Occasionally you see articles on HN with a date in the title, like “(1998)” — and over the years I’ve noticed that these tend to be some of the best posts.
It makes sense: on a site devoted to news, an article posted so long after it was published has to be especially good.
So I hacked together this page, which links to every HN post with a date in its title earning more than 40 votes. It’s sorted in chronological order to encourage wandering.
Tomte is not really Santa. It's more a gnome like creature. He's normally living near farms and protects the family and animals. The connection with christmas is quite new and seems more connected with it's other name Nisse, or Julenisse in particular. "The Tomten" by Astrid Lindgren seems to give a good overview of the folklore.
If I recall correctly, the story of Tomte is one where he is alone on Christmas night, pondering what life and death is, and decides that the art of giving is best virtue. He then knocks on everyone's door with a pig beside him and hands out presents to everyone who opens it for him.
You are absolutely right, some articles are indeed timeless yet it's quite easy to miss them. This is a very good idea. A personal favorite of mine that gets posted here often is the Golden Rules for Making Money By P.T. Barnum (1880).
This is a clever and simple way to dredge up some great posts.
I wonder if you could ensure fewer false negatives (i.e. find even more great stuff) by doing the opposite: attempting to filter out every post whose link is to a page that came into existence within a month of the post's submission date.
This would likely require scraping the source links (unless you can get that from the https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news dataset or somesuch), but it might be worth it anyway. It'd literally be "Hacker News, minus anything that looks like News."
So in case I’m not spending enough time on the front page of this HN, good to know there’s a nearly infinite depth to plumb.
And now I’m reading Arnold Bennett’s ‘How to Live on 24 Hours a Day’ originally published in 1908. Good to know tongue-in-cheek self-help books will never go out of style!
I actually enjoyed reading this today. One highlight was the below on "reading the news every morning"
"
The idea of devoting to them thirty or forty consecutive minutes of wonderful solitude (for nowhere can one more perfectly immerse one's self in one's self than in a compartment full of silent, withdrawn, smoking males) is to me repugnant
"
All of YC's original investment software was written in Arc, though it has been gradually factored out into other systems.
We use it for a browser extension that helps a lot with moderation work. And for general experiments. If I do something more ambitiously new it will probably be in Arc.
With regards to Classics, the "You're probably using the wrong dictionary" blog post at http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary was probably the most interesting pieces I've read on HN.
Very nice indeed. Immediately ran downstairs to verify a Websters encyclopedia dictionary I bought in the UK around 1997 only to find it wasn't the version with all the prose. It's still a very nice illustrated (and heavy!) dictionary, but not quite like what jsomers describes.
So downloaded the version he offers for download and am now installing the dictionary using the steps he provides.
Thank You, really looking forward to using it.
edit: and his install steps still work, using it in the dictionary app right now. Super!
I wish I had a good word to describe my gratitude for this post! I've though reverse dictionary could work but doesn't. Another dictionary I would love to have access to is one where you can find words in other languages that don't exist in yours.
This is very cool! Based on the title “HN Classics,” I thought it might be an implementation of another idea I’ve had. I had this idea to search for stand-out articles that get reposted every so often and always get a lot of good attention and discussion: so-called classics of HN.
I think that data could be very interesting, and would also serve as a sort of “hall of fame” of articles the HN community loves (moreso than just a list of the most upvoted articles of all time).
Of course, you could also figure out the optimal duration between successive posts, and figure out when to repost yourself, if anyone wants a karma-grab. ;)
You could likely find more by searching HN comments for the phrase “previous discussion,” because people tend to post links to the previous HN submissions.
It doesn’t bother me, since there are likely always new HN readers who haven’t seen great “classic” articles.
The HN FAQ says:
> If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok.
I'd prefer to sort them by points. By age is interesting, by the way.
Do you do some deduplication. Some classics are resubmitted a few times successfully. Perhaps add a third sort criteria, that is sorted by the number of big reposts.
Yeah I'd prefer it too, so I've converted the stories.json into a spreadsheet here[1] using this simple PHP script[2]. Feel free to edit, sort them as you like!
I created this for my own use but sharing it here because others may find it useful (hope this isn't breaking any HN etiquette and if you're the original author and want me to take it down please let me know).
Problem with by points is that over time as more people come to HN the number of points are worth less, unless HN does like Reddit does and weighs them but even then such a system tends to change over time and so it’s still not comparable.
For example say that several years ago a post might hit front page and 500 people would vote on it. If 300 people voted up and 200 down then it gets 100 points.
Fast forward and now there are more people on the site. That means greater confidence in the percentage but because only points and not percentage of up/down is revealed, a post with similar percentage up- vs downvotes appears to be better. 600 up and 400 down is still 60% up vs 40% down but it results in 200 points total.
Like I said though maybe HN does account for this and 100 points today means the same percentage of people upvoted it, I don’t know.
You are right I forgot that, heh. Anyway, the problem remains that over time there will be more people to upvote so a post is likely to get more points if it was posted in the future than in the past.
No I mean that a front page post five years ago had fewer people to vote on it so it would get fewer points simply for that reason compared to a front page post today.
Yes it looks like they do deduplication, based on the HTML source:
for (var i in data[yr]) {
var story = data[yr][i];
if (seen_titles[story.title]) continue;
seen_titles[story.title] = 1;
// ...add story to list of stories
};
Any way this could be done without requiring javascript?
For security, ad-blocking, and privacy reasons I have javascript blocked in my browser, and really don't like to turn it on except for sites like my bank.
"Any way this could be done without requiring Javascript?"
Could be done many ways.
Lets imagine you like text, you dont mind reading something somewhat structured and regular like json and you dont need all the html, css, etc. tags and window dressing.
This is a totally reasonable request and I was looking to say much the same thing. Anything resembling HN, or in the spirit of HN, shouldn't require JS to view, I think.
For security, noise blocking, and public unreasonableness I have only HN allowed in my browser, that is, if a site doesn't work without js, there's a high chance I don't want to read it. My bank page luckily doesn't need js either, to function.
This is pretty nice. I also think a browse by year feature would be neat. By that I mean in the same fashion as OP, so I could for example look at posts that had (2011) in the title by going to 2011, etc.
and I just reliazed one of the reason why classic writings are special -- especially for another writing material purpose is because it has passed the the test of time..
Thanks for this. Can't upvote this enough. Still going through lots of gems that I would never have read without this.
p.s thanks for ruining lot of my work hours. but thanks!
I'm not sure how I feel about having three items on this list (including the current #1). I might need to take my buggy out for a long trot to contemplate.
this is really brilliant.
But is there a reason you sort the list from the oldest to the newest ?
I think it would make sense to have it the other way around.
It makes sense: on a site devoted to news, an article posted so long after it was published has to be especially good.
So I hacked together this page, which links to every HN post with a date in its title earning more than 40 votes. It’s sorted in chronological order to encourage wandering.
Out of the 2k+ posts you list, some people are good at finding good quality classics!
The top 10 here combined accounts for more than 10% of all the posts:
Well, let's try again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16444460
(dead) http://yorktownhistory.org/homepages/1900_predictions.htm ===> https://web.archive.org/web/20100108205037/http://yorktownhi... (archive from 6 days later)
I don't think this can be done programmatically though... thanks for putting this together. I enjoy the old posts a lot, too.
http://archive.org/wayback/available?url=http://yorktownhist...
It returns a json with, notably, the closest archived page given the timestamp.
https://archive.org/help/wayback_api.php
http://yorktownhistory.org/wp-content/archives/homepages/190...
Ezra was a... complicated man, but he had keen insights.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm
I wonder if you could ensure fewer false negatives (i.e. find even more great stuff) by doing the opposite: attempting to filter out every post whose link is to a page that came into existence within a month of the post's submission date.
This would likely require scraping the source links (unless you can get that from the https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news dataset or somesuch), but it might be worth it anyway. It'd literally be "Hacker News, minus anything that looks like News."
I probabbly wouldn't understand most of them nearly as well if they weren't proven out by recent history ;)
And now I’m reading Arnold Bennett’s ‘How to Live on 24 Hours a Day’ originally published in 1908. Good to know tongue-in-cheek self-help books will never go out of style!
[1] - http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2274/2274-h/2274-h.htm
" The idea of devoting to them thirty or forty consecutive minutes of wonderful solitude (for nowhere can one more perfectly immerse one's self in one's self than in a compartment full of silent, withdrawn, smoking males) is to me repugnant "
Or click on the date in an account's profile to see what HN looked like on its birthday.
Out of curiosity, for the date rendering, did you xdef racket's date libraries or implement your own date algorithms in arc?
I guess you could've also shelled out to `date -r <timestamp>` which would get the feature done in about ten seconds.
Yes, and we specifically left it as an exercise for the pokey reader to figure out why.
Arc does its own date stuff. We extended it a bit to be able to print things like "x months ago". Edit: and "Feb 31, 2017".
We use it for a browser extension that helps a lot with moderation work. And for general experiments. If I do something more ambitiously new it will probably be in Arc.
Oho, so Arc does compile to JS now.
You gonna release the compiler or what? (Sometime this decade.)
Edit: should be fixed now.
You can't deny it anymore. Everyone now knows that 31st of February exists.
So downloaded the version he offers for download and am now installing the dictionary using the steps he provides.
Thank You, really looking forward to using it.
edit: and his install steps still work, using it in the dictionary app right now. Super!
I think that data could be very interesting, and would also serve as a sort of “hall of fame” of articles the HN community loves (moreso than just a list of the most upvoted articles of all time).
Of course, you could also figure out the optimal duration between successive posts, and figure out when to repost yourself, if anyone wants a karma-grab. ;)
The best example I can find on short notice is this hexagonal grids article:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Hexagonal%20Grids&sort=byDate&...
You could likely find more by searching HN comments for the phrase “previous discussion,” because people tend to post links to the previous HN submissions.
It doesn’t bother me, since there are likely always new HN readers who haven’t seen great “classic” articles.
The HN FAQ says:
> If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Do you do some deduplication. Some classics are resubmitted a few times successfully. Perhaps add a third sort criteria, that is sorted by the number of big reposts.
I created this for my own use but sharing it here because others may find it useful (hope this isn't breaking any HN etiquette and if you're the original author and want me to take it down please let me know).
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16MNPM9fhpglC1s1OV-tp...
[2] https://gist.github.com/san-kumar/0b7d218a08d4d8b4a7d9c07db5...
For example say that several years ago a post might hit front page and 500 people would vote on it. If 300 people voted up and 200 down then it gets 100 points.
Fast forward and now there are more people on the site. That means greater confidence in the percentage but because only points and not percentage of up/down is revealed, a post with similar percentage up- vs downvotes appears to be better. 600 up and 400 down is still 60% up vs 40% down but it results in 200 points total.
Like I said though maybe HN does account for this and 100 points today means the same percentage of people upvoted it, I don’t know.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243417
As a result, its score did not increase, although upvoting "worked".
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11320169
probably more
For security, ad-blocking, and privacy reasons I have javascript blocked in my browser, and really don't like to turn it on except for sites like my bank.
Could be done many ways.
Lets imagine you like text, you dont mind reading something somewhat structured and regular like json and you dont need all the html, css, etc. tags and window dressing.
5-minute quick and dirty solution
1. curl -4o 1.htm http://jsomers.net/hn/stories.json
2. Navigate to file:///2.htmWere there no pre 1900 refrences or is that just were you chose to start?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15669759
well done!
Perhaps Hacker Classics could automatically ensure all remaining live links get archived?
Done. I'm going to run through every URL ever cited on HN at some point when time permits.
Until someone stops paying the host server or the domain expires and then those books just disappear.
https://github.com/jsomers/hacker-classics/blob/master/index...
and I just reliazed one of the reason why classic writings are special -- especially for another writing material purpose is because it has passed the the test of time..
Check back a few hours later.
(Scraped content to markdown, simple Jekyll website in progress)
> if (data.hasOwnProperty(yr) && parseInt(yr) < 2012)
best
You could say they are… evergreen (title bar color)
[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/classic
[3] http://jsomers.net/hn/
Quite a cool coincidence!