Thank you. Do you just recall these off the top of your head or do you generally check each post that makes it to the front page, either manually or with a script?
That lets me find and scan past threads fairly quickly to find the interesting ones. It's still too manual, though; I need to make more steps towards automation. I'm not sure it can be fully automated because you have to do human interventions to either track down relevant past threads or exclude boring ones. The endgame is probably not to fully automate these lists but to have software generate a starter version and then give the community ways to edit it.
The only place that recalling things off the top of my head (or somewhere in the poorly-lit middle of it) plays a role is that often I vaguely remember that there existed a discussion about $X in past years and then tweak the searches till I find it.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
That shows past HN front pages (in sort of a weird time-lapsed version that never actually existed) for particular days. How would you use that to get to past threads about a topic?
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Umberto%20Eco%3A%20Ur-Fascism&...
I'd somehow never looked at the very top past link.
Of course you're right. I just never use that link because of the keyboard shortcuts I mentioned upthread.
The core functionality is front and center, easy to find and use, so the extras don't get in the way.
(Having said that, the difficulty of tapping the correct up/down arrow for upvoting and downvoting on tiny phone screens continues to be a real sore spot.)