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.
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!