Show HN: Timeless HN – random good HN stories from the past | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Timeless HN – random good HN stories from the past

thn.rakhim.org

24 pointsfreetonik14 comments

Nice project, but why do you need to redirect from HTTPS to HTTP? Besides being a bad security practice, it also breaks on Firefox when HTTPS-Only Mode[1] is enabled.

[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/https-only-prefs

The HN search API[1] serves via HTTP only, so my page can't be served via HTTPS while making HTTP requests.

1. https://hn.algolia.com/api

The HN search API does serve via HTTPS, and it also redirects HTTP requests to HTTPS. Demo: [edit: removed]

Well, I don't know what was my problem, but for some reason I couldn't make the HTTPS requests, and couldn't find any info about this. It does indeed work, and I believe I need to have some wine.

Thank you! I've re-deployed the page with https now.

No problem, glad you sorted it out.

Hi everybody,

I enjoy stumbling upon old HN topics. To further improve this kind of procrastination, I've made a simple web app which fetches 30 random good posts from the past.

Due to the limitations of the API, fetched stories are not evenly distributed across 14+ years of HN. Instead, you get stories from 3 random, non-overlapping 6-month periods.

The links don't seem to work on text posts. For example, this Ask HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469649 instead shows the title link as (literally):

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=${el.objectID}

...but the comments link works fine.

Thanks, I believe it should be fixed now.

Have you thought about changing the links to point to the Internet Archive? I just clicked on some (understandably) broken links.

That's a good idea (and a sad reality). I haven't thought about this, I guess because I was mostly interested in discussion threads and not the urls themselves. Regardless, I think I'll add an archive.org links to each item.

I think this is great, I found a few good threads and articles this morning that I missed. Ironically the first was about spending too much time online :)

very cool project ! Thanks for sharing

How is their good ness determined?

By upvotes only. It fetches random posts from three distinct 6-month periods, filtering posts in each period by random minimum rating between 100 and 250.

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