Ask HN: Why doesn't HN keep all the questions in the “ask” section?

9 points·bhnmmhmd··9 comments

I find some really good questions (and great answers) on HN. But HN only keeps the last 64 ones.

Why is that? How can we access older quedtions/answers?

There's a search box on the bottom of the page. If you select 'all time' and sort by date you get a list of all 66.000 Ask HN ever submitted. - https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ask%20hn&sort=byDate&prefix&pa...

But how does algolia do that?

It's a search engine, they crawl and update copies of all submissions.

I second what @mtmail said. You can use Algolia [1] to access older questions/answers. But, if you want to make it more accessible I would recommend to upvote or favorite the question/answer. This way will save your up-voted or favorite questions/answers into your HN account. You can use bookmarking tools for tagging questions/answers. It will help you to organize.

As mentioned on FAQ [2], HN limits the number of showed threads because its ranking algorithm. It depends on thread points and submitted time.

I remember, there is a website which provided weekly top Ask HN threads [3]. This website is useful if you miss threads on previous week.

[1]: https://hn.algolia.com

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[3]: http://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly-ask/

I'm seeing 66 right now. Poking around it looks like maybe the threshold is asked within the past 7 days + at least 1 comment?

I remember emailing Dang about it two years ago. At the time it was barely showing a page worth of stories. They got it to improve a bit, but since then I don't think it's ever paged on and on like top does.

Even this question will be kept. But it won't be found....

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

All past ones after searchable

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