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You can also to go https://news.ycombinator.com/front to bounce around how HN's front page looked on past days, like https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2016-06-20.

Or click on the date in an account's profile to see what HN looked like on its birthday.



Note that https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-18 doesn't let you navigate backwards, but https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09 is the first day.

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.


> 2007-02-18 doesn't let you navigate backwards

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".


Just curious: do you (as in Y combinator) use Arc for anything else or is it a "hobby language" for HN?


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.


We use it for a browser extension that helps a lot with moderation work.

Oho, so Arc does compile to JS now.

You gonna release the compiler or what? (Sometime this decade.)


Probably started logging front page on that day.


No, we only started that in Nov 2014. Before then, the /front pages sort things by points because that's all the data we have.


There seems to be a bug, I can see pages of Feb 30, 31 - https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2017-02-31


Yikes! Thanks for letting us know.

Edit: should be fixed now.


The secret is out now.

You can't deny it anymore. Everyone now knows that 31st of February exists.


Nice thing is, the go back a day link links to Mar 02


Cool, would it be possible to put two dynamic links 'yesterday' and 'two days ago' in the footer? I would really use those.


That's a good idea. Do you mean in the text where it says "Guidelines | FAQ | ..."? or somewhere else?


Yep, that would be a great spot, out of the way of the main UI and yet easy to reach.




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