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.
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. "
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? :)
> The only problem is that you have to install something.
It was very relevant to point that. In my case, exactly this issue made impossible to me that I even try to use Dropbox. Is the install step actually still necessary?"
"Cloud" is notably absent from the comments. Dropbox kind of invented "the cloud" as most of us know it today (the term is older, but wasn't mainstream)
For a couple years I use to run a Wayback like newsletter similar to this, but got too busy with my weekly Hacker Newsletter (http://hackernewsletter.com) that I haven't touched it in a while.
Author of hnhistory.net here. Thanks for mentioning it. I didn't get any feedback back then. This will give me some motivation to work on it again.
Mine actually scrapes hn... This was done before the api came out.
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.
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.
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]
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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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?
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.