[ptsd_dalmatian]

Am I the only one that hasn't noticed the search input in the footer? :O

[BiteCode_dev]

Thanks, 10 years of HN and I was still using "site:news.ycombinator.com"

[quenix]

Try https://hn.algolia.com — it’s great

[sph]

These days I use the search feature much more than commenting or reading posts. The frontpage is the usual recent news addiction treadmill, while for research into niche topics you can find a treasure trove of interesting comments in the archives.

Want more posts about Lisp, Smalltalk and reverse engineering, for example, rather than the usual front page drivel? Search for them.

On one hand I wish Algolia didn't give very old posts a lot of weight (it often prefers to show posts > 8+ years ago), on the other hand old content tends to be before the Eternal September of tech-adjacent people coming to this forum to discuss tech-adjacent light content, so it's actually a feature. The real value of HN is its archives IMO.

[satvikpendem]

I also made a bookmarklet to show me HN posts from random dates, it is quite interesting to see what was interesting to people a decade ago, for example. Lots of comments in HN's heyday were pretty eye opening as well.

    javascript:(function() {function randomDate(start, end) {var date = new Date(+start + Math.random() \* (end - start));var day = ("0" + date.getDate()).slice(-2);var month = ("0" + (date.getMonth() + 1)).slice(-2);var year = date.getFullYear();return year + '-' + month + '-' + day;}var startDate = new Date(2007, 9, 9);var endDate = new Date();var randomDateStr = randomDate(startDate, endDate);var newUrl = 'https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=' + randomDateStr;window.location.href = newUrl;})();