Show HN: Wayback Letter - Looking back at 5+ years of Hacker News

59 points by duck 14y ago ↗ HN

I just sent out my 100th issue of Hacker Newsletter and announced my newest newsletter: Wayback Letter - http://www.waybackletter.com/

In either a daily or weekly version, you'll get links to great HN articles from the past five years. A great way to see how HN has grown and changed, plus see what was going on at different times. Lastly, there are a ton of great reads to learn from that I never saw the first go around. Would love to get feedback and my goal is to expand this past HN in the future.

10 comments

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duck 14y ago ↗

Link: http://waybackletter.com

duck 14y ago ↗

I should of included this earlier, but here is a sample issue you can check-out: http://www.waybackletter.com/issue/2012-06-06.html

KateKendall 14y ago ↗

Congrats Kale. I've been loving TimeHop lately and think it'll equally apply to non-social content. Is there a way you can scale 'curation'? This is something I'm currently researching for The Fetch...

duck 14y ago ↗

Thanks Kate! Scaling is tough, but I think you have to use every type of feedback you can get, so for me I look at what is being read in each issue and finding patterns. Curation is all about the audience, which is why the newsletter approach works so well.

KateKendall 14y ago ↗

Have you thought of making the WayBackLetter a section of the HNL? Seems like you already have a great audience that wouldn't mind receiving a few links of all-time HN goodness in it. You could then save the neat WBL domain for multi-purpose cool reads from across the web!

Congrats again on the 100th issue!

duck 14y ago ↗

I actually have a "Classics" section in HNL already. This is why I started exploring this idea since that section always has a high CTR. Actually, in some issues one of the classics will have the highest CTR of any link!

Edited to add: And I mentioned it above, but my hope is to expand this beyond just HN in the future. :)

Ygor 14y ago ↗

This is great.

I was just searching old HN stories trying to find the very first story on node.js. I thought it would be fun to read all the comments again and see the reactions. Still haven't found the story on node.js, but this is in the same spirit.

solipsist 14y ago ↗

Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but here are two links I found:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1884724/what-is-node-js

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=954682

kew 14y ago ↗

I like the 'classics' section in the Hacker Newsletter especially when I'm working on new projects that are related.

pasbesoin 14y ago ↗

I had an archive of some of these older posts, that I lost (I know...). So, I'm glad to encounter something that is resurfacing them.

While change may be inevitable and something to be embraced, it was a different place back then.

P.S. I dislike the animated favicon, though. I don't like things moving in my peripheral vision.