Hacker News Reader

Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

I'd consider it. But what would be the point? Old pages are viewed mostly by crawlers.

Old pages are valuable since the quality of discussion is very high here. I, for example, did a search on "NYC" and read all the discussions (pros and cons) of doing a startup in NYC vs SF and, just in general, life for a hacker in NYC vs SF. And I do searches on tools like VIM and see what everyone is recommending to do and all the good tutorials people submit. For certain topics, I prefer to search here than Google. A number of discussions on here are timeless.

I'm not arguing to show points. It's fine without the points. Just saying that old pages are valuable to me.

While this might be true "by volume", I would be very surprised if it were true "by weight". The first thing I do when I'm looking at a new library, daemon, service, company, or really almost anything at this point, is go to Hacker News to see if anyone has mentioned it in the past, and what their take on it was during that discussion.

As an example, when I got interested in GitHub last year (note: I mean as "what are they doing in this space and where are they going", not "what does it do"), I seriously went to searchyc and went through the Hacker News archives chronologically, skimming every single thread that has ever talked about it; it took days, but it was incredibly worth the time.

This has become such a resource for this sort of thing, that I've been trying to "get to know" the people I interact with here, building a tagging framework (browser extensions) that I can use to add little notes to users, allowing me to get a better feel for who they are, rather than some anonymous user: if nothing else, it helps me remember at all times that these are real people whom I am interacting with ;P.

So yeah, I guess I'm rambling now, but what I'm trying to say is: the archives are important. They may not be something you use every day, but when you do find a reason to use them it is one of the most valuable resources I currently know of, and I have to see it labeled as something that there is no point in improving due to "lack of use".

After the addition of the search feature in the footer, I find myself looking for old discussions of all kinds of tech.

I agree that points on old stories would be useful as it helps in search results - I find myself searching for stuff on HN quite frequently. Today, I was looking into a way of publishing software contracts to clients online so they could sign them digitally and found out about RightSignature, Tractis, EchoSign and SignNow all from searching HN, and some of the stories that were coming up were from 2 years ago.

Agreed. When I'm researching a new topic, I always search hacker news for anything on point. Sometimes that's enough to find exactly what I'm looking for. The collective knowledge here is astounding.

(my first post. Thanks to everyone who contributes, it's been an incredible learning experience since I learned about hacker news 8 months ago. And I say this as a non-hacker. This site has been immensely practical.)

Statistics if nothing else. Maybe more people would look at old pages given the incentive. Maybe someone will come up with a "best of hacker news" website, with the highly rated or popular stories and a selection of the most prominent comments.

Given the demographics, I'm sure the ratings will be used by someone for something. :)

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

I do frequently return to old conversations when looking for advice about everything from tools to strategy. I think having the points visible would make it easier.

How about just showing them in the best or bestcomments list page or creating a new list page that shows them?

But what would be the point?

Curiosity?

right now I have a group in firefox with 200 old pages waiting to be read by me.

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