Ask HN: Do you delete your browsing history?
Not infrequently, some random page I saw months ago will come to mind, and I'll use browser history to find it. More infrequently, I'll go even further back than that.
- ▪Not infrequently, some random page I saw months ago will come to mind, and I'll use browser history to find it.
- ▪More infrequently, I'll go even further back than that.
Hacker News (Ask HN) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 40 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060245 |
| Publication time | Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:24:32 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-26T19:54:40.625Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-26T19:54:40.625Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | sQaSg7k4QElz |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I'm torn on this. Not infrequently, some random page I saw months ago will come to mind, and I'll use browser history to find it. More infrequently, I'll go even further back than that. And just for posterity, I enjoy having it all accessible.That said, it also makes me a bit nervous having it all there, especially synced to my Firefox account, for some hypothetical hacker, or discovery process, or who knows what.Got me thinking, I wouldn't be surprised if HN is as split between history savers and deleters as I am internally. Curious how you all handle it.
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.