Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

On the topic of Hacker News search… a useful trick that not enough people know is that you can take the ID of a story and use search to return all comments ordered by most recent first - great for keeping up with what’s new in a specific conversation.

Eg for this thread the most recent comments can be found here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I built an Observable notebook to save me from having to manually construct those searches here: https://observablehq.com/@simonw/hacker-news-homepage

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Since it's mention-undocumented-endpoints day, https://news.ycombinator.com/latest?id=$ID does that, where $ID can either be a story (in which case you get the entire thread sorted reverse-chronologically) or a comment (in which case you get the comments in that subthread).

So, for the current thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/latest?id=41228935

or for a subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/latest?id=41229914.

Wow, I had no idea! Thanks for that.

HN could really use some client software. If nothing else for choosing how to read thread replies (ie: most recent, most upvoted/popular, most downvoted, by replies from the OP, etc) + a more advanced built in search.

> more advanced built-in search

Do you have any specific feature requests? I would love more suggestions and ideas!

hn.algolia.com can't do "or" so just the normal stuff for search would be a good start. https://hn.algolia.com/help

The date chooser on hn.algolia.com is also broken but a very handy setting.

And I just saw why search always brings up wrong stuff "typo-tolerance" is default on - https://hn.algolia.com/settings

I have been to the settings, but it's a good example of why defaults matter and on-screen really helps people.

And extra crazy with "typo-tolerance" ON, "optimized" and "optimised" are very different results. Which is technically true, that is not a typo, that's grammatical.

Filter by author is important as people use that to search their own stuff.

Please add "OR" operator, so we could search for e.g. "webkit OR gecko OR blink" in a single query.

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