I also made a bookmarklet to show me HN posts from random dates, it is quite interesting to see what was interesting to people a decade ago, for example. Lots of comments in HN's heyday were pretty eye opening as well.

    javascript:(function() {function randomDate(start, end) {var date = new Date(+start + Math.random() \* (end - start));var day = ("0" + date.getDate()).slice(-2);var month = ("0" + (date.getMonth() + 1)).slice(-2);var year = date.getFullYear();return year + '-' + month + '-' + day;}var startDate = new Date(2007, 9, 9);var endDate = new Date();var randomDateStr = randomDate(startDate, endDate);var newUrl = 'https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=' + randomDateStr;window.location.href = newUrl;})();

That's really neat. Thanks for providing it

Also recommended is https://news.ycombinator.com/front, which shows you the frontpage stories from any day—a little bit like archive.org would do, except that it's not a snapshot, but a composite of all the front pages from a 24 hour period.

For example, here's HN from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2023-07-02.

https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights is another good resource (and if anyone notices a great HN comment, past or present, they're welcome to nominate it for the highlights list! just email [email protected]).

Thanks Dan, that is in fact exactly what my bookmarklet does, it generates a random date (2012-01-02) and appends it to `https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=`. I think there should be a `random` link on the HN header links that does what I am currently doing, it would be useful to have it built-in.

Ah sorry I missed that you were already pointing to those!

A 'random' link might be a good idea. For /highlights too.

Yep it's fairly easy to make a bookmarklet for /front but for /highlights it seems to depend on the id of the comment as a cursor rather than the date, so it would be nice to have them both as links in the header bar.