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Not quite a featureset like Wayback Machine...in that going to a certain day will show you top stories ranked by cumulative votes since submission...rather than the algorithmic position, and number of votes received from that day...but that's presumably not available via the API.

But even as just a list-by-day, it's a lot of fun to browse, especially going back many years [1]. What did you use to build it?

[1] HN's first day, http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2006-10-9

1. Y Combinator (ycombinator.com) 61 points by pg 3175 days ago | 18 comments

2. A Student's Guide to Startups (paulgraham.com) 16 points by phyllis 3175 days ago | 1 comment

3. Feld: Question Regarding NDAs (feld.com) 11 points by pg 3175 days ago | 1 comment

4. LikeBetter featured by BBC (bbc.co.uk) 10 points by frobnicate 3175 days ago | 0 comments

5. MySpace: Not a purely viral start (startup-review.com) 9 points by starklysnarky 3175 days ago | 1 comment

6. Salaries at VC-backed companies (blogs.com) 8 points by pg 3175 days ago | 3 comments

7. Google, YouTube acquisition announcement could come tonight (techcrunch.com) 7 points by perler 3175 days ago | 1 comment

8. Woz Interview: the early days of Apple (foundersatwork.com) 7 points by phyllis 3175 days ago | 1 comment

9. Best IRR ever? YouTube 1.65B... (techcrunch.com) 6 points by sama 3175 days ago | 3 comments

10. NYC Developer Dilemma (blogs.com) 5 points by onebeerdave 3175 days ago | 1 comment

11. A Story About Not Going IPO During The Bubble (usatoday.com) 5 points by starklysnarky 3175 days ago | 1 comment

12. The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn (paulgraham.com) 5 points by phyllis 3175 days ago | 1 comment

13. Wired: The Desktop is Dead (wired.com) 5 points by farmer 3175 days ago | 1 comment

14. Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute (useit.com) 5 points by frobnicate 3175 days ago | 1 comment

15. Sevin Rosen Unfunds - why? (gigaom.com) 5 points by phyllis 3175 days ago | 0 comments

16. Business Intelligence the Inkling Way: cool prediction markets software (360techblog.com) 4 points by perler 3175 days ago | 1 comment

17. Small is Beautiful: Building a Successful Company with Less Capital (zdnet.com) 4 points by pg 3175 days ago | 1 comment

18. weekendr: social network for the weekend (weekendr.com) 4 points by askjigga 3175 days ago | 0 comments

19. Voddler Raises $2.2M For Virtual Cable TV (thealarmclock.com) 3 points by farmer 3175 days ago | 1 comment

20. PhotoShow: Broadcast Photos to Cable TV (techcrunch.com) 3 points by frobnicate 3175 days ago | 1 comment

21. Will Silicon Light Illuminate the Future? (technologyreview.com) 2 points by pg 3175 days ago | 1 comment

Great hack, Thanks
This is very cool. I could lose a lot of time just casually browsing the random day link.

One problem I ran into, is the "More" link at the bottom of any past date, links you back to the present date and shows you the next page of results for today instead of the next page of results for the past date in question.

Thanks for checking it out! For the time being I've turned off the more button
Missed opportunity at the Wayhack Machine, but interesting still.

What would be very interesting would be to take snapshots by time so you can see the flow of a story throughout the day.

I'm sure there's another site that does this that was a show HN last year. It allowed hourly selection too...

Edit: found it, http://hnhistory.net

That one only goes back a little more than a year. It also doesn't show vote/comment counts, something I quite like about this one.
I agree. If the new one adds hourly it's the clear winner.
Author of hnhistory.net here. Thanks for mentioning it. I didn't get any feedback back then. This will give me some motivation to work on it again. Mine actually scrapes hn... This was done before the api came out.
Amazing! It was cool to see the day my company was acquired: http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2011-4-25

Just pinged Dan and Scott to find out the day HN started. I believe it would have been called Startup News then.

Just told me the first item submitted was Mon Oct 09 2006. http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2006-10-09
Scott tells me that the launch date is Feb 19, 2007. Which is when its announced it on Reddit.

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/15gkq/startup_ne...

Here's what it looked like (maybe) then. http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2007-02-19

It would be really useful if the links were replaced with archive.org links from the same year. A lot of links are now dead.
Is more granularity possible? There was a moment on 10/05/2011 where the entire front page was Steve Jobs.

http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2011-10-05

Reminds me to waking up to the Snowden revelations and reading HN.
I have a screenshot of that which I could upload to Dropbox if anyone wants.
It's worth nothing that according to the source code, this uses the Algolia HN API and not the official HN API, which is a smart move because the official API still doesn't have bulk requests.

As a slightly off-topic aside, I have a GitHub repo showing how to download all Hacker News stories and comments using the Algolia API: https://github.com/minimaxir/get-all-hacker-news-submissions...

Well this is just awesome! Gonna try and use it often.
One important question: does it make a single snapshot at a certain moment during the day, or does it take multiple snapshots during a day, and combine the most highly rated articles into an ordered list?
Hey Guyz, from where I can download the HN software/theme?
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Protip: Refrain from pluralizing things with the letter Z if you would like to be taken seriously.
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It would be interesting to see if someone else made something like this for Reddit and Slashdot.
Poking around on here reminded me that nickb used to be everywhere and then disappeared. It also reminded me that almost everyday we see well thought out predictions on here that are almost all going to be wrong.
Amazing.

I love the Steve Jobs PDF (from flyingyeti).

Is there a place where we can find all the HN stuff? Does someone collect them?

I'm also curious about nickb. He is mentionned regularly.

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Wow, very cool. I love seeing the leading stories from each year. It kind of reminds me how the industry has evolved.
Very nice, could you avoid resetting the date when the user changes the step size (year/month/day)? Also a datepicker would be nice.
Both are planned features!
This is so cool. I clicked random month a few times and found the Dropbox launch:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

A killer feature would be to change submitted links to wayback links for the submitted date. I'd love to see a bit of what the commenters are talking about.

Oh wow, the cynical comments are just too much. That certainly gave me some perspective!
What cynical comments? I read most (or all) of them as positive and encouraging.
First paragraph on the top comment is very representative: "The only problem is that you have to install something. See, it's not the same as USB drive. Most corporate laptops are locked and you can't install anything on them. That's gonna be the problem. Also, another point where your USB comparison fails is that USB works in places where you don't have internet access. "
All I see is one person expressing their reservations, which I think is quite legitimate given the novelty that Drew's YC app was at the time. Either way how is that a bad thing? Feedback is crucial at such an early stage.

Maybe I read this wrong or are you the one being cynical here? :)

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> The only problem is that you have to install something.

It was very relevant to point that. In my case, exactly this issue made impossible to me that I even try to use Dropbox. Is the install step actually still necessary?"

"It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating."

This took the gold for me.

I would love a website that just collected a bunch of past ideas, along with all the naysayer comments, that end up being huge successes later on.

That would be pretty uplifting, imho.

It'd probably have to include even one of my comments. :-( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6824666 (I still can't believe it all worked out...)

The jury is still decidedly out on that whole Snapchat thing.
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"Cloud" is notably absent from the comments. Dropbox kind of invented "the cloud" as most of us know it today (the term is older, but wasn't mainstream)
Filtered by Year, than First. How nostalgic seeing news like Google buying YouTube or blog posts about MySpace.

Kudos for the dead simple interface.