You can ... kind of ... use Algolia in this way. It's pretty easy to search for the top submissions of the past day, week, month, or year:
Day: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=0&prefix=fals...
Week: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal...
Month: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...
Year: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
I really wish there were an easier way to list top stories for a specific period --- month or year would be good. Algolia does have a date-range-picker, but like many, it's cumbersome. It also generates date specifiers based on Unix timestamps (seconds since 1970-1-1). So here's the Best of 2012:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1356912000&dateRange=custom&...
That is:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1356912000&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1325376000&page=0&prefix=false&query=&sort=byPopularity&type=story
Where:
dateEnd=1356912000
dateStart=1325376000
I've suggested using a shell script to generate URLs of interest. This could also of course be done in JS or the programming tool of your choice:
for i in {5..15..5} do
echo "https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=$( date -d "$i years ago" +%Y-%m-%d )"
done
(See earlier:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28806795)
There's also the "past" link, which can be used to show any one day's top stories: https://news.ycombinator.com/front