment

4\. LikeBetter featured by BBC (bbc.co.uk) 10 points by frobnicate 3175 days
ago | 0 comments

5\. MySpace: Not a purely viral start (startup-review.com) 9 points by
starklysnarky 3175 days ago | 1 comment

6\. Salaries at VC-backed companies (blogs.com) 8 points by pg 3175 days ago |
3 comments

7\. Google, YouTube acquisition announcement could come tonight
(techcrunch.com) 7 points by perler 3175 days ago | 1 comment

8\. Woz Interview: the early days of Apple (foundersatwork.com) 7 points by
phyllis 3175 days ago | 1 comment

9\. Best IRR ever? YouTube 1.65B... (techcrunch.com) 6 points by sama 3175
days ago | 3 comments

10\. NYC Developer Dilemma (blogs.com) 5 points by onebeerdave 3175 days ago |
1 comment

11\. A Story About Not Going IPO During The Bubble (usatoday.com) 5 points by
starklysnarky 3175 days ago | 1 comment

12\. The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn (paulgraham.com) 5 points by
phyllis 3175 days ago | 1 comment

13\. Wired: The Desktop is Dead (wired.com) 5 points by farmer 3175 days ago |
1 comment

14\. Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute
(useit.com) 5 points by frobnicate 3175 days ago | 1 comment

15\. Sevin Rosen Unfunds - why? (gigaom.com) 5 points by phyllis 3175 days ago
| 0 comments

16\. Business Intelligence the Inkling Way: cool prediction markets software
(360techblog.com) 4 points by perler 3175 days ago | 1 comment

17\. Small is Beautiful: Building a Successful Company with Less Capital
(zdnet.com) 4 points by pg 3175 days ago | 1 comment

18\. weekendr: social network for the weekend (weekendr.com) 4 points by
askjigga 3175 days ago | 0 comments

19\. Voddler Raises $2.2M For Virtual Cable TV (thealarmclock.com) 3 points by
farmer 3175 days ago | 1 comment

20\. PhotoShow: Broadcast Photos to Cable TV (techcrunch.com) 3 points by
frobnicate 3175 days ago | 1 comment

21\. Will Silicon Light Illuminate the Future? (technologyreview.com) 2 points
by pg 3175 days ago | 1 comment

~~~
dubin
Thanks! Built with Flask, check out the source here:
[https://github.com/jondubin/HN-Wayback](https://github.com/jondubin/HN-
Wayback)

------
lucisferre
Looks like the trolling started right from day 1.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Arrington](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Arrington)

------
pikachu_is_cool
"Mobile is a dud"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4855](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4855)

Read the first comment.

Boy have times changed.

------
tacone
Very nice, could you avoid resetting the date when the user changes the step
size (year/month/day)? Also a datepicker would be nice.

~~~
dubin
Both are planned features!

------
stockkid
It'd be more user friendly if 'prev' and 'next' button are next to each other.
I had fun using this!

------
davesque
Wow, very cool. I love seeing the leading stories from each year. It kind of
reminds me how the industry has evolved.

------
joshrotenberg
_No stories from 2016_

Now make the Wayforward version!

------
tehwalrus
I am now confused about what year it is, what has recently launched and who
has just died. Good job!

------
datacog
This is awesome.

Very funny first comment

 _So, just to see how hard it is to make the longest span between article and
comment :)_

------
xena
It would be interesting to see if someone else made something like this for
Reddit and Slashdot.

------
cqcn1991
My god, I was just thinking about creating the exact same thing for HN, and
here I found this.

------
f055
Well this is just awesome! Gonna try and use it often.

------
elmar
Great hack, Thanks

------
phatak-dev
Cool

------
FaisalRashid
Hey Guyz, from where I can download the HN software/theme?

~~~
cmdrfred
Protip: Refrain from pluralizing things with the letter Z if you would like to
be taken seriously.

