Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsomers | Hacker News Reader

Occasionally you see articles on HN with a date in the title, like “(1998)” — and over the years I’ve noticed that these tend to be some of the best posts.

It makes sense: on a site devoted to news, an article posted so long after it was published has to be especially good.

So I hacked together this page, which links to every HN post with a date in its title earning more than 40 votes. It’s sorted in chronological order to encourage wandering.

View on HN

Really cool!

Out of the 2k+ posts you list, some people are good at finding good quality classics!

The top 10 here combined accounts for more than 10% of all the posts:

    USER         POSTS COUNT
    Tomte        66
    luu          42
    tosh         33
    ColinWright  27
    adamnemecek  26
    vezzy-fnord  26
    brudgers     25
    pmoriarty    24
    networked    23
    shawndumas   22

Unfortunately, I have so far failed to get a (1538) submission to stick.

Well, let's try again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16444460

I think it does not stick, because I don't understand anything from the title

Well at least you know that it's by Andreas.

LOOOOOOOL :D

Looking at the source code, it only considers titles from 1900 to 2010 as classics.

Tomte is Swedish for "Santa", which seems fitting.

Tomte is not really Santa. It's more a gnome like creature. He's normally living near farms and protects the family and animals. The connection with christmas is quite new and seems more connected with it's other name Nisse, or Julenisse in particular. "The Tomten" by Astrid Lindgren seems to give a good overview of the folklore.

Why? Does he know when you are naughty? Do you also feel like watching out and not crying when he comes to town?

If I recall correctly, the story of Tomte is one where he is alone on Christmas night, pondering what life and death is, and decides that the art of giving is best virtue. He then knocks on everyone's door with a pig beside him and hands out presents to everyone who opens it for him.

we need more Tomtes in this imperfect world of ours.

For links that are now defunct/gone (such as #2 on the chronological list), can you pull the web archive at the closest date to the submission?

(dead) http://yorktownhistory.org/homepages/1900_predictions.htm ===> https://web.archive.org/web/20100108205037/http://yorktownhi... (archive from 6 days later)

I don't think this can be done programmatically though... thanks for putting this together. I enjoy the old posts a lot, too.

The url can be found via the archive's API, and you can specify a timestamp.

http://archive.org/wayback/available?url=http://yorktownhist...

It returns a json with, notably, the closest archived page given the timestamp.

https://archive.org/help/wayback_api.php

That's way more fantastic than I thought their API would be! Thanks. Hope OP sees it.

FWIW, #4 "Two 4000 ft plumb bobs hung down a mine shaft, with baffling results (1901)" can be found at http://www.lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/hollow/tamarack.htm

I also stumbled upon this too. The article was archived, I wonder why it's not redirecting. Now I'm finally enjoying this post too.

http://yorktownhistory.org/wp-content/archives/homepages/190...

Very cool! Reminds me of the Ezra Pound quote, "Literature is news that stays news."

Ezra was a... complicated man, but he had keen insights.

He was also a fascist to say the least of him. I would refrain from using any quote of him

can "bad people" not have good ideas?

You are absolutely right, some articles are indeed timeless yet it's quite easy to miss them. This is a very good idea. A personal favorite of mine that gets posted here often is the Golden Rules for Making Money By P.T. Barnum (1880).

Link for those who are interested:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm

This is a clever and simple way to dredge up some great posts.

I wonder if you could ensure fewer false negatives (i.e. find even more great stuff) by doing the opposite: attempting to filter out every post whose link is to a page that came into existence within a month of the post's submission date.

This would likely require scraping the source links (unless you can get that from the https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news dataset or somesuch), but it might be worth it anyway. It'd literally be "Hacker News, minus anything that looks like News."

I wonder how would you determine when a page came into existence.

Someone mentioned the archive.org/wayback API. You could check the oldest archive.org/wayback snapshot is over a certain age.

google certainly has some approximation of that, for example

It helps that for us readers we've got a lot of time after they were published to to evaluate those articles with.

I probabbly wouldn't understand most of them nearly as well if they weren't proven out by recent history ;)

hi james, i miss you

merci, mr. j.

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