Show HN: Library of the best Hacker News Classics
hn.lindylearn.io
hn.lindylearn.io
So I built this small website to browse and search across these timeless HN posts [1]. The idea is to make use of the immense library we're all curating by posting and commenting here. What you can do with the site:
• See all recent HN discussions about timeless content, without it being lost in other posts: https://hn.lindylearn.io
• Browse the best essays of all time, according to HN: https://hn.lindylearn.io/best
• What's the best content for example on "career advice"? https://hn.lindylearn.io/search?q=career%20advice
• Which articles from 1995 do we still talk about? https://hn.lindylearn.io/years/1995
• What are the best posts on any website? https://hn.lindylearn.io/from?site=paulgraham.com
IMHO it's an excellent Friday evening idea to explore and read through some of these articles (that's at least my plan). It was a quick project to put together, I hope it's useful for you all! Halfway through I realised there's some prior art for it [2], but I think this site adds enough to make it worthwhile.
Technical info: Most of the data can be easily queried through the HN BigQuery dataset, and I added a periodic function to poll more recent data from the API. The filtered posts are then hosted in Firestore for most of the pages + Relevance.ai for the search. The frontend is built with Next.js and uses the original HN CSS + small tweaks like the year display. It indexes all HN posts with a year in the title that have more than 40 upvotes, where the article publish date is >= 2 years before the post date (results in about 10k posts). Articles are ranked by the summed score across all posts for the url.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29590667
[1] Named "Lindy Hacker News" after the Lindy Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect